Looking to give your LinkedIn campaign a boost? Here is a quick guide to creating a successful LinkedIn campaign for your brand or business, written by TPG’s Associate Media Planner, Cameron Cusack. 

LinkedIn’s self-service platform requires a lot of time and energy to run a successful campaign. Without giving away all my secrets, I believe there are four keys points to running an effective campaign on LinkedIn.

1. What’s your goal?

Knowing the goal is half the battle. Figure out what you are trying to achieve with your campaign before creating the campaigns.

2. Who’s your target audience?

LinkedIn campaigns have to be extremely focused on direct response. Do extensive research before defining targets on LinkedIn. The platform has a huge global audience and many targeting options are available, including geographic and skill based targeting.

3. Make sure you have enough reach

You want to make sure you are reaching a large enough audience in each campaign to get a decent amount of impressions. For smaller targets like job titles and groups, bundle similar job titles or groups together into one campaign. This helps give you a larger reach. LinkedIn recommends a minimum of 60,000-audience reach, but 100,000+ is best practice.

Of course ad copy needs to be created within each campaign. What 75 character message is going to get your target audience to engage with the ad? Even if you are targeting the correct audience, if your ad copy doesn’t speak to them, your campaign will not perform. Like paid search, strong CTAs are always good to include.

4. Need to keep CTR above .025%

Now that the campaign is up and running, it’s time to start babysitting. If you do not keep your ad copy above the LinkedIn CTR average of .025%, Linkedin will gradually stop serving as many impressions to your campaign. Unfortunately, there is no way around this. Check you campaigns multiple times a day. If CTR is coming in below average, create new ad copy and deactivate copy that wasn’t performing. This will help keep the campaign live even if the CTR is below .025%.

LinkedIn gives you the ability to create 15 different ad variations. Don’t create all 15 at once; optimize them during your campaign for best results.

Each LinkedIn campaign is different and you’ll learn what’s working and not working as you go along. For starters, knowing the goal, knowing your target audience, ensuring reach, and keeping your CTR above .025% will all help in creating and running a successful LinkedIn campaign.