Reach more customers and increase sales by utilising LinkedIn for your next corporate video campaign.

When it comes to marketing business services to other businesses, managers often veer towards platforms like Facebook and Instagram to launch B2B campaigns. And although it’s true to say business leads can be generated through the like, they’re not always as effective as you might think. You may be better off investing your ad spend into another platform.

Downside to B2B Facebook and Instagram

Platform focus

Facebook and Instagram are very much social and lifestyle channels in that they actively seek out to connect friends and family, over business associates and colleagues. In fact, the savvy engineers behind their algorithms have gone to great lengths over the years to decrease visibility of brands in the feed and downplay the platform as a place to talk shop.

Environment

Facebook and Instagram offer users a particular type of environment and it’s much less likely that a user will be using the platform to passively or actively pursue business objectives. This is not the case for marketers and social media managers, whose entire job relies on social media lines of code. But the average worker outside of these fields, will be primarily looking for respite from their day-to-day duties rather than a way into them.

Targeting

Targeting is always important when it comes to ensuring ads are seen by the right people but segmentation is harder on platforms like Facebook and Instagram who offer a smaller set to choose from when it comes to creating audiences based on company role or job title. Marketers will need to be creative with how they use the tools they do have available to reach the right people.

The Pros of LinkedIn

LinkedIn is underused

LinkedIn is a thoroughly underutilised platform when it comes to B2B advertising which means the barrier for entry is extremely low. There just aren’t that many businesses to compete with when compared to the behemoths of Facebook and Instagram, where your ads will be competing with the huge B2C market too. This means you may be able to achieve better results purely due to the fact you have less competition.

Choose from a variety of ad units

All social media platforms offer more than just one type of ad unit but LinkedIn does a good job at offering a variety of different options to marketers. So, whether you are looking to increase brand awareness, market an offer or generate leads, there are different ways to be seen and convert.

Direct connections and messages

Although direct messaging and InMail lead generation has a scatty hit rate, the option to directly message a potential lead is still an advantage over other social platforms. Due to Linked in’s establishment as a place to find a job or recruiters candidates, it exists in a world where users are much more upfront with their networking goals. As such you don’t need to dance around the houses before getting down to the nitty gritty.

Targeting

The biggest plus for B2B marketing on LinkedIn is that the platform offers unrivalled segmentation and targeting options for the corporate landscape. Since the Cambridge Analytica debacle forced Facebook to remove position and employer targeting, LinkedIn is now the only platform that does so. You can also target users by the companies they follow as well as something called ‘customer match’, which enables marketers to target similar customer segments to other companies.

Access to Bing

LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft which means you have access to Microsoft Advertising (AKA Bing), a unique offering for some marketers depending on how much your target audience uses search engines outside of Google.

Downsides to LinkedIn

There are of course some downsides to using LinkedIn that must be highlighted. It’s not as robust or well-funded as Facebook so their Ads Manager can be a little clunky when compared to Facebook’s counterpart. Like many social platforms, it also has a minimum daily spend. It’s minimal at $10 a day but a restriction, nonetheless. The post-reporting is also pretty limited and not as customisable as most marketers would like, which can put some analysts off who may be used to a flexible dashboard.

That said, the pros for us far outweigh the cons and if you’re looking to increase eyeballs on a platform that offers more targeting per dollar, then LinkedIn may be a good place to start creating videos ads.

At Snackable, we work closely with brands and agencies to ensure their content converts as intended. We’ve developed a checklist to ensure that each piece of content works as hard as it can in this regard. Here we outline 10 tips for making better ads.

10 Tips for creating effective B2B videos on LinkedIn

1.     Make the videos short and snackable

2.     Tell a story / be creative

3.     Include subtitles or closed captions

4.     Use success stories and testimonials

5.     Speak to specific audiences

6.     Use humour

7.     Pull key messages out on screen with supers

8.     Add a layer of animation

9.     Test and iterate

10.  Don’t take failure personally

Looking to add more dynamic video ads to LinkedIn? Reach out to Snackable today to find out how we can help you increase your sales.