The Best Practices For LinkedIn Message Ad Campaigns

Every business needs to get its sales messages out there. Marketing emails may be one approach, direct mail could be on your radar. But as a comparatively new option, LinkedIn Message Ads give you oodles of ways to target your messages. Here’s how it works.

Targeted messages based on predefined groups

Every marketer knows that the key to marketing email success is to segment your audience. With LinkedIn Message Ad Campaign you can deliver a targeted message to a group of prospects. Similar to a marketing email, but it can be even better.

Here’s why. According to LinkedIn itself, and the data they have, message campaigns like this are in a far less cluttered environment than your average email account. That immediately helps your brand to stand out. And more than 1 in 2 prospects open a message ad. You would be hard-pressed to get the same open rate through any other means.

Why we use LinkedIn Message Ads

We’ve spent some time experimenting with this feature on LinkedIn to see just how effective it is. In each campaign we create, we use message ads to reach a highly targeted audience and we use just one single CTA in our campaigns.

Interestingly, in lockdown, we’ve found a number of our clients have found success through message ads, primarily in campaigns where the purpose was to promote webinars and other virtual events, combined with sponsored content campaigns.

What are the best practices for LinkedIn Message Ad Campaigns?

So, aside from keeping the CTA clear and singular, and targeting a focussed group of people, how else do you boost the effectiveness of your campaign?

• Content – LinkedIn also allows you to personalise the content using macro, custom, fields. So, you can design copy that’s easy on the eye and impactful. Just make sure you keep your content short and snappy. A couple of short paragraphs or 3-5 bullets is plenty. Any more than that and people will switch off.
• Audience – staying focussed is the key but narrow your audience too far and it won’t run. Yes, keep it targeted, but the campaign will struggle if the audience is less than 5000 users.
• Remember, there’s also InMail – if your audience is small, you’re not out of options. Using the Sales Navigator to send InMail messages will help you target niche groups.
• There is a difference between InMail and Message Ads – remember that there is a difference between the two. Message Ads are viewed as ads with a CTA and no need to reply. InMail campaigns are designed to start a conversation.

How do I create a LinkedIn Message Ad?

We work with several B2B marketing teams, using LinkedIn and other social media platforms for audience research and to help with planning and budgeting. So, if you need a helping hand to get started, contact us now.