CHICAGO — LinkedIn, a business- and employment-focused social media platform, can enhance your brand and help you grow your audience.
Trade Show Executive’s Young Professionals Corner chatted with Simone Verria and Claire Merrill, Digital Marketing Specialists at Diversified, to get tips for leveling up your LinkedIn game.
“Advertising on LinkedIn is genuinely fun!” Merrill said. “Unlike other platforms, LinkedIn gives you a lot of creative freedom — from how your ads look to where they appear to exactly who sees them. It’s an ideal space to flex your creative muscles while still grounding your decisions in data. When you combine that creative control with LinkedIn’s precise targeting and rich audience insights, it becomes a rewarding platform for marketers who enjoy both the art and science of digital advertising.”
1. LinkedIn Can Help You Reach Relevant Professionals
“Every marketing platform has its strengths,” Verria explained. “LinkedIn’s lies in meeting users where they already are — in a professional mindset. For the B2B space, that is a huge advantage. The platform allows you to reach folks when they are actively thinking about career and business growth, networking and professional development.
“Additionally, our data teams provide highly detailed audience personas that align seamlessly with LinkedIn targeting capabilities — allowing us to target users by profession, industry, revenue, years of experience, etc. This level of precision makes LinkedIn uniquely powerful for marketers and sets it apart from other advertising platforms.”
2. It Can Fuel Lead Generation Without Being Disruptive
Verria added that LinkedIn wants users to remain on its platform and does not often encourage them to leave the channel.
“By leveraging the platform’s built-in lead gen format, we can capture users’ information without disrupting their experience — a win-win for all,” Verria said.
3. Advertising Success on LinkedIn Starts with a Strong Organic Foundation
“Paid campaigns can only perform at their best when your brand is already active and providing valuable, trustworthy content through consistent posting.” Merrill added. “For beginners, our advice is to start small and set realistic expectations. Launch one campaign focused on a single objective, such as post engagement, and let it run for 7-10 days before drawing conclusions. Use that initial data to guide your next steps, then begin scaling and experimenting. Once you have a sense of what works, lean into testing — LinkedIn is a fantastic platform for A/B testing creatives, copy and audience segments.”
4. The Ideal Audience Size is 50,000-300,000 Users
“Staying within that range consistently improved engagement, CTRs and conversions while minimizing wasted impressions and spend,” Verria said.
5. Attribution Might Be a Challenge
Merrill explained that LinkedIn’s tracking capabilities are less robust than other platforms, which can make it hard to link platform engagement directly to conversions.
“For example, a user might see an ad on LinkedIn but not engage with it, then research the company on Google and convert there — leaving LinkedIn without credit for the assist. That said, there are ways to mitigate this, such as setting up strong insight tag conversions to better understand user behavior after they leave the platform,” Merrill said.
6. Test Ad Formats
“As Digital Marketing Specialists working across diverse industries and offerings, we’ve learned there is technically no single ‘best’ ad format for every single user. It all depends on what visual experience resonates most with your audience,” Verria said. “Testing formats like carousel vs. PDF, [and] images with copy vs. without, helps to identify what drives the strongest results for a specific objective. While this approach requires an initial investment to run multiple campaigns with the same audience and objective — given LinkedIn’s restriction on mixing ad formats within a campaign — it pays off to determine what format will cut through the noise and make an impact.”
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7. Lean into Video Advertising
According to Merrill, video advertising on LinkedIn has grown very popular in recent years and now consistently outperforms images.
8. Turn off LinkedIn’s Audience Expansion Feature — and Keep an Eye on the Audience Network Setting
“The feature is automatically turned on and while it’s meant to show your ads to people ‘similar’ to your target audience, it can quickly become a problem,” Verria shared. “The real power of LinkedIn advertising lies in its precise, detailed targeting options. Audience expansion essentially undermines that entirely by broadening your reach to less relevant users. It’s an easy way to waste budget, fast.
“Similarly, keep a close eye on the audience network setting, which extends your ads to partner sites and apps outside of LinkedIn. While it can sometimes increase reach, it often leads to lower-quality impressions and less control over where your ads appear. For most advertisers, turning both features off helps maintain targeting accuracy and ensures your budget is spent reaching the right people.”
9. Keep an Eye on Cost
Merrill shared that a major risk with LinkedIn marketing is cost.
“It is known to be one of the more expensive advertising platforms, with CPCs often more than twice those of Google, Meta and similar channels,” Merrill said.
10. Leverage LinkedIn’s Reporting Features
“Beyond lead generation, LinkedIn’s conversion reporting has allowed us to tell a stronger buyer journey story,” Verria said. “We can see who engaged with our ads and took a meaningful next step — such as visiting a pricing page, submitting an attendee inquiry or registering for our events — within 30 days of interacting with our ads. Lastly, LinkedIn’s demographic reporting is another tool that has proven integral … [with] further understanding which job titles, company industries and other audience segments engage most with our content. These insights not only validate our strategy but help to shape future targeting and offers that resonate with key audiences.”
11. Don’t Forget the Post-Click Experience
“Even the best ad will fall flat if users click through and immediately bounce off your site. Ensure your landing pages align with your brand identity and provide content that keeps visitors engaged once they arrive,” Merrill added.
12. Be Relatable
“When it comes to content, many assume that clean, polished content performs best in the B2B space — but that isn’t always the case,” Merrill said. “People resonate with brands that build trust and authenticity through relatable content. Ads featuring testimonials, behind the scenes content or a genuine human touch often deliver stronger results … Ultimately, the key to success is using LinkedIn for its intended purpose: building connections, sharing knowledge and engaging meaningfully with your professional community, rather than simply following the crowd.”
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