Creative Best Practices for Social Media Marketing on LinkedIn

Editor's note: This post is part of the LinkedIn Collective , which is designed to inspire excellence and success for all B2B marketers. The Collective offers groundbreaking thought leadership and content resources informed by LinkedIn data and insights, our team of experts and leaders across the B2B marketing industry.

Marketing on LinkedIn—just like with most popular online platforms—can feel like an uphill battle because you’ve got so many other brands to compete with.?

Now, more than ever, rising above the noise and catching your audience’s attention requires a very creative approach steeped in proven best practices. This means understanding what works, and establishing guidelines that will channel your creativity.

This creative best practice guide offers our step-by-step walkthrough on how to fine-tune your LinkedIn social media marketing and advertising campaigns to make a powerful impact with your audience.

Start with your audience

First, find sample profiles of the type of people you want to engage with your content. You can do this by using Ad Targeting to find profiles that match your targeting criteria, or by uploading existing contacts directly to LinkedIn Campaign Manager .

How are these members using their LinkedIn feeds right now? What are they reading, sharing, commenting on, and engaging with? Who do they follow, and why? What are the common skills and interests listed on their profiles?

Find out who the people in your audience are and what they come to LinkedIn to achieve, then start designing ways for your ads and content to connect with them. Always remain centered on the overall mindset of users on LinkedIn—they are professionals looking to network, learn and grow.

Best practices for speaking to your target audience:

• Focus on the pain point: Show them that you understand their challenges, and know how to help.
• Be different: Figure out what they see every day… and then figure out how you can make your brand stand out from the norm.?
• Talk like an expert: Use industry language in your ads to establish your authenticity t, and talk about what insiders are talking about.
• Express a point of view: Don’t just share news or trends – add commentary. People are drawn to strong stances and opinions.

Design around your objective

After you’ve identified your audience, there’s one step before you start designing creative: determining what you want that creative to accomplish. This is what the objective-based advertising experience in LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager is all about.?

Use LinkedIn’s objective filters to see which ads we recommend for you based on what you want to achieve, and let your objective guide your creative approach.

There are three? core LinkedIn ad formats, which can all serve different objectives in different ways:

Sponsored Content

Sponsored content is a LinkedIn Page update that appears as a sponsored advertisement directly on the feeds of targeted LinkedIn members.

Best Use Case: Sponsored content ads are great for promoting big events and special deals, making announcements, or sharing exclusive content such as survey results or a study.

Creative Best Practices for LinkedIn Sponsored Content:?

• Stop the scroll: Use punchy copy and attention-grabbing visuals to make a scrolling user pause and look closer.
• Keep it short and sweet: Your headline should be no more than 150 characters. Your descriptive copy should be no more than 70.
• Use rich media whenever possible: Videos play right in the LinkedIn feed, and they tend to receive more engagement than other types of content.
• Embed large images with people in them: Content with sharp, high-definition visuals can achieve up to a 38% higher CTR. The recommended image size for these ads is 1200x627 pixels. Images that include people also tend to perform better.

Message Ads

Message ads are native advertising displayed in your target audience’s LinkedIn Messaging. This gives you an opportunity to reach out to individual audience members one-on-one without manually sending each message.

Best Use Case: Use message ads when you want to communicate a more specialized, substantial offer or pitch to an audience segment you think will be highly receptive to it.?

Creative best practices for LinkedIn Message Ads:

• Give it a human face: Send the message ad from a person’s (such as a sales associate) profile, and make sure that profile picture is high-quality, professional, and smiling.
• Personalize automatically: Use LinkedIn macros to add the recipient’s first name and job title to pre-selected parts of the message.
• Be concise: Keep the body text under 500 characters total.
• Use bullet points: These are more parsable and organized than a long message.
• Provide clear next steps: Make sure the recipient knows what you want them to do with the information you’ve just given them.

Text Ads

Text ads are simple, flexible ads served alongside or on top of your audience’s LinkedIn desktop feed.?

Best use case: This is your most basic “catch all” advertisement, and should be used to promote your business on an ongoing basis.

Creative best practices for LinkedIn Text Ads:

• Use eye-catching language: Use phrases like “Limited Time,” “XX% off,” “Discount,” etc. to attract your audience’s attention quickly.
• Use powerful, clear CTAs: Firm, action-oriented CTAs that describe the action taken will prompt higher CTR than passive ones.
• Include images: Try using crisp, clear images with bright colors. Avoid using images that don’t fill the 50x50 pixel space.
• Experiment with variations: Run multiple creative variations per campaign to see which performs best. Turn off and replace low-performing variations quickly.
• Address your audience directly: Call out your audience by job title or pain point in your headline.

Never Stop Optimizing

One of the most valuable aspects of advertising on LinkedIn is how quickly and effectively you will receive campaign data to analyze.?

Monitor campaign results closely and optimize your creative based on real-time feedback to continuously improve your marketing ROI.?

Creative campaign optimization best practices:

• A/B test creative elements: Use the scientific method to A/B test slight variations on your ads – such as images, taglines, and CTAs – to understand which elements perform better and worse.
• A/B test audience variations: Try running the same ad campaign to a slightly different audience to measure that audience’s response vs. the first.
• Don’t wait to switch it up: If an ad isn’t performing to expectations, don’t wait for the campaign to end to edit it. Switch an image or try a new headline in real time.
• Capitalize on success: When an ad performs well, take note. Consider boosting that ad to make it appear more often, and model future ads after it.
• Run multiple different campaigns to the same audience: See how they react to each one to understand what appeals to them and what doesn’t.

For more research-backed marketing best practices, follow the LinkedIn Collective .