LinkedIn Message Ads

LinkedIn message ads are often underused and underrated as an effective lead generation tool. Howbeit, it is one of the cheapest Ad formats on LinkedIn.

It is a common believe that LinkedIn Ads are expensive relative to other advertising platforms.

However, I always advice advertisers and business owners to evaluate the Value or Life Time Value (LTV) of leads generated with LinkedIn Ads relative to the cost of acquisition, before concluding that LinkedIn Ads is too expensive.

For example, If it costs you $50 to acquire a lead on LinkedIn and the value of that lead is $1500, your cost of acquisition is cheap, relative to the value of that lead.

In addition, ad formats on LinkedIn, e.g, image, carousels, video, messages are not charged at the same price.

I found LinkedIn Message Ads to be one of the most affordable ad format I have bought on any platform, hence the reason for this post.

About LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network, Over 690M active professionals that can be targeted by job title, function, industry, experience and more. It is also said to be the number 1 platform for lead generation. Hence if your goal is quality leads, you have it on LinkedIn. Because of this, it is best not to compare the cost of LinkedIn ads with other advertising platforms.

LinkedIn Message Ads

LinkedIn message ads lets you send timely, convenient and relevant private messages to people who matter most to you and you business.

These messages can also be personalized with recipient’s name as registered on LinkedIn, giving your message a more personalized effect.

According to LinkedIn internal data; updated August 3, 2016, open rate for LinkedIn message ad is 166% higher than email marketing benchmarks. This is remarkable!

LinkedIn has other ad delivery formats including the good old image ad, video ad, and message ads, text ads.

LinkedIn message ads is 166% higher than email marketing benchmarks. This is remarkable!

This is how LinkedIn Message Ads will appear in recipient’s message boxes, as seen below; labelled Sponsored.

I was recently commissioned to run LinkedIn Ads for a client, and I chose to use the LinkedIn messaging ad as the medium to achieve the clients goal.

As a result, I found LinkedIn Messaging Ad to be very cheap, literally a gold mine that people have not been taking advantage of.

Tope Emiola

My Results

• Impressions = Number of LinkedIn message ads sent
• It cost me $0.1 to send 1 LinkedIn message ad, and $20 to send 200 messages.

It cost me $0.1 to send 1 LinkedIn message ad, and $20 to send 200 messages. This is ridiculously cheap if you ask me. I should add that the forecast that it would cost $10 per message and I ended up spending $0.1

Tope Emiola

How to set up and execute LinkedIn Message Ad Campaign

Typically, a LinkedIn business page and an advertising account is required to run ads on LinkedIn.

The remaining part of this blog post details how to build a comprehensive LinkedIn Message Ad.

1. Go to the LinkedIn Campaign Manager.

2. Login to Campaign Manager

3. Create an ad account or use a default ad account, and add a billing information.

4. Name your campaign and select an objective. Only Website Visit, Lead generation and Website conversion objectives uses the LinkedIn Message Ad format.

5. Select your location(s)

6. Choose your target audience attributes based on company, demographics, education, job experience, interest and traits.

a. Company Attributes

b. Demographics

c. Education

d. Job Experience

e. Interest and Traits

7. Choose your Ad format – Message Ad

8. Set your budget and campaign duration

9. Review the result forecast. The actual spend is usually way cheaper than the forecast.

How to build your LinkedIn message ad.

• Name your ad (you are the only one that will see this)
• Select a sender; If you are running the ads for yourself, choose your self as the sender. If you are running the ad as a business, you want to invite someone is more authoritative in that business to be the sender, the Add a sender button let’s you invite another sender, whose name will show that the recipient’s end.

• Give your message a subject. (writing your subject in all caps get your ad rejected. Capitalizing each word or using the sentence case would be ideal.
• Type your message and insert custom field like; first name, last name, company name, job or industry. The first name option is highly recommended.
• Add custom footer for terms and conditions, or disclaimers if necessary
• Insert your Call to action; e.g; Get Offer, Learn More, Download etc.
• Insert the link to your landing page or website
• Add an image/banner to your message following the custome dimension provided. This is optional and will only show on desktop computers.
• Finish creating your ad
• Ad will be sent to review and launched once approved by LinkedIn

And that is how to create a LinkedIn message ad.

Will you be testing this ad format for yours or a client’s business? Would you need additional help setting up and optimizing your LinkedIn message ad? I am always happy to help, simply share this post on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and tag me, to get the conversation started.