Find here Daxue Talks 87. Our guests Julien Sicard and Tamar Hela from LinkedIn Local Asia (Shanghai) share the intricacies of LinkedIn ads and marketing. There are many factors companies need to consider, such as the type of company, demographics, and language to target a specific audience. What are some things to avoid? Find out more from this China business vlog.
Full transcript below:
LinkedIn ads are much more costly than say Facebook or Google ads and tend to drive less traffic. How does LinkedIn ads differ from Facebook and is it worth the cost?
Facebook is the same, obviously there is a way to get a return on investment, but here we come back to the fundamental of what is marketing. Did you target the right audience? Did you deliver the right message and obviously if you do that, the more you’re going to be precise on your client and the more you’re going to have results?
Let me give you an example. I used to do e-commerce and creating my own e-commerce website and I run a lot of Facebook ads. It’s true I mean you really increase the cost, it was incredible. It was hard as there was more competition, but again its innovation in the advertising because my branding was better in comparison to the competitor, or better videos to show the product and it was okay I was still making money and at the end of the day when you run a Facebook ads campaign, it’s what you have to sell.
For LinkedIn the strategy is kind of different, I would say definitely the best advertising you can do – okay, to give you an example, big universities that want to try to sell you MBA for 50,000 Euros but definitely this is a good place to advertise for LinkedIn because you have all the high executive and generally it’s not the individuals that finance for the MBA, but it’s the company itself, right. Why? Because this is again a way to get retention of the employees – okay I’m going to send you in Jiao Tong or Harvard for your MBA and you’re going to stay five more years because we need you. I mean it’s just an incentive, I mean education is just like that. So yeah for education it really works well – its great as a lead magnet – I would advise again – a webinar – people will register definitely and again the audience, we have to keep them in mind. If I want to do a webinar to explain to the architect in Dubai that okay China is a great place to develop new projects and we’re kind of considering new companies as we have a new project there, the webinar is the best way.
I won’t target these people on Facebook because they are not active, right. So definitely it depends again on what you have in mind, what’s your objective. LinkedIn is definitely very, very efficient and it is complementary to all the weapons – if you can say like that, because prospecting is a war and you have to use a different weapon for different objectives, right. And in the art of the war, again you have the content creation to bring your target to you, you have the sales navigator but LinkedIn adds – it’s a complimentary right because the more people going to see your ads and the more they will think of you and they will take action and they will give you more credibility, let’s say after the ad you’re going to talk to them personally, right – where they are adding connections – oh, I’ve seen your ads, so yes – its again a complementary tool and can be definitely efficient but not for all kind of businesses, that’s why for our agency we really are careful when people – a lot of people actually are super excited with LinkedIn ads – you are right on that point, some businesses being honest is not going to get a return on investment, but for other like education – definitely it is.
What are some good ad targeting tactics for companies in China who are marketing globally?
Great question – so you want to be super, super targeted. So even if you are in China and you’re looking for companies that really want the B2B kind of services or activities, you can’t go global because otherwise you’re going to spend so much money on the ads and at the end of the day your results are not going to help you measure well, because again – with advertising it is a long term game and you have to be careful with your money spent and you have to have the right data to clarify and then know when you shift and pivot.
That’s why I personally like doing AB testing once I’ve really niched down and targeted. For example, when I used to run LinkedIn ads, we did a lot of AB split testing and we super niched down – like we knew exactly where these targets were, we specified with the language so again to like people in China need to be careful with the language, like do they need to target in the local language of that country or does it need to be international English and we need to know like the job title, so you don’t want the interns finding your ads, you want the decision-makers, the people with money.
So again, think about the title and then when you’re doing the AB split testing, this is more for like the really small squares of ads that you’ll see to the right of your home feed on LinkedIn. You want to think about language and you have really a really small amount of characters that you can put in, so the nice thing about AB split testing is that you can test the language and that’s really what it comes down to. You can definitely do like a little image – which is great, but test more the language not necessarily the image, because then you’ll understand how those targets are reacting.
For example when we’re talking about language and we’re talking about attracting people through ads, you want to understand your demographic, if they are the kind of people who run towards pleasure or run away from pain. And when you know that – then you can formulate the structure of the odd. If you’re targeting people who maybe want to get better cheaper products, like tech products in China, they’re going to be running away from the pain or paying too much locally. So you want to use language that is saying things like “this can save you money” or “it’s more efficient or lower cost.” But if you’re talking about other services or other industries where people are going to earn more money for doing something, or they’re going to have a better return on investment, that’s running towards pleasure.
So you want to use language structured in a pleasures format and that’s where you can really test the AB kind of stuff and see the demographics that you’re getting.
Also, I would say if you don’t use an AB split testing, you want to be super targeted and segmented so that you can have enough data. Let’s say run a campaign for 14 days, you want to be tracking everything and then know if it’s time to shift.
If you do it too short, it’s not going to give you much return on investment and it’s not going to give you enough information and that’s why again if you’re only targeting the West as a business in china – it’s too broad.
So really think about the specific targets, their languages, their culture, definitely like you’ll have to if you don’t know this already – there’s a company in China – you’re going to have to bring in so experts who can at least do a little bit of market research for you and then finally you need to think about the language. Because language is everything in advertising and you only have like three seconds. Kind of to make an impression – so the simple and more compelling the language is, the more successful it will be.
How to optimise retargeting on LinkedIn?
For retargeting it’s very simple: you really have to think on two steps for when you create your campaign. So first let’s say the user is going to see ads – he will visit your website but won’t take any action okay, but the cookie is going to be stored with the user and then again the user will see when he would browse his internet, your marketing ads and will visit again your website and may be will take action to fill up your form or your booking calendar because sometimes okay we visit but we don’t necessarily are aware – or our time is very limited, so that’s one of the greater examples on how you can use retargeting. The two steps definitely work well and is one of the strategy actually we implement for our clients.
Any questions? We will find an expert to answer them. Drop your questions in the comments, or send us an email – dx@daxueconsulting.com.
