How to make memorable ads on LinkedIn.

With 830 million users, LinkedIn is the largest professional network. It is a platform that professionals log onto with a “business mindset” as stated by Gary Vee. Should marketers then tweak their LinkedIn ads to suit the formal and professional tone of the platform? We did a deep dive into what makes for an effective ad on LinkedIn. Let's dive right in.

The Ad Itself

Unlike Meta’s restricted formats, LinkedIn allows a wide range of sizes and layouts to make sure your ad is highlighted. When launching a visual ad, here are some of the best practices you can use as a marketer to increase its memorability and effectiveness.

1. Ad Size and Format

LinkedIn offers more flexibility in image and video layouts compared to other advertising platforms by providing larger ad size formats. When marketers take advantage of a larger digital real estate, it is most likely that the target audience will view the ad, mid-scroll. LinkedIn allows a maximum of 7680 x 4320 pixels which covers a vast landscape along with other sizes like 1:1, and 9:16. Single image ads are the most widely used ad format by marketers due to the minimal budget required. However, LinkedIn recommends using video ads to promote content on the platform. According to LinkedIn, video ads perform 20x better largely due to the sheer volume of shareability. ?

2. Colors

When it comes to choosing a background color for LinkedIn, most businesses try to follow a basic hygiene – to make it as eye-catchy as possible. Colors like white and gray are typically avoided when creating an ad for LinkedIn as it blends in with the platform’s background color and can be easy to miss. It is widely known that colors are an important element that evokes emotion in the viewer as well as catches their attention. The primary colors evoke the below emotions:

Red: Red can be used to create a sense of urgency, and evoke emotions of passion, love, and anger too. A bright red color can be used to display CTA buttons on the ad to highlight it amongst the rest of the colors in the ad.

Green: Green can be used to showcase growth, nature & health. Many pharma and environmentally conscious brands use green. Green can also be used to promote a soothing experience like a spa or a retreat.

Blue: Blue is popularly used by tech brands like HP, Salesforce, Philips, and many more. Linkedin claims that Blue is the most used brand color across many sectors as well. Blue promotes feelings of stability, calmness, trust, and friendliness.

Yellow: Yellow is a very eye-catchy color which makes it appealing for brands to promote with. Psychologically yellow is the happiest color on the spectrum therefore used to promote joy & happiness.

But what happens when some of these colors aren’t in your design playbook? Let’s look at Apple for example, their primary brand colors are White, Gray and Black. But in some ads, especially on sites like X and LinkedIn, Apple’s display ads have a pop of color different from their usual brand playbook.

Here, a blue CTA button is placed to add a contrast between the white, black & gray tones. This instantly grabs the viewer’s attention.

This carousel ad by Apple definitely does not play by their design playbook and it is interesting to see brands think out of the box for different platforms when it comes to advertising. Multiple images with different background colors to indicate the features of the product is a genius move!

3. The storyline.

A stellar headline, which is clear, crisp, and short will always stand out from the crowd. Limiting your words to 10-12 in your ad copy will lessen cognitive load and hereby make your ad copy effective. As it is important to grab the viewer’s attention mid stroll, the brand’s message should be clearly communicated in the first few lines for the viewer to recall the ad. While this kind of a short & crisp ad might work for some companies, businesses like AirBnB have always advertised with a compelling personal story attached to their brand.

They sell stories! The reason for AirBnB starting the company, what their mission is and how they’re helping others focus on their travel & exploring passions. On a professional platform like LinkedIn, their messaging was personalized and promoted the “work from anywhere” concept. This applied to so many of the professionals present on LinkedIn who are looking to travel while having remote jobs. This campaign was vastly famous during the Covid-19 lockdown period as most professionals were working out of their homes but wanted to also travel to other locations.

4. Playing with emotions.

Although LinkedIn is a more formal social media network, the marketing doesn’t have to be always rational or functional in nature. Many B2B marketers often forget to involve emotions in their advertising. Even when pitching to a business, emotions still play a key role in making advertising memorable. When we did a deep dive into emotions and advertising in our blog, we found that having an emotional tug makes an advert twice as memorable when compared to an ad that is purely rational or factual. Amongst the many emotions present, marketers popularly opt to feature happiness and humor as people like to spread positivity. This strategy is often used when brands target their ad to receive more shares. Let’s look at how some B2B brands play with emotions.

Mailchimp recently released an ad that spoke directly to marketers who face clutter in their professional lives and took a humorous spin on it. The ad with the elements of relativity and humor went on to receive many shares and reposts on LinkedIn for their unique approach taken in B2B advertising.

5. Optimize for Sound-Off Mode

Since LinkedIn is used by professionals who may scroll during working hours, video ads must be optimized for sound off mode. Ads with minimal dialogue or narration are preferred in this instance, if dialogue is a key element in the ad, we recommend adding subtitles with an easy-to-read font at a readable size. Let us see how some brands optimize their video ads for sound off mode.

Canva addresses a new product feature with a simple, fast, and easy to understand ad. It has little to no ad copy, narration, or dialogue. It instantly captures the viewer’s attention with eye-catchy colors and the relativity quotient makes it ever so appealing to designers who face similar crisis before a big presentation.

LinkedIn is expensive!

LinkedIn is an expensive social media platform to advertise on, then why do most B2B marketers opt for this platform in particular? It is because of the high ROI received in their ad campaigns. With LinkedIn’s precise targeting and retargeting audience strategies, marketers go back to this platform repeatedly. Don’t believe us? Let’s look at the data. In an infographic published by LinkedIn, over 80% of marketers choose to advertise on LinkedIn and a whopping 40% of B2B marketers surveyed said that LinkedIn provided organic and quality leads, therefore, providing a high ROI for marketing campaigns.

To marketers who are looking to advertise on LinkedIn, we recommend first conducting thorough market research to understand your target audience which includes their profession, age, and seniority level in their field. Initially experiment with a low budget to decrease chances of risk. LinkedIn’s average daily ad budget ranges between $25-$50.

Tracking the ad metrics post flight.

When looking into the performance of the ads, tracking the right actionable ad metrics is essential to making effective marketing plans in the future. Some marketers might make the mistake of tracking vanity metrics which may not improve the efficacy of your marketing strategies. We understand that ad metrics can be hard to track over time, so we created a Social Media Ad Analytics Tracker which is free to download. When tracking ad metrics consistently, the numbers start to reveal a story in which you can find ads which perform better, what kind of budgeting strategy involves low risk for your business and how long the campaign should run. This can empower marketers to make sound decisions in their strategies.

While advertising on LinkedIn can be expensive, a platform that generates quality leads and provides high ROI as evidenced by data is worth exploring for both B2B and D2C brands. While the ads have to be insightful and rich in content, allow creativity to take the center stage even while marketing on a formal and professional platform such as LinkedIn to make the ad memorable and thereby effective. To test the effectiveness of your advertisement, consider testing your ad creative on Incivus, your creative effectiveness platform.