Do LinkedIn Ads Work for Print Companies?

Offline channels & Online channels each have their unique tactics and individual expectations for performance. As you know Direct Mail can perform well and even better under specific circumstances. The same thing applies to digital marketing, more specifically LinkedIn Ads.

So the question “Do LinkedIn Ads Work?” is best explored by first understanding that circumstances play a big part in the success or failure of a LinkedIn Ad campaign.

 

How LinkedIn Ads Work

We won’t go into too much detail here, but essentially LinkedIn allows you to create ads that show up in the content feed for an individual when they are on LinkedIn. There are a number of different ad types and a number of different ad placements, but for the sake of simplicity let’s just use an example that you will run a promoted post that shows up in the main feed of a user.

Example: Getting in Front of Your Customer (C-Stores)

Now that you’ll be running an ad you have to get it in front of the right target audience.

LinkedIn makes this very easy by allowing you to target companies, job titles, industries, groups, and many more demographics as well with the ability to layer the targeting criteria for even greater specificity.

Imagine wanting to sell more to Convenience Stores (C-Stores). You can target specific convenience store chains and the marketing job titles that make decisions on buying window clings, pump toppers, bollard signs, and other POP displays or signage.

Your ads will only show up to those targeted people making it very effective.

Now that you know how LinkedIn Ads works let’s look at how effective they actually are.

 

Are LinkedIn Ads Effective?

To find out if LinkedIn Ads are Effective we have to define what effective is.

We define this as being able to generate leads that turn to sales which generates more revenue than what you spent on the ads in ad spend.

 

To get to the point of selling to a customer they have to become a lead.

A lead coming from a LinkedIn Ad we call a conversion.

So we decided to look at LinkedIn Ads vs Google Ads and compare their conversion rates.

 

Google Ads has an average Conversion Rate of 2.27% for B2B according to SmartInsights while LinkedIn Ads show a whopping average Conversion Rate of 6.1%.

That’s a HUGE Difference!

 

With this data alone we feel you could call LinkedIn Ads worth it, but the fact is that LinkedIn isn’t the best channel for every type of printed product or service. You may find it difficult to achieve profitability selling business cards through LinkedIn Ads, but find that you make a ton of new sales from promoting packaging, folders, or signs.

 

ROAS and Lifetime Value Consideration

To determine for yourself if LinkedIn Ads are worth it you’ll need to find out what your Return On Ad Spend is per unit and against the average Customer Lifetime Value.

 

For example if you run ads and spend $450, get a job for $1,800 then you achieve a ROAS of 4 or 4X ($1,800 / $450). But if you consider lifetime value, and let’s say that the same customer will spend $8,100 with you over the next 5 years then you will have achieved a ROAS of 18 or 18X.

 

With all of these considerations in mind, we can confidently say that LinkedIn Ads DO Work and LinkedIn Ads ARE Effective for print companies like yours.