A blog about smart marketing and conversion optimization.

I covered the basics of LinkedIn advertising in a post on the KISSmetrics blog a few months back. Now, I’m going to touch on more advanced strategies for structuring your campaigns, writing your ads and stretching your LinkedIn ad dollars.

Are you ready to try out some expert tips and get clever about your LinkedIn PPC campaigns? Good.

Writing the perfect ad copy for LinkedIn

Take a look at the pair of ads below. These showed up on my LinkedIn homepage the other day. What do you notice about them?

If you said that they both call out their target audience in the headline explicitly by title, you’re right.

Try an ad variation using your target audience’s job title in the headline (e.g. Sales Executive). This strategy is likely to improve your clickthrough rate, and in turn, conversions, while decreasing irrelevant clicks.

Now, have a look at these two ads. Why is the ad on the left more effective?

Nice, large photo of a person’s face. In most cases, you’ll get a better clickthrough rate if your photo is of a person’s face, clearly visible. Your company’s logo is not as effective in this context as a live human being. Of course, you don’t have to use a photo of a person if it’s more relevant to depict something that your target audience will immediately relate with. If you’re selling software that helps beef up Excel for superusers, a “supercharged Excel logo” might be even better.

Strong call to action. The ad on the left encourages you to “Get a free quote” – the ad on the right leaves you hanging.

Punctuation. Using clean punctuation and terse, natural-sounding phrases is best. Although this particular example doesn’t capitalize the first letter of every word, excluding articles and prepositions, this is also an AdWords ad copy best practice that translates nicely.

Relevant headline. Needless to say, using your company name in the headline is not effective. Speaking to your audience and clearly laying out your product or service offering is how you want to spend your 25 characters.

Contrary to the best practices cited by LinkedIn, their customer success team has recommended running just 2 ads at a time per campaign. If you only have 2 ads active within a campaign, the system can quickly determine which ad is the best and show that ad more often. Once you know this information, you can turn off the second ad and replace that ad with a new ad variation. Then you simply rinse, lather and repeat.

Be sure to have a free offer that’s targeted and compelling. Give away something for free, whether it’s written content, promotional items or a seat in a webinar – you’ll see a healthier response, guaranteed.

Try using a “use by” date in your ad copy to create urgency. What’s true in mass email subject line testing also works for LinkedIn ad copy: if the ad is explicit that your giveaway has a limited supply, or ends by a specific day, your clickthrough rate will almost certainly improve.

Switch up your ads often, at least once a month. New ads get a boost in terms of impressions and have a chance of scoring a higher CTR than your previous ads. Although LinkedIn claims a good solid clickthrough rate to be 0.025%, you can do better with laser-targeted ads featuring compelling copy.

Finally, don’t overlook that you can target members of particular LinkedIn Groups, similar to the way you can target Facebook ads at users who “like” the page of a company or cause. Peruse the groups directory and find cohorts that could be relevant to what you’re slingin’. Then, write ads that speak to those group members.

Smart campaign structure

It’s tempting (and intuitive) to create one campaign targeting your audience, plug in some ads and let ‘er rip. But according to the optimization ninjas at LinkedIn, you’ll actually get more impressions if you segment your campaigns by the types of titles you’re targeting, the company size you’re going after, etc.

In the example below, check out how every demographic sliver has its own campaign. Professionals with a specific job title, e.g. VP of HR, have a single dedicated campaign, as do those with a job function in HR and relatively senior titles, perhaps director-level and above.

If you choose to target by job function (e.g. Accounting), run just one Job Function for each new campaign.

Remarketing & LinkedIn Ads can play together

If you’re retargeting your site visitors with ads while they browse the web elsewhere, you should recognize your LinkedIn campaigns represent an opportunity to build up a laser-targeted remarketing pool! For example, target only Chief Legal Officers at large corporations with a specific offer and landing page. With remarketing code on that page, build up your tailored creative and remarket specifically to that pool of CLOs. Even if they don’t convert on the landing page, you get nearly-free brand exposure down the road.

If you create a dedicated landing page for the CLO-focused ads you’re running on LinkedIn, you can consequently tailor your display advertising message via retargeting only to that particular pool. Your remarketing tags on the rest of your site can be different from those you place on this LinkedIn-specific landing page.

