LinkedIn Advertising: How to Create LinkedIn Ads

Do you want to get new clients to grow your Edmonton business?

Have you tried social media marketing, but you’re not sure how to reach a wider audience?

Social media advertising is one of the best ways to amplify your message to reach a wider audience in Edmonton using various social media networks, such as LinkedIn.

With LinkedIn, the audience is generally more educated and affluent than other social media networks. You can also focus your ads to people based on their profession, company, or industry, which you can’t do with other social media networks.

Next to Facebook, LinkedIn is the second most popular social media network in Canada.

According to a recent study at Ryerson University, 46% of Canadians use LinkedIn and 56% of self-employed Canadians use LinkedIn. There are also more Canadian men on LinkedIn than women.

Regardless of the averages, do your patients use LinkedIn?

The best way to answer that question is to ask them directly. A patient survey is an effective tool to learn more about your patients and the social media platforms that they like to use. This helps you learn who your clients are, and how to find more clients like them.

But, does advertising on social media work in Edmonton?

According to a study published by Curalate, 76% of people surveyed have completed a purchase based on a company’s social media post.

We wrote this article to help you learn:

How to create a LinkedIn Business account?

1. Sign up for LinkedIn Business
2. Edit account details

How to create LinkedIn ads?

1. Set up campaign
2. Create a new audience
3. Select ad format
4. Determine budget and schedule
5. Set up ads
6. Analyze and optimize

Let’s get started!

How to create a LinkedIn Business account?

In order to create a separate LinkedIn Company Page, you need a personal profile as well. Many health professionals use LinkedIn to network using their personal profiles, so it’s essential to have both.

Sign up for Linked Business

1. Go to LinkedIn Pages.
2. Click on the “Create your Page” button in the middle of the screen.
3. Select your business size, likely “Small business”.
4. Complete your business name, LinkedIn public URL, and your website address.
5. Complete your company details, including your industry, company size and company type.
6. Complete your profile details by uploading your company logo using image dimensions of 300 x 300 pixels. Write a short tagline for your business.

Edit account details

1. Go to your Company Page and upload a cover image using image dimensions of 1536 x 768 pixels.
2. Write a company description that summarizes your health and wellness practice and why your prospective patients should visit your clinic, in 2000 characters or less.
3. Underneath your company description, add 20 company specialties. Use keywords for specialties, as it will help people find your business on LinkedIn.
4. Click the Publish button to make your page live.

How to create LinkedIn ads?

To create advertisements on LinkedIn, you need to use the LinkedIn Campaign Manager. This advertising tool will help you create, manage and optimize your advertising on LinkedIn.

It also includes detailed analytics to help you see how your LinkedIn ads are performing and the demographics of the people who interact with your advertisement.

You’ll need a personal profile on LinkedIn in order to access the Campaign Manager. You’ll also need a Company Page created to promote your business content in the Campaign Manager, otherwise, you can promote your personal content.

Step 1: Set up campaign

The first step in the LinkedIn Campaign Manager is to set a specific objective for your campaign to help you realize your business goals. A campaign objective is the action that you want your audience to take when they see your LinkedIn ads. Choosing an objective helps LinkedIn customize your campaign creation and help you achieve your marketing goals.

LinkedIn organizes your marketing objectives into three categories:

• Awareness: display your ads to the maximum number of people possible to increase their awareness of your health products and services.
  • Brand awareness: introduce your business to a new audience.

• Consideration: promote your ads to encourage people to interact by visiting your website, commenting, sharing or liking your post, watching your videos, and more.
  • Website visits: increase the number of people visiting your website.
  • Engagement: increase the number of post comments, likes, and shares.
  • Video views: encourage people to watch your video.

• Conversions: encourage your audience to take action by purchasing a product, or by visiting your clinic in person for an appointment.
  • Lead generation: get potential new patients into your pipeline.
  • Website conversions: encourage people to take a specific action on your website, such as subscribing to your newsletter or booking an appointment.
  • Job applicants: encourage people to apply for a job listing at your clinic.

