LinkedIn Marketing Solutions is a recently (2015) expanded marketing platform for reaching audiences through the popular Linkedin work-oriented social network that includes modules like the Lead Accelerator (supporting segmentation features to improve conversion), Sponsored Updates, LinkedIn Onsite Display, LinkedIn Network Display, and Sponsored InMail. While still at its core a social marketing engine, Linkedin Marketing Solutions now presents a more comprehensive B2B advertising platform. The…
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X Ads
Score 5.7 out of 10
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Formerly Twitter Ads, X Ads is a search engine marketing tool built around features such as objective-based campaigns, promoted trends, and in-depth analytics.
LinkedIn has a much higher CPC than most commonly used platforms resulting in a much higher CPL/CPA. For businesses that don't have big CPC budgets, it would be difficult to be able to run tests without breaking the bank. Unless they get it right out of the gate, they may not find success with their efforts. On the opposite side of that, if a business can afford higher acquisition costs, this platform is likely worth exploring. They offer precise targeting with audiences full of professionals so often the leads are really high quality if you get it right.
Twitter is well suited for brands seeking to effectively manage and tweak their advertising campaign, while also interacting in real-time with people who stumble on their ads, thus maximizing optimal result. It is also my suggested ad platform for brands who want to target the younger generation, especially millennials and those born in the 1990s.
Targets the exact right audience for your B2B messaging: you don't have to guess based on likes or any other periphery data to determine whether you're reaching the right audience - you can hit by job title, years of experience, job function, seniority, and other great ways to ensure precision delivery to the correct audience.
Offers a helpful variety of ad units that are great for different types of campaigns to make sure you're reaching your audience in the right format for the ask.
Self-service platform now for all ad units, enabling you to take control of your LInkedIn marketing with a hands-on approach.
While the targeting of Twitter is relevant most of the time, it is not always right and there are some ads that are completely unrelated to the search terms entered.
in terms of promoted content reporting and usability, the platform is not as flexible or easy to use compared to more established social platforms like Facebook. However, it does offer plug-ins to Google Data Studio which makes pulling and manipulating data easier. My main usability gripe comes when looking at organic performance of a company page. There isn't an easy way to export organic performance data.
The tool is ok to use, and ads are becoming more skippable on Twitter, so we are unsure as a company if it's still a good channel for direct response messaging. It does not perform as efficiently as other social platforms for lower funnel marketing. It does well for awareness campaigns that are set and forget, but optimizing for DR is not as efficient when you are trying to manage the ads on the client side.
So, everything what I just said previously adds up to the value of LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. Definitely recommending it to a friend. It has its things to improve but its nothing major or nothing to worry about. So I give a 9 because it still has that, some user interface glitches that can be improved but do not damage the experience that you have with it.
LinkedIn offered a different way to market and that was through direct messaging on the platform. Those direct messages result in a push notification and an email (depending on the user's settings), so we knew that was a more creative and attention-getting spend. It made more sense for our professional clientele as well.
Compared to Facebook Ads or Instagram Ads, Twitter Ads was more expensive. However, when we only look at the conversions rate of Twitter Ads, it always had way higher numbers, mainly because it is conversation driven and allows for the customer to speak directly to you as a business owner in a 2 way conversation.
As an agency, LinkedIn gives us one more way to demonstrate worth: we're managing the LinkedIn page of many of our clients, and this is demonstratively an improvement from before.
Also as an agency, LinkedIn ads allow us to offer an additional way to get leads in the door. When we've struck out on other ad programs, we usually try LinkedIn Ads before moving on to a higher investment channel (such as list rental).
One Positive Impact has been that having ads running has increased the number of followers we have on Twitter.
Another positive impact is that due to having more followers, we now have more visits to our site.
A mixed impact would be that positively, since we have Adwords implemented as well, we can track back the source of our website traffic to being from a social source like Twitter. The negative of it is that Twitter ads does not have the tracking capability and we still need Google Adwords to do so.