Don't Do Remarketing on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a social network that allows professionals to interact in a B2B setting. This holds extraordinary potential for business owners who are able to harness its power. With over nine billion weekly content impressions in the LinkedIn feed, it's no surprise that the platform is the top channel that 94% of B2B marketers prefer.

Carefully crafting a compelling presence on LinkedIn is the first step in your B2B social media marketing plan. However, getting the kind of return on investment that makes LinkedIn a worthwhile endeavor entails diving a little deeper. The ability to hone in on an audience and envelope targeted users with value-rich content is paramount to your success. This is where remarketing comes in.

Can You Do Remarketing on LinkedIn?

For those unfamiliar with the term, remarketing is the practice of targeting a user that has interacted with your brand before. Also called retargeting, the process often involves taking another shot at previous visitors to your web presence. This may include providing a discount or using a different approach than that of their first interaction. Oftentimes, this second approach may be as simple as a reminder to revisit the content they initially showed interest in.

The concept of remarketing started with search and is now popular on social media where it is even more effective. LinkedIn follows this trend by offering retargeting on its platform. You can attempt a second approach to certain professionals that have viewed your content. For instance, you may want to target CEOs of companies with at least 2,000 employees.

Remarketing is a technology that works by putting a snippet of code on your website. This places a cookie on users' web browsers. Every time the user shows up on another page on the internet that displays ads, they get relevant advertisements. LinkedIn cookies expire after 90 days.

Why Remarketing on LinkedIn Is So Powerful

The strength of social media marketing for business owners is the availability of user data that they are able to leverage on the various platforms. LinkedIn has data that no other social network has. While Facebook and Instagram may know a lot about users' social preferences, LinkedIn gathers data on people's professional interests. For entrepreneurs that operate in a B2B environment, this has the potential to boost productivity.

Disadvantages of LinkedIn

Keep in mind that LinkedIn is not a network people stay all day on. If you're only showing your ads to your target audience two times a month, effectiveness drops. This comes in stark contrast with sites like Facebook where users check into their feeds multiple times per day. In order to be successful on LinkedIn, your efforts need to follow an efficient digital marketing strategy.

LinkedIn ads costs are markedly higher than those of other platforms. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram may be viable for running experimental campaigns with extensive A/B testing due to lower costs. With LinkedIn, this isn't a cost-effective option.

All-in-all, the vast majority of internet users won't fit into LinkedIn retargeting. While this may sound like a disadvantage, knowing that you are selling to a very specific audience may be preferable.

Two-Step Funnels

One of the strategies that LinkedIn growth hackers use is that of two-step funnels. This is when you drive traffic from the platform to a landing page and then exclude the people that convert. To simplify, consider you are passing out flyers for a hot dog stand outside a sporting event. Imagine being able to subtract the attendees that make a purchase from the stand. You could then distribute a different flyer to those that have the first one but didn't make a purchase.

Two-step funnels make sure you avoid paying twice to advertise to people that are already in your conversions. You're then free to target the people that didn't convert with a second offer that's tailored to their new circumstances. This new offer can vary on price, scarcity or other factors that you find to play a role in increasing conversions.

Leveraging Other Platforms

LinkedIn is significantly more costly to advertise on. Besides making sure each click counts, you can drive down your overall digital marketing costs by leveraging other platforms. You can approach users on LinkedIn and remarket on Facebook, Instagram or Google.

Since the professional network is better for getting laser-targeted leads, you can make your second approach on their other newsfeeds. This requires a bit of planning but can offer budget-saving synergies.

What Makes a Good LinkedIn Ad?

Most of the same factors that make any online ad effective hold true for LinkedIn. Making sure you provide something of value will go a long way. People do not respond to irrelevant ads and LinkedIn is too expensive a place to waste clicks on.

To make their digital marketing on LinkedIn more effective, growth hackers use gated content. This is where the user receives something from you in exchange for their e-mail. A free e-book, a webinar or other event will incentivize users to trust you with their address.

Applying best practices in ad creation can mean the difference between 20% conversion rates and $25 costs per conversion as opposed to lower conversion rates and over $100 spent per conversion.

LinkedIn expert AJ Wilcox notes that matched audiences are now available on LinkedIn. This is a feature that other platforms use and pertains to uploading your e-mail lists for targeting. As with two-step funnels, you can exclude e-mail addresses from other audiences to avoid spending money on people you're already marketing to.

Look-Alike Audiences on LinkedIn

Those that have experience advertising on Facebook will recognize the concept of look-alike audiences. This is where you can target audiences that are similar to people that are already converting for you. The system puts together a list of users that are similar in behavior to those whose e-mail addresses you've uploaded.

Look-alike audiences serve to drive down your advertising costs on LinkedIn. If you're already targeting users that convert well, the system will feed you more high-quality leads for your funnel.

New LinkedIn Features Ahead

AJ Wilcox provides some exciting news for business owners looking to maximize their LinkedIn ROI. The platform is preparing to offer engagement retargeting. This feature will give you the ability to target users based on the data LinkedIn has on them. You won't need a cookie in the users' browsers to be able to retarget prospects. By offering engagement retargeting, LinkedIn will make video ads more efficient as you'll be able to recommend video ads to prequalified users rather than wasting money on views from disinterested users.