While many service professionals may think of LinkedIn as merely a place to house their online resume, it can serve as a much more dynamic social media. You can create a business page, post your own blog posts, and share content from people that you follow.
In addition to using LinkedIn to grow your social media presence, it is also a good platform for service professionals that are interested in paid advertisements. There are different forms of advertisements on LinkedIn, including pay-per-click advertisements, sponsored InMail, and sponsored updates. Let’s look at some of the most common types of ads and how you can get started advertising on social media.
1. Pay-Per-Click Ads
These ads are similar to what you generally see in search engines like Google, including banner and sidebar ads. For these kinds of ads, you can either specify the amount you want to pay every time someone clicks your ad, or the amount you want to pay per 1000 impressions of your ad, meaning the amount of times someone sees your ad (not how many times it’s clicked).
Pay-per-click, or PPC, ads are useful for service professionals who want to generate traffic back to their website and don’t have a lot of content to post for sponsored ads. One benefit of PPC ads is that you can create multiple versions of an ad and see which do the best.
2. Sponsored InMail
Sponsored InMail is one of LinkedIn’s newest forms of advertisements and allows companies to send InMail messages to targeted audiences. InMail has always been a good way for service professionals to connect with their current clients and prospects, but Sponsored InMail now allows them to message a targeted audience that they may not have interacted with before.
For example, if you are hosting a retirement planning seminar, you may want to use Sponsored InMail to send a message to LinkedIn users that are in your target age range, either nearing or in retirement, and who live in your local area.
3. Sponsored Content
One of the best parts of social media is that users are able to publish and share their own, and their network’s, content. LinkedIn has utilized this social aspect and has Sponsored Content, which allows companies to share an update to people outside of their network. With this type of ad, your post will appear in the homepage feed of targeted users.
Sponsored Content ads are a good option for service professionals that post relevant, unique content worth sharing. The premise is that your sponsored post will entice users to click on your profile and learn more about your company.
There are other forms of advertisements on LinkedIn, but there are the ones that may be most appropriate for financial advisors and other service professionals. Remember, before starting a LinkedIn Ad Campaign, you will need a LinkedIn Business page and a LinkedIn Advertising account. To learn more about how to get started, click here.
