Whether you’re hoping to raise brand awareness for your animation services or attract sales leads, LinkedIn, with its more than 660 million users, is worth pursuing.

Advertising your services on LinkedIn will allow you to build a powerful network of other animators and companies looking to create animated videos. Growing your animation business has never been easier!

One of the best things about advertising on LinkedIn? The site allows you to strategically target your ad so you can reach thousands of people who might be interested in what you can offer. Plus, you can monitor your ad’s performance to make sure it’s getting you closer to your goals.

This article will share six tips to run successful LinkedIn Ads that will help you get animation clients.

1) Create a Company Page and a Campaign Manager Account

Creating a page solely for your animation business is a great idea. It helps you look more professional and established while allowing you to curate everything perfectly for your business.

If you don’t think you need a company page, you can choose to run ads from your personal account, but we strongly suggest that you create a dedicated LinkedIn page for your brand.

A LinkedIn Page helps LinkedIn members learn more about your business, products, services, and job opportunities. It allows you to interact with members on LinkedIn as a business and share links that will direct them to your website or landing page.

Campaign Manager is the LinkedIn platform where you can create your ads, run your ads, set budgets, and manage all your LinkedIn ads.

Starting a campaign is easy: after signing in, click Create Campaign and add necessary details such as business line, campaign type, region, campaign ID, and campaign timeframe.

2) Choose Your Ad Objective

Every campaign always has an objective. Selecting an objective is the first step in objective-based advertising. Your objective helps LinkedIn streamline and customize your campaign.

An objective is the action that you want your target audience to take after they view your ad. An example of an objective would be brand awareness, in which you aim to make more people aware that your brand exists and inform your audience of what you’re all about. This is quantified through impressions you make on LinkedIn.

Another example of an objective is consideration. If you choose consideration as your objective, you want your ad to get you website visits, engagements, or video views. It encourages your ideal audience to learn more about your business.

Conversion is another example of an objective you can choose. This objective focuses on generating leads and tracking movements on your website. Under these are lead generation, website conversion, and job applicants.

The lead generation campaign typically performs best compared to Sponsored Content campaigns, but the result still depends on the kind of content you promote for the objective you choose.

3) Define Your Target Audience

Before you start running LinkedIn ads, you must first decide who you want to target so that you can customize your ad and match their occupation, needs, and interests. LinkedIn is 277% more effective in gathering sales leads compared to other social media platforms due to its accurate targeting options.

Targeting your ads is absolutely crucial if you really want to see results. According to Vidooly, your ads perform better when you have a targeted and relevant audience.

To specifically target your audience, choose your target audience’s location and language then choose from many different audience categories such as your target audience’s company name, company size, job title, job seniority skills, gender, age, member schools, and more.

4) Choose a Linked In Ad Format

When creating a LinkedIn ad, you can choose from Text Ads, Sponsored Content Ads, Dynamic Ads, and Message Ads. The format you will choose will depend on the type of content you want to show and the goals you want to achieve.

Text ads

Text-ads are like pay-per-click (PPC) ads. They appear on the top sidebar of LinkedIn’s website. They include a short headline and a small image.

You have the option to choose if you want to pay per click or pay by cost per impression. Cost per impression means you have to pay every time a LinkedIn user views your ad. 

To attract your target audience to click your ad, address your audience directly, as specifically as possible, then use a catchy image and a strong call-to-action.

Sponsored content ads

Sponsored content ads appear on LinkedIn user’s feeds when users scroll. This kind of ad will show on any kind of device and will help you build awareness and drive leads within your target audience.

You can choose either single image ads, video ads, and carousel ads. They help you target your audience, reach an audience with high engagement, build brand awareness, and drive leads.

Single image ads

This kind of ad is the most common ad found on LinkedIn. Single image ads include a photo with text and work best with sponsored content.

Carousel ads

Carousel ads are used with sponsored content. They allow you to feature several images throughout the entire ad.

Video ads

Video ads are used for sponsored content. They are supposed to give your ad viewer a lot of information about your animation service over a few seconds or minutes.

To make the most out of your sponsored content ads, make sure to keep your ad copy short, use a clear call-to-action, add attractive photos or videos, and track the number of conversions on your page.

Message Ads or Sponsored InMail

Message Ads or Sponsored InMail allows you to send personalized messages to sales leads who might be interested in your animation services. You can send messages to drive stronger engagement and also know what kind of professionals take action on your message.

To increase your Message ads’ effectiveness,, optimize your LinkedIn profile to show your credibility. You should add a subject line, keep your message ad short (500 characters or less), add a landing page URL.

Dynamic Ads

Dynamic Ads collect LinkedIn users’ data like their photos, company name, and job title to make the ad more personal. Some kinds of dynamic ad formats you can choose from are follower ads, spotlight ads, and job ads.

Follower ads

Follower ads allow you to promote your LinkedIn animation business page or showcase page and encourage members to follow your page via desktop.

Spotlight ads 

Spotlight ads allow you to display your animation product or service and drive traffic or perform an action. When people click on your ad, it will lead them to a landing page on your animation website. This kind of ad usually has sponsored content.

Job ads

This kind of ad will help you find relevant employees and high-quality candidates on desktop and mobile.

When you create your ads, LinkedIn recommends that you make three ads per campaign so you will be able to see which kinds of ad formats perform best. This will help you know how to attract your target audience better.

Also, it is best to start promoting useful and valuable content first to your targeted audience and not use direct response marketing.

According to Liraz Postan, former Senior SEO and Content Manager at Outbrain, when your target audience becomes engaged with your content, that’s when you can move them down the funnel.

5) Set Your Campaign Budget and Schedule

Image via LinkedIn

After selecting your audience and ad format, it’s time for you to set your budget and schedule.

When setting your budget, don’t go too small with it. The more people you can reach, the more growth you can drive and evaluate. LinkedIn suggests that you test with at least $100 a day.

You have three options to choose from:

Cost per send (CPS) where you run Message Ads. You pay for each message delivered to your target audience.

Cost per click (CPC) is usually used for lead generation and other action-oriented campaigns.

Cost per impression (CPM) is used when your goal is for brand awareness.

After choosing the option that matches your ad format, you will be asked to set an amount you are willing to pay. You simply select your daily budget and the start and end date of your campaign.

6) Measure Your LinkedIn Ad

Image by Inlytics via Unsplash

Once your LinkedIn ad is live, you can keep track of its performance by visiting the Campaign Manager. You will be able to see statistics on your LinkedIn ad’s impressions, clicks, budget, etc.

Analyzing your ad’s performance will help you make your ads more effective as you observe what’s getting results and what’s not. You can edit your ads, adjust your targeting and budgeting, and make changes to your ad’s content depending on how it performs with your audience..

Three Girls Media suggests that you change your ads frequently (at least once a month) because new LinkedIn ads receive more impressions than old ads. This kind of strategy will help you maintain a high click-through rate, allow more people to see your ads, and, eventually, increase your conversions.

Wrapping It Up

Now that you know how to run successful LinkedIn ads, it’s time for you to take action and make your own ads.

Choose your ad objective, target audience, and ad format wisely. Always make sure to use high-quality images, headlines, and calls-to-action. Creating your LinkedIn ads can be challenging and time-consuming, especially if you are new to the platform.

However, if you follow the steps we mentioned above, you are sure to get great engagement, reach your ad goals, and connect with professionals within your industry who can help you reach your overall goals of getting animation clients who can’t wait to work with you.

If you are interested in learning more about animation and how to manage a freelance animation business, we encourage you to sign up for our free masterclass and get your copy of our free marketing handbook.