LinkedIn Has a New Course on Ad Tool Utilization

LinkedIn is now offering a new course which is intended to help users come up to speed on how to make best use of the platform. Included in the areas touched upon are how to build your brand on the platform and how to increase your effectiveness at marketing. It also covers virtually all aspects of how to make best use of tools made available by LinkedIn, especially in the area of business usage.The new course is being made available on the LinkedIn Learning Platform, and although there is a free trial available for this learning area, it will eventually require you to pay a monthly fee. The name of the new course is Marketing on LinkedIn: The Sophisticated Marketer's Guide, and assuming you're a monthly subscriber to the learning platform, you can access it for free.

LinkedIn's intent

Through this new course, LinkedIn expects to offer all the knowledge which is necessary for any business to assemble a top-notch social media marketing strategy. According to the principles laid out in the Sophisticated Marketers Guide, an entirely new and more effective strategy can be developed in about two hours. Along the way, LinkedIn offers a virtual gold mine of guidance and useful insights that should help both newcomers and veterans of the platform to improve their content strategy significantly.This new course is basically a comprehensive accumulation of tips and insights which have been garnered from LinkedIn's Resource Hub. By gathering all these into a single collection, much more focus can be put on the key elements involved with marketing. Any user who successfully completes the course will be issued a certificate which could be added to their LinkedIn profile. While this may not sound all that significant, it does tend to showcase the user's knowledge of the LinkedIn platform, and could certainly provide the basis for ongoing interaction with other users.

Content included in the new course

While there are a huge number of tips and tricks made available through this course offering, some of the most fundamental elements included in the course are the following. Rather than simply telling you the information, LinkedIn has made all these sections of course material available on video, so that you can be shown in a hands-on fashion what you need to do:

• Detailed ad targeting – this section includes notes on the best way to utilize the advanced targeting options on the platform, so as to maximize the performance of your overall advertising campaigns. This includes the Matched Audiences tool, which is specifically set up for re-targeting.
• How to use LinkedIn's ad tools – this section provides a broad overview of all the currently available advertising products in the LinkedIn arsenal. There is also a good deal of guidance and some recommendations on the best methods for creating LinkedIn ad campaigns which will have diverse objectives.
• Maximizing your metrics – this section encompasses an in-depth look at the best system for metrics to be used for evaluating the bottom-line impact of all your marketing initiatives. There are also notes on the best ways to make use of Campaign Manager and Conversion Tracking, and some other important elements as well.
• How to increase your LinkedIn presence – there are some important and very useful recommendations in this section on how your LinkedIn profile should be optimized, as well as how to publish the most useful and relevant content for your audience. Some other tips in this section will help you to engage more fully with any LinkedIn groups you're associated with, and to help build your LinkedIn community in various ways.
• What's new – all the new features and tools which have recently been added to LinkedIn are explained in detail in this area, as well as why it's so important to have the strongest possible brand presence on the platform at the present time.
• Primary marketing objectives – the three primary marketing objectives common to all businesses are treated in this section, as well as a discussion of how to achieve a good balance between paid advertising and organic advertising.
• Paid marketing tools – for brands which are unaware of some of the paid advertising options, these are discussed in detail, and there is also some guidance on best practices for creating campaigns whose objectives include consideration, awareness, and conversions.
• First campaign – a walk-through of how to set up your very first marketing campaign on LinkedIn, along with some recommendations for simplified versions, as well as some more sophisticated approaches.

Definitely worth a look

Obviously the Internet is flooded these days with self-help material and all kinds of guides on how you can do things better. This new course from LinkedIn however, is well worth the time it takes to browse through it, especially if you're already a LinkedIn business user and would like to maximize your usage of its available tools. It's also worth your while to have a solid understanding of the best ways to build your LinkedIn presence, so that your brand can attain maximum visibility.LinkedIn is experiencing a boom time in gaining new users daily, and in driving referral traffic, so it's very important for any brand to have a solid presence on the platform. With LinkedIn experiencing this kind of tremendous growth, it makes good sense for your company to tap into that huge trend, so you can reach the rapidly increasing audience. In fact, this might be a good time for you to reevaluate your LinkedIn strategy, to refine it and make it more effective than it has been in the past.You might also want to re-think where LinkedIn fits into your overall social media strategy, so all your initiatives can be synchronized. Even if you don't make use of every single tool described in the new course, it will be well worth your while to have an understanding of how they can help you, in case you might have a need for them in the future. And if nothing else, by reading through this new course material, you'll have some very good ideas about how your presence on LinkedIn can be increased, and how you can acquire additional followers who are more fully engaged with your brand.