One of the most common differences between LinkedIn and other social media networks is their audience.

Users on LinkedIn are older, more educated and more professional. Most of the users have attained a significant position in their career and tend to earn a higher income than users of almost all other platforms.

Mind you, note that most LinkedIn users also make use of other social media networks like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

If we are to make use of all this demographic info, we can predict and estimate a few facts. For instance, you can take a look at a user’s profile and predict a young entrepreneur in his/her 30s who has a university degree and earns around ₦200,000 per month.

Now, come to think of it. This demographic info is useless if your business’s target audience and main consumers are teenagers as well as low-income individuals.

However, if your major customers and target audience are working-class professionals or entrepreneurs, then LinkedIn would be your best choice for social media advertising in Nigeria. The same thing applies if your business is a B2B enterprise.

The success and return on investment of your social media advertising campaign depend on how your ads reach your target audience and potential buyers. The targeting options on the social media advertising platform you choose are very crucial.

It’s ok if you need more explanation on this. Let’s use Facebook as an example here. Facebook targets its ads based on interest and user behaviour.

On the other hand, LinkedIn does its targeting with industry-specific variables. Aside from making use of demographic info of its users, LinkedIn allows advertisers to target their ads using factors like:

1. Job title

2. Job function

3. Seniority

4. Company name

5. Company size

6. Industry

7. Skill

8. Degree type and name

These targeting options are very huge LinkedIn advertising benefits on their own. As a result, LinkedIn is a very good social media advertising network for businesses that want to target potential customers.

Brands, businesses and companies that provide services for specific job titles, industries and degree types can all increase their brand awareness and drive engagement with LinkedIn’s narrow targeting.

If your business is already into social media advertising, then you should already know the most common ad types.

Just like other social media ad platforms, LinkedIn allows advertisers to use multiple ad types and formats. For example, businesses can use sponsored posts and sidebar ads to get exposure, clicks, and conversions.

With LinkedIn advertising, you can leverage the power of Sponsored InMail. Sponsored InMail is a type of LinkedIn advertising that is integrated into LinkedIn’s internal messaging platform.

This is a very significant benefit of LinkedIn advertising. Since the ad will be sent to the user’s inbox, it has a much higher open and click-through rates than regular emails.

Just think about it for a moment. Not everyone will know it’s an ad before opening the message. Also, the user is in the inbox and not in his/her newsfeed at the time of opening the ad.

That means there’s nothing else capturing their interest at that moment. If your ad is compelling enough and is what they need, users will click on it.

Most social media advertising goals and objectives focus on promoting brand awareness and lead generation. However, not all think of what happens when their leads visit their profile or website.

If you are not able to nurture your leads, there’s no possible way you can persuade or convince them that they stand to gain the most if they patronize your business.

Usually, nurturing leads seems to be only possible with email and messages. However, LinkedIn advertising offers more opportunities.

One of the things that make LinkedIn Advertising stand out amongst other social media advertising platforms is its network’s Lead Accelerator feature.

LinkedIn’s Lead Accelerator feature allows advertisers to track their most valuable potential buyer and serve them more targeted ads. These ads are intentionally and specifically directed toward them to increase their chances of converting to real customers.

Through remarketing to recent web visitors and list-based advertising, it helps you better nurture your leads on their way to becoming customers.

LinkedIn advertising really helps with remarketing and retargeting of prospective customers. This includes leads that visited your website recently but didn’t buy anything. By giving them retargeted ads, you’ll be nurturing them to become actual customers.

The last key benefit of LinkedIn advertising is something most brands and businesses are already familiar with. LinkedIn advertising can increase your conversion rates, as long as you play your cards right.

Some of the benefits we mentioned earlier also lead to this benefit.

According to HubSpot, LinkedIn ads convert users to leads at a very significant rate. To be specific, LinkedIn paid ads have a conversion rate of 6.1%. This is more than twice the conversion rate of Google search ads (2.58%).