Step 2: Create a new audience

Next, select the location that you want your LinkedIn ads displayed, starting with North America, then Canada, then Alberta, and finally the city that your clinic is located. On the right-hand side, LinkedIn will display their Forecasted Results, which shows you the approximate audience size in your selected city.

Below your audience location, you’ll find another option for “Add new targeting criteria”. This is another way to segment your audience further based on various attributes, such as:

• Company: find people based on the companies listed on their LinkedIn profile.
• Demographics: reach people based on their inferred age or gender.
• Education: reach people based on a degree, field of study, or learning institution.
• Job experience: reach people based on their job experience, skills, or years of experience.
• Interests: reach people based on their direct or inferred interests, behaviours, or professional groups they may belong to.

You can also exclude people from these same attributes. It’s worthwhile to consider testing your ads with different audience groups to help you get the best results.

Step 3: Select ad format

After creating your audience group, you can choose the format that you want your LinkedIn advertisement to be displayed as, including:

• Text ad: text-based ads that are displayed in the right-hand side column or top of the page.
• Single image ad: a single image is displayed in the news feed.
• Carousel image ad: two or more images that are displayed in the news feed.
• Video ad: a video that is displayed in the news feed.
• Follower ad: a personalized ad using profile data that promotes your Company Page.
• Spotlight ad: a personalized ad using profile data that promotes an offering.
• Job ad: a personalized ad using profile data that promotes your job listing.
• Message ad: text-based message delivered to your audience’s LinkedIn messaging inbox.

Once you select your ad format, the Forecasted Results on the right-hand side will update to reflect your estimated impressions (views), interactions (engagement), and overall cost.

In addition to displaying your ads on LinkedIn, you can also display your ads on LinkedIn’s Audience Network. This is a network of websites and apps that will also display your advertisement. LinkedIn’s partnership with Microsoft has expanded the reach of where your ads can be displayed.

Step 4: Determine budget and schedule

Next, you can choose your daily budget, total budget, or both. The daily budget is an average, so you may end up spending up to 20% higher on any given day.

Then, you can decide if you want your budget to start immediately, or on a specific date. You can choose to have a specific end date, or let the campaign run continuously. We suggest setting an end date, in order to prevent forgetting about the campaign.

Finally, you can select your “Bid type”, which is how you want to spend your budget. Unless you have some experience with bidding on LinkedIn ads, we suggest that you start with the “Automated bid” option.

Generally, the cost for LinkedIn ads is more expensive than other networks, like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. The main reason is that companies are willing to spend more money per click, as the audience is generally more educated and affluent.

The average cost-per-click for LinkedIn ads in Canada is about $5.

Step 5: Set up ads

Once your campaign is setup, you can create your advertisement. You can choose to either create a new ad, or use existing content from a previously published post.

If you choose to create a new ad, you’ll see a new page where you can create your new content. Otherwise, you can click on “Browse existing content” to review your previously published posts and select one for your ad.

Once you’re ready, click on the “Review order” button near the top-right. Review the details of your advertisement and when you’re satisfied, you’re ready to launch.

Step 6: Analyze and optimize

As with most social media networks, LinkedIn also provides extensive analytics to help you measure the performance of your advertising campaign.

When you’re in the Campaign Manager dashboard, click on the link “Campaign Performance” near the top-left. Below, you’ll see your Campaign Groups.

Find the Campaign Group that you’ve created and when you hover your mouse over the title, you’ll see a link that reads “Chart”. Click on it to see a chart of the performance of your campaign.

Conclusion

Most of your patients in Edmonton are using social media daily, many of which use LinkedIn.

With LinkedIn ads, you can focus your advertising to a more educated and affluent audience, many of which are self-employed or business professionals. You can also focus your ads to people based on their profession, company, or industry, which you can’t do with other social media networks.

LinkedIn advertising provides a cost-effective way to promote your health and wellness practice to grow your business with new clients.

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