Earlier today I received an email from LinkedIn telling me to try their new service called LinkedIn DirectAds.  I knew it was only an amount of time for LinkedIn to either partner with Google or create an some sort of in-house advertising model.  They have 66 million members worldwide, 32 million of them residing in the United States.  LinkedIn says, “for example you can target 7.9 business decision makers, 5.5 million high tech managers, 1.3 million small business, and 4.2 million corporate executives.”  You will be able to refine your search to target your EXACT demographic.

LinkedIn has made it relatively simple to create your first Ad.  Take a look below, I will guide you through the process.

Creating a New LinkedIn DirectAd

STEP 1 – Create Your Ad Campaign

Step one is the longest of the 4 steps, especially since it is vital to create at least 1 ad variation so you can at least split-test the effectiveness of ad1 and ad2.  LinkedIn allows you  to create up to 10 different ad variations under one campaign, all with different text and images if you’d like.  They also allow you to have a 25 character title and up to a 75 character description spanning no more than 2 lines as well as a field for your display and destination URLs.

STEP 2 – Target Your Audience

Step 2 is all about targeting your website’s audience.  They have a pretty cool way of showing you exactly how many people you are targeting.  For instance, this  screenshot shows you that there are 66,266,528 possible people that I can target with my campaign.  Let me refine my target market to demonstrate.  I run a web design firm who is looking to acquire new clients so I am going to go through the methods of refining my search to target my ideal client in LinkedIn Direct Ads. I know that I mainly design websites for small businesses so I am only going to check the boxes that would define my target client.  Take a look at the number of potential people that I now can target after filtering out the ones that generally wouldn’t buy my service, it is only 18,508.

STEP 3 – Set Your Campaign Budget

LinkedIn allows you to choose your payment method, either Pay Per Click (CPC) or pay per 1,000 impressions (CPM).  In my specific case LinkedIn says that my default bid is $4.91, with a suggested bid range between $4.91 – $5.95; Minimum Bid: $2.00.  The CPM choice says my default bid is $3.05, with a suggested bid range between of $3.06 – $3.52; Minimum Bid: $3.00.  You are allowed to select a daily budged , no lower than $10 per day, defaulting at $25. Once you have chosen your daily budged the last step is inputting your credit card information.

STEP 4 – Billing Information

Of course, the last step in the process is the billing information.  They ask for all the general billing information and also provide a helpful FAQ sidebar on all step throughout the process.

Take a look below and read what LinkedIn said in their blog post:

As the world’s largest and fastest-growing professional network, LinkedIn is a fantastic place for businesses of all sizes to reach professionals with targeted messaging.

That’s why today we’re announcing LinkedIn DirectAds, a new online product designed for LinkedIn members who want to market their business, product, or service to other members. While large brands and companies will be best served by contacting our sales team, DirectAds lets LinkedIn members purchase audience-targeted text advertising on the site for their businesses of any size. For example, maybe you’re a tax accounting firm looking to reach young professionals, or you’re a design agency looking to find potential new clients in key industries, or maybe you’ve just written a new book on a career or business topic. You can use DirectAds to get the word out to your target customers.

Using DirectAds, members can specify the audience that will see their ads (based on seven different criteria), write targeted messaging for their products, and pay by credit card – Premium Account holders even get 50% off. The whole process takes just a few minutes. We’ve opened up the product to a large number of our members, so you can try it out for your own business at https://www.linkedin.com/directads .

Like existing ads on our site today, DirectAds advertisements are intended to be non-obtrusive messages that accompany the overall experience of LinkedIn. Note that you won’t see any additional ads with the introduction of this product and every DirectAds ad includes the advertising member’s name and profile data, so you’ll know who is trying to reach members like you.