Don’t forget, if you’re crafty, you can grab a $50 LinkedIn Ads gift card. Reach out to an online marketing firm you’re chummy with, or try to hit up the LinkedIn team.

Ultimately, testing and playing around with different offers and targeting options will lead you to discover your own expert tips and strategies. These tips are a good place to start optimizing your campaigns, and once you’ve had a chance to toy with them, we’d love your comments on what worked and what didn’t.

Warning: this blog post contains a powerful dose of tooting our own horn. But that’s not to say that it doesn’t deserve tooting.

This morning, the Zebos are beaming with joy after receiving this email from our awesome client, ActionQuest, a company that runs outdoor science & marine biology camp programs for teens.

“Just wanted to thank you again for your work on our CPC account. [While reviewing] our analytics, one stat in particular caught my attention:

“Compared to April 2011, this past month saw almost a 100% increase in conversions while having 23% fewer visitors (due to smaller budget)… Not bad at all considering that’s exactly what we were looking to do.”

When you load up a marketing channel with rocket fuel and it works, it friggin’ works!

With more and more businesses moving online, it seems that the dominance of cyberspace in the global business environment is only set to increase. Certainly, the web offers many great tools for marketing your e-business and increasing your number of sales. However, where the internet suffers in comparison to the traditional bricks-and-mortar sales environment of a physical shop is its lack of direct, face-to-face engagement.

Online it is much more difficult to initiate a relationship with a customer that will hopefully lead to a transaction. This is where live chat solutions come in.

While the typical conversion rate to sales for e-business is just 1-3%, meaning that of 100 visitors to your site only 2 or 3 will actually purchase, with live chat software you can boost these rates considerably by improving your customer engagement and creating a strong feedback loop that will help you to improve your sales processes. Here are 3 ways in which chat solutions can help to boost your website’s conversion rate.

1. Opening the sales relationship

Just as a sales rep in a bricks-and-mortar store would approach an entering customer and offer their assistance, with chat solutions your business or organization can make the first step and initiate a sales transaction with a potential customer. This facility has an advantage over the traditional bricks-and-mortar setting because it is available around the clock, 24/7 – so that no matter when the customer accesses your website, you can have customer service ready to initiate contact and respond to their needs.

This immediate engagement will instantly set your business apart from others and demonstrate that your brand is hands-on, caring and professional, with a strong emphasis on customer service.

2. Keep visitors on your site longer

When trying to improve website conversion rates, many marketing professionals and webmasters will only concentrate on methods of increasing overall traffic to the website. However, a more effective solution is to examine why visitors are leaving your site – on average, 97% of them!

Increasing traffic to your website is not useful if these visitors will continue to exit before completing transactions with you. Fixing any problems and resolving customer issues is a smarter way to improve your conversion rates. Using chat solutions can help you to identify these issues and locate the bottleneck that is occurring between the point at which visitors enter your site and the point at which they exit before purchasing.

Being connected to a live human being has a powerful impact on customers, and will encourage them to spend much longer on your website than they would otherwise. Friendly, accessible and customer-focused chat services are a great way to make your customers feel cared for and valued, and will make them feel more positive about your brand as a result.

3. Helping customers through the buying process

Live chat through e-business websites has been proven to increase the number of sales, help to generate sales leads, and reduce the proportion of shopping carts which are abandoned before checkout.

According to a survey carried out in 2009 by the North American Technographic Customer Experience Surveyors, 57% of consumers online stated that they were ‘very likely’ to abandon their shopping cart if they were unable to quickly locate answers to their questions – for example, regarding delivery rates, product information or legal statements.

Some retailers have found that live chat has a conversion rate as high as 15-20%. Chat is particularly effective for customers who do not know what they wish to purchase, because chat agents can guide them quickly towards products that meet their needs. If a customer encounters problems with vouchers or shipping, live chat can be crucial for keeping the transaction going.

A couple of good live chat solutions out there include:

Live chat by Olark

Live chat by Liveperson

Live chat by Velaro

 
This is a guest post by Liza, a blogger who also works with a company helping clients discover their average site conversion rate and ways to increase it.