LinkedIn's marketing solutions are an easy and effective way to start your B2B marketing program. Starting a basic LinkedIn sponsored post campaign is simple: All you need is an idea of your audience, brief copy, a picture, a hyperlink (to an offer or web page) and a credit card. It takes 15 minutes or less to get up and running once you have an account. Really, the most difficult part is making your audience selects.
If you want a more sophisticated campaign, LinkedIn can help you there, also. You have the ability to upload both company and contact lists. You can target these specific contacts or companies so that sponsored posts appear in their feed. Or, can you have LinkedIn find people in their database that match the profiles of the companies or contacts you uploaded. This will give you a much larger audience to reach out to. Finally, LinkedIn offers a couple of ways to reach out to people via InMail. You can, of course, contact people directly which works well if you have just a few to contact. Or, you can place ads in your contacts InMail ad feed. While the latter is less effective than a direct contact, I find these ads to be less annoying than a marketing message clogging up my InMail. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
In spite of many good options, LinkedIn's audience selection tool is awkward to use. Some selects are not available if others are chosen and it isn't always clear why. In addition, some selects can only be excluded instead of being able to include them. However, if you intend to reach out to the same audience regularly you can save it as a template Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
