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This is Denise from The Recruitment Marketing and Sales Podcast, and today we’re talking LinkedIn advertising. This is specifically LinkedIn advertising around promoting you and your brand.
However, if you’re new here, welcome; great to have you. Depending on when you’re listening to this podcast, if you haven’t signed up for our Recruitment Marketing Week, then head over to the website or head over to this URL 👇
www.superfastrecruitment.co.uk/RMW
Over five days we are running a training programme, an hour each day, on how to build a marketing system for you and your recruitment company.
I think you’re going to find it incredibly useful. We will leave the recordings up for over a week after the event. You can access workbooks, frameworks, and video recordings for up to two weeks after the event.
Head over to that URL I mentioned: superfastrecruitment.co.uk/rmw stands for Recruitment Marketing Week; pop your Name and email address in and grab your place.
I look forward to seeing you on Monday the 26th.
Now, let’s talk about LinkedIn Ads.
LinkedIn Ads Work AND They Are Not a Fast Fix
I wanted to share this with you because we have been delving into LinkedIn Ads for several months.
I will be honest and say the jury’s out as to how this will deliver for us because we’ve been testing all sorts of different strategies, and as a marketing company, it’s something you need to do.
What I wanted to talk to you about today is what we’ve been doing, some of the upsides of LinkedIn Ads, some of the pitfalls, and some of the things you might want to consider.
The first thing is LinkedIn Ads really need to be part of your whole process. If you rely on LinkedIn to build your brand, get in front of people, and generate immediate leads, it won’t work; It’s a much longer-term strategy.
It is potentially a very effective strategy, but it is long-term because it’s a very different platform from others; It is still a social media platform, and here’s a top tip when it comes to advertising on social media.
It works in a B2B environment; however, if you think doing ads for a month or six weeks will work for you long-term, then the answer is no. You need to give it six to eight months to test and measure what’s going on so people can see you in their feed.
It’s the same with LinkedIn. Possibly with LinkedIn, it will take a little bit longer because you’re going out to a cold audience of people that don’t know you.
Targeting Specific Groups of People
The strategy for using LinkedIn Ads that we’ve been using is to advertise to a very specific and targeted group. Now, you can do this on various social platforms; however, LinkedIn works particularly well because, from our perspective, we are targeting the staffing and recruiting sector.
When you sign up for LinkedIn, you click staffing and recruiting as the group you are associated with- so we can target our adverts for you. Now let’s say that you’re in the engineering space, then you could look for the equivalent; off the top of my head, I don’t know what it is in engineering, but people that are involved in engineering, and then you can drill down to who specifically you would like your ads shown to.
We work with micro businesses and small SMEs, targeting our ads to those individuals. You might want companies with over 50 employees, 50 to 2,000 employees, whatever it might be, and on LinkedIn, you can do that.
You can target Facebook, too; they have a lot of data on their users and their behaviours!
Though LinkedIn has fewer data points, you can still use a useful amount to target potential buyers.
For example, this is the industry I’m after, the company’s size, and with LinkedIn, you can even direct your adverts to specific companies that you want to get your ad in front of.
Remember, with any platform like this, the more specific you are, the more expensive your ads will be. Now ads on LinkedIn are generally much more costly than on Facebook, but they are incredibly targeted.
Retargeting Ads on LinkedIn
One of the big benefits of LinkedIn Ads these days is that you can set up retargeting. Now those of you who are new to us or maybe you’re new to marketing, let’s just do a quick tutorial on retargeting.
If you want to know more, head to the Superfast Recruitment website, go onto our blog, and you’ll see a search bar there. Add the word retargeting, which will pull up one of the podcasts I probably recorded a while ago.
Retargeting is a classic marketing technique when shopping for something for your significant other at Christmas. You want to buy them a new pair of boots or a new jacket or something like that, then suddenly you see that new pair of boots or jacket all over the internet, on Facebook, on Google, wherever you’re going.
Fundamentally you can put some code on your website. When someone visits your website, they are known as cookied, and then you can show adverts to them generally.
Regarding LinkedIn Ads, which are the same for many other platforms, the general idea is you’re going out to a cold audience. They don’t know you, so that you might decide– Let’s say for us, we’ve decided that we will go out to an audience in the UK, in Australia, and in the US, so our ads go out in front of those people.
They may not know who Superfast Recruitment is. They might not understand Superfast Circle, so we first want to get some brand awareness.
What we do is use a cold ad. In other words, we direct people to our website, where they can find out more about us, and we ‘cookie’ them.
What we’ve done is we have set up on our website a cookie from a piece of code from LinkedIn so anyone that goes onto our website and visits a particular page is cookied/tagged.
That means we are building up a list on LinkedIn of people who might be interested in Superfast Recruitment and Superfast Circle.
They’ve seen our advert, something is connected with them, and they’ve gone to look at our website.
They are new to us; in other words, it is a cold audience, so they need a lot more nurturing, they need more information, they need to see our adverts and our brand more, but what we’ve done is build an audience.
Then what we do is we start to show adverts specifically to those people that have expressed an interest.
All seems logical. If someone rings you up and they’re interested, somebody comes onto your email list, or a new candidate comes onto your database, they are interested.
A client opts into a report you might have; they’re interested.
The retargeting audience you build is quite an asset, and then you start to advertise to them.
The thing to remember is these people are cold. They don’t know you. They need several points of contact. Then, you start showing slightly different information to these individuals, more than brand awareness advertising. Y
You talk to them about the results clients who work with you can get, maybe some case studies you have, maybe a couple of videos about how you help people.
You get more specific.
Depending on your business driver, the goal is to get them onto a call/demo with you.
The goal, then, is we build more advertising around these individuals. You may have been caught in our spell. You may have decided that you want to watch one of our master class training, and you put your Name and email into a lead generation form on LinkedIn, and now you’re on our email database.
You can see how this works.
The thing to remember about this is it is a longer-term strategy. It was a strategy we decided we wanted to try this year, along with more LinkedIn outreach that we do, and up to now, we are getting traction, but it has taken four to five months to build.
Whilst it’s been building, we are paying for ads, so we haven’t gotten a huge ROI yet on our spending. We have a lot of very warm people that we’re talking to because of it, but it has taken some time.
Results Will Build For The Long Game
What I want to say about LinkedIn Ads is that if you want immediate leads, you’re much better at implementing cold outreach and emailing people you already have connections with.
When it comes to LinkedIn advertising, it’s about building your brand; it’s about making you a recruitment organisation that people can work with. Remember, you’re going to have to factor in a significant investment.
It is a learning curve like any marketing strategy; it will take time, and depending on your market and size, it might just be a good investment for you.
Thanks,
Denise
How We Can Help
Are you a recruitment or search business owner who wants to get marketing working in your business? Hence, you stand out and create a consistent supply of job-ready meetings and move-ready candidates who see you as the logical company to work with.
Then we can help.
We have been working in the recruitment and search sector, supporting clients across the globe for over 15 years. Our Superfast Circle programme will deliver an ROI of its entire investment in less than 50 days. You can read our case studies here.
Want to find out more? Then book a quick demo call here.
