Your Guide to Getting Started with LinkedIn Advertising

Forget everything you think you know about LinkedIn.

Once considered a job acquisition tool for the young and hungry, LinkedIn has grown up. It’s no longer simply the place people go when they need a new job or want to refresh their professional profile. It’s now a top destination for business news and career advice, and for building personal brand cache with original thought leadership.

The appeal of LinkedIn as a channel to reach successful, high-earning adults has not gone unnoticed; more and more brands are beginning to see it as a compelling advertising option. And they should.

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LinkedIn’s user base has steadily increased year after year, and it currently sits at a healthy 380+ million. But even more impressive than LinkedIn’s growth is its increase in user activity; since 2012, unique visits to the site have doubled, and member page views have tripled. The launch of LinkedIn Pulse in 2012 and its subsequent rise as a leading professional publishing platform has a lot to do with this boost in user activity.

Source: LinkedIn

Another reason LinkedIn is so appealing to advertisers is its singular audience demographics. The average LinkedIn user is a marketer’s dream come true—a perfect trifecta of steadily employed, high-earning, and mature. The social network’s sweet spot is 30- to 49-year-olds (i.e., those old enough to have their careers on track); more than one quarter of U.S. internet users within this age range use LinkedIn.

It’s also an attractive option for brands thinking about building a presence in emerging markets. A California-based network, LinkedIn has a strong following in the U.S., with 118 million registered members. But, more surprisingly, almost 70% of the network’s users are located outside the states. The top non-U.S. countries on LinkedIn include India, Brazil, China, Canada, Mexico, and Australia.

Source: LinkedIn

LinkedIn advertising has long been thought of as the stomping ground of B2B marketers. But B2C marketers also stand to gain a lot from advertising on the platform. The best-performing LinkedIn Sponsored Updates of 2014 included a slew of B2C companies, including L’Oréal, P&G, Luxottica, and Secret.

And these consumer companies have seen impressive results. Nissan Motor Corporation wanted to pitch its most popular product in India, the Nissan Sunny, to “Career Changers” (professionals who have been promoted recently or just switched careers). The automaker turned to LinkedIn’s Sponsored InMail product, and their campaign generated an 88.9% open rate—four times the industry benchmarks.

There’s a lot for brands to consider when they first start advertising on LinkedIn. What’s the best ad format? How should you think about advertising costs on the platform? What are best practices for running effective advertising campaigns?

In this whitepaper, we teamed up with LinkedIn employees and experts to cover everything brands need to know about diving into LinkedIn advertising. Grab it for free below.

About the Author: This post was co-authored by Uyen Nguyen and Chloe Mason Gray. Uyen is a content manager at Sprinklr, and Chloe is Sprinklr’s Blog Content Manager.