@diane this is a great question! i was working on annual marketing plan and was looking to try Linkedin ads myself and was wondering if anyone had any success also.  I haven’t received an email about free advertising however….sadly :/

@joanmuschampfagnani You make some good points.  I definitely want to research this some more.

@dianebianchi

We did some LI advertising for a client and got dismal results.

Of course, maybe we created dismal ads!

In any case, $50 is there for you to try it out. I do like LI’s targeting system. If you’re in B2B it’s a great tool to be able to target specific job titles, companies, geographies, etc.

However, I don’t know that I even notice the ads, and I don’t spend a lot of time “IN” LinkedIn, even though I use it quite a bit.

Would love to hear your experiences.

@dianebianchi - I got such an email.Would love to hear what you find.

@dianebianchi

I’ve done some LinkedIn advertising, mostly for B2B businesses.  I did have one B2C client that insisted we do some ads and the results weren’t very good.  

It’s expensive…the CPC is pretty high and although much different than Facebook, it is still a social network so you should set your expectations lower than you would for search engine advertising.
We did have some successes but the ROI just wasn’t there in most cases.

I’ve investigated on behalf of a client but haven’t actually been involved in any advertising to date. As mentioned I like the way you can target people by job tile and geography. Also like Facebook you can go through the options to see the numbers for your target market so that is probably a good starting point to get a feel for how many people you can reach. 

@rich-brooks Hi Rich, out of curiosity did you pay per click or impressions? Did you split test and if yes, how many different ads did you run?

I used it for a client and found the CPCs high but targeting very good. If you are targeting an audience that matches with their targeting criteria then it could be useful. But I stopped using because they seem to have some strange algorithm that stopped (or slowed)  showing my ads because of low CTR or something, and didn’t offer an option like on Google Adwords of increasing my bid to compensate. In the end I didn’t have time to figure it all out and they didn’t offer any help.

I can give my opinion from a different point of view.

I have never clicked on a digital banner unless it was visually very attractive and the selling proposition was of an interest. The 2 most challenging factors in an ad. 

If 1 of these factors is missing i will never mouse over these ads. So whenever I am handling a digital campaign to any of my clients my target is to have a banner material that matches my own criteria otherwise i simply don’t take over the job. Of course knowing where to post it and what time are also factors you need to consider carefully.

@jeanneehinger @dianebianchi

“Crash & Burn eh Mav?” our linkedin trial run “stunk”… I think reaching out with a more personal note to certain key connections has paid off WAY WAY more than any ad we ran on there…