Most common LinkedIn Paid Ads mistakes - Creatives & Copy

In the ever-evolving landscape of digital marketing, LinkedIn stands out as a powerful platform for businesses, especially for SMBs (small and medium-sized businesses) seeking to expand their reach and influence. Having audited numerous LinkedIn Ads accounts, we have identified several common mistakes that can significantly impact the success of LinkedIn Paid Ads campaigns. Today, we’ll focus on the most prevalent issues related to creatives and copy.

Ignoring your Audience’s Pain Points

Effective advertising resonates with the audience by addressing their pain points. Too often, ads emphasize features rather than solutions. Your creative and copy should speak directly to the challenges your target audience faces and how your offering can alleviate those problems.

Tip: Conduct thorough research to understand your audience’s struggles. Use this insight to craft copy that highlights how your product or service provides a solution. For example, “Tired of managing invoices manually? Our tool automates the process, reducing errors and saving you hours every week.”

Know how to tell stories

Sure, telling a story in just one ad is tough. But not undoable. Consider for instance video, or perhaps combine headline, description and the copy in the visual to tell your story. Or what’s even better, if you’re using LinkedIn Ads, move over to the new Thought Leader Ads. They are ideal for storytelling.

Why is this important? Stories draw people in. Engage. Make people excited.

Learning how to tell stories is not very easy. There is however, a good course out there from Masterclass. They also have some information on their website for you to browse through. Can definitely recommend it.

Sell workflows. Not features.

One of the best pieces of advice I have received is to sell workflows rather than features. How does your product or service really transform lives of your ICP? How does it support them from start to finish?

For instance, the company I used the work for sells Recruitment Software to all sorts of companies. It was easy to try to market using buzzwords like “Decrease manual workload”, “Increase Employer Brand” or “Centralize candidate data”. Surprise, that approach did not work.

Once you start calling out specific problems and create a new workflow around it, you start gaining attention.

So for instance, we called out things like: “ Having to manually reject all candidates that did not even have the right qualifications from the start?” “Trying to come up with interview questions 5 minutes before the interview?” “Having to inform all the stakeholders through email (which 50% of people don’t even read) after that interview?” - Using a Recruitment System will help you avoid all this and more.

This goes into specific problems that your audience relates to. Secondly, we sell a workflow, we help these recruiters move towards a more efficient workday. Meaning they could either find more talent or work less. Up to them.

And finally, don’t underestimate the value of testing

Without A/B testing, it’s challenging to determine what resonates best with your audience, leaving you to rely on guesswork rather than data-driven decisions. From experience we know that certain things related to copy work well. However, so many other things are in the end trivial. Factors that go into copy is the audience, location, industry, seniority etc etc

To get to the best results you will have to test what works best. You have to become comfortable with testing. Certain things work out great, the majority of things usually lead to average results.

Tip: Implement A/B testing for your ads to identify which versions perform better. Test different headlines, images, and CTAs to gather insights and optimize your campaigns based on real-world performance data.

Be comfortable in investing into ad copy & visuals. Both time and money. Optimising results from your campaigns simply requires resources. However, if you do, you will find it can really set you apart. Especially as an SMB company.

Now, do be aware of certain tools that are on the rise nowadays for your marketing campaigns. AI will be an awesome change in the field to increase the efficiency when creating copy and creatives. At the moment the technology is not that good that it can take everything on when it comes to your marketing campaigns.

But it can help you brainstorming, getting some initial ideas or do some analytics related to your copy.

Next week we will dive into the last topic of the common mistakes we find related to LinkedIn Ads: Bidding & Budgetting. LinkedIn is certainly more expensive than other channels. So we discuss a couple of must know points for you to drive down those higher costs and squeeze more out of your Marketing Budget!