Business to Business Advertising with LinkedIn

Sonya Wood - January 18, 2010

Many of us have used LinkedIn as a way to maintain a professional profile within the social networks. LinkedIn is a great platform to communicate with business professionals and it can also be used to open communications with businesses. By direct communication or joining a group, it is easier than ever to reach important members of any business.

Can businesses use LinkedIn as a way to market to other businesses? LinkedIn DirectAds is an additional channel for business-to-business advertisers to capture qualified visitors. It offers advertisers many targeting options to help qualify the audience. With 7 top level categories, businesses can choose up to 3 of the categories to target, including industry, company size, job function, seniority, age, gender, and geography. LinkedIn is a good option for businesses, because they can target the exact industry, company size and even job function of their potential clients.

Most business to business companies know exactly who they want to target in a company. For example, advertisers may want to specifically reach a marketing manager in an enterprise level company. Creating very custom ad messaging to capture these people can turn them into customers.

LinkedIn DirectAds have no minimum spend requirements and can also be paid via a CPC (cost per click) or CPM (cost per thousand impressions) platform. Similar to Facebook ads, LinkedIn DirectAds can also have images in the body, which helps to brand the message as well as help to gain user attention.

With LinkedIn DirectAds, businesses are able to target qualified decision makers in their industry.