How to Boost a Post on Linkedin: A Complete Guide

Marketing on the B2B platform LinkedIn has multiple benefits, especially when it comes to audience targeting.

When you create a campaign on the channel, you don’t just hit “publish” and hope for the best. Instead, there are features designed to nurture your ad after it goes live to ensure it’s reaching its maximum potential. One such feature is “boosting”.

There are a handful of LinkedIn ad types that allow you to boost your ad to ensure it goes further afield to generate leads and awareness outside the standard LinkedIn algorithm.

Not sure where to begin? You’ve come to the right place — our LinkedIn ad agency is here to help!

1- What Does it Mean to “Boost” a Post on LinkedIn?

Sometimes a LinkedIn ad campaign – no matter how optimized and well-tailored to your audience – needs a little push here and there; that’s exactly what boosting on LinkedIn means.

How it works is you need to set aside a little of your budget to pay to boost a post as and when you feel it’s needed, and you do so via LinkedIn’s boosting feature within your Campaign Manager.

Boosting essentially acts as a paid (ad once the post has been boosted), meaning it will reach a farther and wider audience – more so than you would get with the standard organic ad algorithm – the same way a sponsored ad would.

But before you hit “boost ad”, it is important to ensure you have a set budget available for the feature, and that you know which audiences you wish to target via the boosted ad.

Case Study: How We Helped a Security Analytics Software Company Generate 42% More SQLs Using LinkedIn Ads

2 – Pros & Cons of LinkedIn Ad Boosting

Nothing is perfect and every tool within the digital marketing toolbelt comes with its strengths and weaknesses, so it’s important to weigh each out to see if LinkedIn ad boosting is the right option for your campaign.

Pros of Boosting a LinkedIn Post

It will reach a wider audience. As we stated earlier, the main appeal of boosting is to broaden one’s audience and visibility in a way that organic posting won’t do.
Trustworthiness and “social proof”. Boosted posts tend to heighten engagement, which adds a level of credibility to the brand behind the post. Think about it: we’re far more likely to trust an ad with a decent amount of interaction, as opposed to one that has gone relatively ignored. This encourages users to trust that the publisher knows what they’re doing and that what they’re saying is legit.
GIFs. Modern marketing has seen the use of GIFs (Graphics Interchange Formats) as a fun, quick, and reliable way of reaching audiences. Once you boost your LinkedIn post, you can harness the power of the GIF, which you cannot do on standalone posts (well, technically you can if you use Video Ad format, but the GIF will only perform once, as opposed to on a loop, as GIFs should).
It’s ideal for campaigns where the objective is brand awareness. Boosting is a no-brainer when you want to broaden your brand’s horizons, as boosting will do that for you.

Cons of Boosting a LinkedIn Post

Take these downsides into consideration before getting boost-happy.

Less leverage with tracking. It’s far more difficult to track a lead on a boosted post, as it’s harder to decipher whether the lead was drawn in via your organic or boosted post.
More varied (and less targeted) audience exposure. The way LinkedIn’s algorithm works with boosting is it shares the content with those who interact with your target audience, which may not necessarily be ideal leads, AKA, your ideal customer persona (ICP).

3 – How to Boost Your LinkedIn Post

If you’ve decided to go ahead with a post boost, but aren’t sure where to begin, simply follow this step-by-step guide to get started.

But before you do, you need to make sure you understand the following:

You can only boost a post once.
The only ad types that can be boosted are single-image ads, video ads, events, and text posts.
Only account users who’ve been granted super admin or content access have the power to boost a post.

8 Steps of Boosting a Post on LinkedIn

Here are the simple steps to boosting your first post on LinkedIn.

Head to the admin view of your company’s LinkedIn page (not your personal one) and select the post you want to boost.
Click the “boost” button just above the post. This won’t immediately boost the ad; it will take you to the boost post page.
Select the type of audience you wish to target with your boosted post.
(Optional) Uncheck the “Automatic Audience Expansion” and “Include LinkedIn Audience Network” options.
Set your lifetime budget and schedule.
Select the account for the ad billing cycle.
Click “boost”.

4 – How Much Does LinkedIn Post Boosting Cost?

Unfortunately, boosting isn’t free, so you will need to make sure you have enough in your marketing budget to cover a boost period.

Depending on where you are in the world, the roughly translated cost of boosting is (minimum) $10 (USD) a day, although there is room for flexibility. However, how much you decide to spend ultimately comes down to you and your budget.

Also, how much you spend defines how long the post will be boosted for, as well as the audiences that it will reach, and, ultimately, the success of the boost in terms of your marketing objective. Naturally, the more you spend, the further your post will go.

It can be worth experimenting with different budgets (if possible) to see what provides the best outcome for your unique brand and marketing needs.

5 – LinkedIn Boosting Best Practices

The “boost” button alone isn’t even to guarantee success, so consider these top tips first.

Strategize & Look at the Stats

This means focusing on the strategies you put in place before you created previous organic posts and which strategies (and ultimately, which posts) performed best.

When the time comes to hit that boost button, it’s worth looking back over your previous ads with the best engagement and consider boosting those for optimal results. There’s a reason why they performed well in the first place.

Be Clear With Your Objective

Any marketer worth his or her salt will know that it’s important not to go overboard with objectives on one particular campaign. Instead, pick one and use it to expertly craft your content.

Understanding what you hope to get out of a post when it goes live paves the way for the interactions and conversions you get via the campaign, so clarity with goals is pivotal.

And make sure you’ve opted for the right objective that aligns with where your business is at right now and what it needs to move forward.

Consider Using Profile-Based Targeting

LinkedIn allows users to input a wide variety of professional information onto their profiles, such as seniority, title, education, industry, and so forth, which marketers can harness for their targeting.

This profile information can be leveraged to pinpoint the right users to build a laser-focused audience to launch your ads at. When it comes to boosting, you can also target via professional interests, seniority, and other factors.

Be Generous With Your Audience

Don’t aim too small or narrow with your audience. Instead, it’s better to go a bit too high than a bit too low. Boosting is often rendered ineffective with small audiences, so consider this if your brand is in a particular niche business sector.

A ballpark audience size figure is circa 50k (or more) users, and don’t forget that excluding audiences is doable with boosting. While quantity is important here, so is quality.

Have a 1-2-Week Time Window

Success is rarely achieved overnight, so it is important to give your boosted ads a little time to circulate and draw in further audiences. LinkedIn itself recommends a period of one-to-two weeks to get the full boost effect.

However, bear in mind that you can experiment with time windows and run your boost period based on your budget and individual brand’s needs. LinkedIn provides a forecast within its “boost” page to decipher whether your opted boost period is long enough to smash your marketing goals.

Case Study: How We Helped Kodo Survey to Generate 167% More Leads in 3 Months Using LinkedIn Ads

Conclusion

As you can see, the pros of boosting generally outweigh the cons, so if your budget permits, it can be lucrative to experiment with this feature to elevate your LinkedIn marketing game.

Just bear in mind that tracking can be more complicated with boosting, so if you rely on your metrics to analyze your marketing endeavors, boosting may make that harder.

If you’d like to learn more about how we help B2B SaaS and Tech companies grow their MRR through LinkedIn advertising, contact us online or send us an email today at info@getuplead.com to speak with someone on our team.