What’s the best way to complete a complex task requiring multiple stakeholders? Map out each of the steps.
The same process holds true for strategic digital marketing.
Here’s our health tech marketing agency’s ten-step workflow for launching a successful LinkedIn Ad campaign.
10-step workflow to launching a LinkedIn Ad campaign
1. Goal: Start with your end goal in mind. What do you want to accomplish with this campaign?
Pro-tip: Ensure the goal aligns with your leadership and sales teams’ expectations.
2. Budget: Know your monthly ad spend budget and understand how it will be distributed across campaigns. We recommend a minimum monthly budget of $5,000 for lead generation to ensure adequate reach. However, you may be successful with less for other goals, such as new follower campaigns and awareness building.
3. Target audience: Identify who you want to reach. Be specific about job titles, skills and seniority levels. Remember firmographics, such as organizational size, revenue and geographic location. You may also want to consider where your campaign fits in with an ABM workflow.
4. Call-to-action (CTA): Articulate what you are asking your target prospects to do and map out how they will complete the action. Downloading content is different than requesting a demo, as is the experience of completing both actions—plan accordingly.
5. Content asset: Determine what content is likely to spur your target audience to take your desired action. Considering that different content types are relevant for different stages of the buyer’s journey, work with your content team to develop assets that will help meet your goals or even develop campaign-specific assets. Related to the CTA above, if you’re asking the audience to download content, you need to think about the user experience of how your prospect will access the content, either from a landing page or by sending them directly to an asset.
6. Ad type: LinkedIn now has more than ten types of ad formats. Trying a new ad format is a great way to stand out in a crowded feed.
7. Ad creative: Too many people start here because they have a great idea for a campaign. Remember, your ad creative should be in service to your goals within the parameters of the medium. Here are our design best practices for LinkedIn Ads that convert.
Pro-tip: Use images optimized for both desktop (horizontal) and mobile (vertical) to reach as much of your audience as possible.
8. Follow-up: If an individual completes your desired action, then what? At the bare minimum, you will want to alert relevant team members and ensure any new contact information is automatically added to your CRM with LinkedIn Ads integration. Marketers should define a separate workflow with a decision tree to determine where contacts that engage with the campaign go next in their buyer’s journey.
9. Metrics: Remember that goal in step one? The only way to meet it is to measure it. If you’re redirecting people to a landing page or piece of content, ensure tracking is properly set up to capture those views or engagements. Define what metrics will determine the campaign’s success and optimize based on those metrics.
10. Test the ad: Test your ads before they go live; every version. There’s nothing worse than launching an ad only to find out the person is being redirected to the wrong landing page or there’s a typo in your form.
Only then should you go live with your LinkedIn Ad campaign!
Map LinkedIn Ad campaign success
With so many moving pieces, it’s easy to overlook something that could negatively impact your campaign’s success.
Using this LinkedIn Ads workflow, you can ensure your campaigns are strategic, targeted and cost-effective—ultimately driving better results and helping you meet your marketing goals.
