target audience

LinkedIn DirectAds Advertising

Here’s the scenario. You have a business and you may or may not have a Google Adwords campaign. You’re now thinking about investing in LinkedIn ads and questioning whether or not you should run a LinkedIn DirectAds campaign to promote your business. Here are some things to consider.

Target Audience

Does your target audience include business professionals?

LinkedIn is a social network for professionals. Its website highlights that there are 90 million LinkedIn members World wide with 32 million members from the United States.

Advertising Budget

How much capital have you budgeted for online advertising?

LinkedIn campaigns can be created and disabled at any time.
However, there is a minimum $10.00 daily budget and a minimum bid amount ($2.00 for the cost per click payment model and $3.00 for the cost per thousand impressions payment model).

Depending on your ROI on LinkedIn compared to your other advertising programs, LinkedIn may or may not be cost effective for you.

Audience Targeting Options

LinkedIn allows advertisers to target LinkedIn members with the following categories:

• Company size
• Job Function
• Industry
• Seniority
• Gender
• Age
• Geography

Use these settings to ensure you are speaking only to people who may be interested in your business.

A final point to be aware of. LinkedIn ads are display ads which appear to members based on the ad targeting options selected. Display ads typically have a lower click through rate than search ads. Search ads, for example on Google, are displayed to users who search for a specific topic. Display ads may be good for increasing awareness for a business in general, but may have a lower conversion rate than search ads because people who are searching for a topic already have an intention to find information.

LinkedIn may be a good advertising solution for your business. It all depends on your overall online strategy and how this piece of the puzzle fits into the overall plan.

Victor

Photo Credit: Coletivo Mambembe

Tags: advertising, budget, LinkedIn, PPC, Social Media, target audience

Social + Search = Marketing (Part 2)

This is part 2 of the Marketing basics series. After discussing the 4 P’s of Marketing in part 1, I thought it would be useful to talk about brand positioning. In particular, the basic T-C-B model is a good, simple framework to organize your thought process and approach when creating social media and search engine marketing strategies.

Brand positioning is an enormous topic in itself. Traditionally, companies tried to create a brand image for their companies through broadcasting marketing messages to their audiences through advertisements on TV, radio, print, etc. With the advent of social media, online marketing and engagement focused communications, it is suicide to sound like a traditional broadcast ad when engaging with your audience.

Traditional messaging approaches and the notion that you can define your brand for your audience do not carry over to online marketing. So it is important to understand your company’s brand positioning.

Even though you can’t tell your audience how to perceive your brand, your communications and actions do influence how they perceive it. What you say and what you do must be consistent with your desired brand image.

What is the T-C-B model?

I was first exposed to the T-C-B model while reading a Marketing book by Rossiter and Bellman. T stands for Target, C stands for Category and B stands for Benefit.

Target

It is important to understand who is your target audience. With social media, your target audience may be just one person or a small, special interest group you engage with. Whichever the case, you need to understand them on a deeper, more personal level than traditional marketing.

Category

It is also important to understand what category need your audience will get from your product, service or interaction with you. By category, I mean the type of product. For example, the iPhone’s category is a mobile phone. The iPod’s category is a MP3 player. The iPad’s category is…I’m still trying to figure out that one… If you cannot quickly communicate to your audience what your product does, why they need it or why they should care about your company, they will not pay attention.

Benefit

As touched upon in part 1 of this series, the benefit of a product to its consumers is the value your audience will receive from your product. If you understand who your audience is and what category need they desire, then the key benefit is the “thing” that will satisfy that need.

Try considering T-C-B before sending that next tweet. Who are you engaging with? What is it you’re talking about? What value will your followers get?

Victor Chan
eMarketing Strategist

Tags: benefit, brand, brand positioning, category need, digital strategy, engagement, internet marketing, marketing basics, online marketing, target audience