With LinkedIn recently reaching 610 million people using its platform to network, find new jobs, and share and receive updates in their industries, we thought, what better time to put together a list of our top posts for advertising on LinkedIn? And, as we found in our Q4 2018 Benchmark Report , with median CPC dropping and median CTR on the rise, it’s a great time for marketers to take advantage.

Image Source: LinkedIn Statistics

The Secret to LinkedIn Ads: 10 Questions Finally Answered really spilled the beans on advertising on LinkedIn. In it, AdStage’s Sahil Jain shares the answers to all the questions and ponderings he’s heard over the years, including “Is there a minimum time frame or test budget that must be allocated for success? How do you optimize your targeting? Why is it so “expensive’?” Here’s a peek at one of the questions:

“Q: What are recommendations for B2C targeting? How do you use the options available for targeting when you’ve got a clear demographic but it’s not tied to an occupation?

A: LinkedIn obviously lends itself well to targeting occupations, but if you know your audience well enough and that persona is very developed, you can use the business targeting for a B2C play. For example, Nissan is an active B2C brand advertiser on LinkedIn. Here’s an example of  Sponsored Content that was shown in my news feed.

A slightly different B2C use-case is when other channels cost more than a click on LinkedIn. For example, some clicks on AdWords can be > $125 so paying $7 per click on LinkedIn, while not as targeted, could be seen as getting a huge discount. Conversion rates can be lower with LinkedIn as you pay less for that traffic. If you can make the targeting work for you, I highly recommend it.”

In our podcast How to Generate Leads with LinkedIn Sponsored InMail we talked to a Product Marketing Manager at LinkedIn about how to use Sponsored InMail for bottom of the funnel lead generation and tips for creating ads that drive ROI. Here’s a snippet of that conversation, including the fact that one in two people open InMail.

“So I find that a lot of bottom funnel marketers find success with InMail. So as you know, as I just explained, it's really personal, right, but it's skill. So you're sending messages to your prospect through the messaging app. It's delivered on both desktop and mobile. And when you see the icon, you actually see that you have a message. So automatically, you're gonna go in, check it out. It's usually addressed to you, so you can use macros, for example, to address the person by first name. And so as a result, it has really high performance rates. So I think one in two people actually open up the InMail, which is insane, right? It's almost, like it's guaranteed that you're gonna reach your prospect. And then after that, half of them are definitely engaging. And so for marketers who want to drive event registrations, webinar registrations, share content that will get opened. Basically any lead gen marketer, it's great for. I think the flip side is for brand marketers who are more, who don't mind that personal touch. So I can't say their name, but a luxury car brand, for example-”

LinkedIn Text Ads: 5 Brands to Copy to Boost Performance offers a few suggestions on how to maximize the few characters at your disposal. Here’s a look at the kind of advice you’ll get in the full article:

“Mind The Where, What, and Why-Should-I-Care – With LinkedIn text ads, a short line of text is all you’ve got, so it’s critical to use the limited number of characters (25 for a headline and 75 for description, including spaces) wisely. Leverage this space to showcase a benefit, announce a product update, promote a discount on a service, recognize your customers’ problems and offer a solution, or quote a happy client. As a target buyer, I should be able to quickly figure out the value proposition. As Steve Krug put it , ‘don’t make me think.’”

Quick Guide to LinkedIn Matched Audiences shows you step-by-step how to use website retargeting, contact targeting, and account targeting. Here’s a glance at the tips in that post:

“Account Targeting – Get your message in front of decision makers at your target accounts with this feature. Upload a list of your target companies, then use LinkedIn’s data to run an account-based marketing campaign. You can target by professional demographics to make sure you’re reaching the people with buying power in the accounts with the most prospects. LinkedIn says during its six-month Matched Audiences pilot program, on average, customers saw a 30% or more increase in CTR when Website Retargeting, Contact Targeting, or Account Targeting were used. Ready to try it out for yourself?”

In our post How to Create LinkedIn Remarketing Audiences from User Interactions , author Etgar Shpivak shared a brilliant hack that allows marketers to fire scripts in the Google Tag Manager that emulate pageviews to the LinkedIn tag, and goes over the important difference between events and pageviews:

“Pageviews only tell a small part of the story. User engagement spans interactions that are far more significant than simple pageviews. For example, what if you want to set up an audience based on users that spent more than 30 seconds on a given page, and also partially filled out a form (but didn’t complete it), and also visited more than 3 pages, etc.? That’s where you use Events. Anything your diabolical marketing brain can think of, you can create a sophisticated audience for.”

One more thing to note – Microsoft also reported that LinkedIn was seeing record levels of engagement among its 610 million registered users ; a 34% increase in sessions in fact. Another powerful stat to consider as you take a look at your current budget allocation.