When it comes to cost per click (CPC) based advertising campaigns most healthcare and pharma marketers tend to focus their budgets purely on pay per click advertising across search engine networks like Google, Bing and Yahoo. However, if you want to specifically target a business audience, then you should consider running CPC campaigns across the LinkedIn network – here’s why…
According to Quantcast.com, in the UK 35% of LinkedIn’s visitors are “regulars”. By Quantcast standards, that means a visitor frequents the site several times a month. 1% of visitors are considered “addicts” which means that they frequent the site 30 or more times a month. There are 101 million LinkedIn members worldwide, roughly 60% are male and 40% are female.
- 20.9% are aged 18-24
- 35.8% are aged 25-34
- 36.3% are aged 35-54
- 6.9% are aged over 54
The biggest users are North Americans – 47.9 million users and the second largest group are Europeans – 23.1 million users. Out of the 17 business areas listed on LinkedIn, the ‘Medical’ sector ranks number 4 globally in terms of the number of users tagged to that sector.
In the UK alone there are 148,870 members on LinkedIn that are tagged with a ‘Medical’ job function. From a targeting perspective you can narrow this down, so if you wanted to just reach individuals that use the words ‘Doctor’ or ‘General Practitioner’ in their profile description, then your ads would still be seen by 21, 019 highly targeted members.
Profile Data You Can Trust
LinkedIn allows you to target ads based on user profile data. Because of the business focus of the site, LinkedIn states that the profiles of its users are ten times more accurate than many other sites’ registration data. In other words, people who create a LinkedIn profile to connect with their work colleagues or other business professionals are less likely to be deceptive in their profile data. For us marketers, that means we’re working with highly accurate profiling data which helps to create a more targeted campaign and reduce budget wastage.
Ad Formats
LinkedIn Ads consists of these elements:
Headline (up to 25 characters of text)
- Description (up to 75 characters of text)
- From: (your name or any company)
- Image: (50×50 pixel image)
- URL (website people visit once they click on your ad)
The ads will be eligible to appear on a variety of prominent pages on the LinkedIn.com website and your ads may appear in various positions on any or all of the pages listed below:
- Profile Page (when users view the profile of other LinkedIn members)
- Home Page (the page that users see when they log in to LinkedIn)
- Inbox (the page where users see messages and invitations to connect)
- Search Results Page (the page that results when you search for a member by name)
- Groups (on pages in LinkedIn Groups)
Your ads will only be displayed to LinkedIn members who meet the targeting criteria that you set. The targeting options include:
“Job Title, Job Function, Industry, Geography, Company Size, Company Name, Seniority, Age, Gender, LinkedIn Group”
Currently, LinkedIn only allow ads to be written in English. However, these English-language ads can be targeted and shown to LinkedIn members in over 50 countries including Europe.
So, next time you’re planning cost per click ad campaigns and you want to target business professionals make sure you consider the LinkedIn network because the precision targeting options that this social network offers will help you to improve the overall efficiency and effectiveness of your marketing budget.
