Best B2B advertising platform
September 18, 2020
Best B2B advertising platform
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with LinkedIn Marketing Solutions
As a marketing agency, we often recommend LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, specifically LinkedIn Advertising, to our clients that sell B2B. It solves the problem of being able to target prospects for our clients at various industries, companies, and with specific job titles. There is no other widely used business networking platform as widely used as LinkedIn, so we know we're using very accurate and exhaustive data. We can build awareness for our clients by showing ads to their ideal customers.
- The variety of Advertising campaign goals and mediums is great. You can use LinkedIn ads for building brand awareness with a broad reach, or get very narrow with InMail messages to a targeted list. Ads can be videos, images, personal messages, or just a text ad, all with varying pros and cons, so our clients lean on us for advice.
- Setting up campaigns is very easy. Choose a goal, create an audience, add your content, and off you go. You can preview your ad to see exactly how it will look too.
- The reporting is very expansive, too. You can view traditional metrics like impressions and clicks, but also set up custom goals to track as conversions, see the reach and frequency of ads, video views, clicks or engagement with your LinkedIn company profile, and a lot more.
- Cost per click has tended to be fairly expensive, especially compared to a search ad campaign with Google or Bing, so it's not necessarily to be used in every situation. Our clients typically see a $10-$15 cost per click, and for smaller companies with limited marketing budgets, sometimes that can only get them 1-2 leads per month.
- Audience expansion is one thing that doesn't always play to your advantage. It's supposed to find more people like the people you target in your audience, but it tends to go outside of some very important criteria, such as industry or job title. It makes it hard to make sure you're getting the right traffic or leads while still getting a good scale from the audience.
- LinkedIn Marketing Solutions has significantly helped our agency to generate leads for our clients, which in turn incentivizes them to spend more on our marketing services.
- Ironically, though, we have not had as much success doing our own LinkedIn advertising for our agency. Clicks have been a little too expensive to get scale from our own marketing budget.
- Google Ads (formerly AdWords)
LinkedIn is definitely more expensive if you are doing video or image ad formats, unless you're in an extremely competitive industry for search ads on Google. However, Google has nowhere near the capabilities for audience targeting if you are selling business-to-business. They are about the same in terms of ease-of-use, breadth of control, reporting capabilities, and from a machine-learning and automation perspective.