Effective strategies to reduce LinkedIn advertising costs for your business
LinkedIn is one of the most lucrative platforms for B2B businesses to advertise on. It is filled with professionals from around the world which makes it great for companies to showcase their offerings and build relationships through marketing activities.
The only downside is that advertising with LinkedIn costs a lot as it is such a niche and tight community. But just like any other platform where you can advertise, there are many tactical ways you can reduce your LinkedIn ad spend.
Ways to reduce LinkedIn ad spend
1. Select the right bidding strategy
There are three main types of bidding strategies within LinkedIn. Maximum CPC, Enhanced CPC, and Automated CPC. Maximum CPC gives you the most control letting you select the max amount you’re willing to pay per click.
Enhanced CPC is similar to the Maximum CPC strategy with the difference being that the ad system will optimize to deliver your ad to people who are most likely to engage with it. The Automated CPC strategy is the one where you give up control and let the ad system decide the bidding for your ads.
2. Adjust recommended bid
Considering that you want to reduce the advertising cost on LinkedIn, the bid strategy you select will play a significant role in how much you end up spending and the results you get. A smart move is to bid low to start off.
Place your bids just a little higher than the minimum bid. You must track your ads daily to see whether your ads are reaching people or not.
If they’re not, your bid price is probably too low compared to competitors. You must play around and adjust the bids and bid strategy based on your budget and the results you want to get.
Related read: Best practices for effective marketing budget management
3. Target one specific country at a time
The average CPC and other metrics of your ads will be different from one country to another. This is due to various factors such as the amount of competition in a country and also the size of the audience present in a country.
Another factor is the value of your currency compared to the country you’re advertising in. For this reason, it is wise to experiment and figure out the best LinkedIn ad strategy for your business one country at a time.
4. Using lead generation forms
A great way to reduce your advertising cost on LinkedIn is by using the inbuilt lead generation form that LinkedIn provides. What this does is reduce your potential customer’s journey and help them fill up information much faster and ultimately reducing your total LinkedIn ad spends.
5. Improving quality score
A LinkedIn ad campaign with a better quality score will be more efficient in the auction and will be able to win over competitors even with a relatively lower bid. The quality score of an ad tells you how relevant your ad is to the audience you’re advertising to.
The platform has not disclosed the exact factors that affect the quality score. But, two things to definitely consider are the amount you are willing to bid and the engagement your ad is getting from the target audience.
6. Perform A/B testing
Testing different types of ads in the creative sense is a great way to see what your target audience resonates with and responds to. You can test different captions and headlines when it comes to messaging. You can try various different offers.
You should definitely test between single-image ads, carousels, and videos. You will see that your average CPC will come out to be different for these different types of ads.
7. Leverage the use of analytics
Using analytics you will be able to understand who your target audience is and craft ads specific to their profession. This will in turn help you get a better quality score with relevant ads and decrease your CPC.
8. Reducing and choosing the right audience size
Getting the size of your target audience just right is key to the amount you end up spending on advertising. You don’t want to spend just reaching a wider audience. Always try to get your audience very niche specific and target around 100-300k people on LinkedIn.
9. Retargeting ads
Retargeting ads are a way to reach people who are in your funnel but did not convert. An example could be someone who clicked on your company’s ad but did not convert. This shows that they were interested but not ready to commit. You can retarget these website visitors with compelling offers.
Control your digital marketing spend with Volopay virtual cards
Apart from the internal mechanics of managing LinkedIn ads, another way to control the cost of LinkedIn marketing is by using smart financial tools like virtual corporate cards. Volopay is a complete expense management system that also allows you to create unlimited virtual cards on our platform.
Virtual cards are very customizable making them super useful for managing different marketing expenses. You can set a custom spending limit on each Volopay virtual card that you create.
So with this limit, you can be sure that there will be no cases of overspending on ads. You also get to set custom expiry dates for each card. It is also much safer to use virtual cards for online expenses as the card numbers and details are not directly linked to any bank account helping you stay safe from fraud.
All in all, virtual corporate cards are a great way for a marketing team to keep their LinkedIn ad spend in control and manage other marketing expenses efficiently.