LinkedIn Ads International: Tips and Best Practices

With over 750M active professionals are on LinkedIn, their advertising platform is a great way to reach new customers online and grow your business in your local market. But what if you want to reach global markets, and widen your pool of potential clients? In this article, you’ll find our best tips to optimize your LinkedIn ads campaigns for international audiences.

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

1 – Estimated Target Audience Size

The first step to international Linkedin advertising is to determine the international audiences you want to target. Once you have done that, you should make sure that the volume is enough to target each country. If the volume is too low, your campaigns will not perform well.

Utilize LinkedIn Ads Manager for estimating the size and learning more about a particular audience. This includes the volume and some other attributes of users such as the seniority or functions that can be used to identify some specific attributes from one country to another. Considering hiring a LinkedIn ads agency can help you to setup the right campaigns and tests.

2 – Perform competitor research on Linkedin

As a premise of expanding into new territories with Linkedin ads. You should spend some time analyzing what ads and offers your local competitors are using. As a result, you may be able to think of some new ideas for the offer to start promoting (free consultation, ebook download, etc.) In order to check the ads from your competitors, follow theses steps:

1 – Go the LinkedIn Ad Library’s page: https://www.linkedin.com/ad-library/home

2 – Enter the name of your competitor in the field ” Search by company or advertiser name”

3 – Scroll down to see all their active ads

3 – Separate you campaigns for location and language targeting

When creating international campaigns for your clients, make sure to create separate campaigns for each country. By creating separate campaigns for each country, you can track the ROI and performance of each location easily. For example, what works well for the United States may not work well for Canada.

4 – Translate Ads for the Local Audience

Don’t use the same ads for every country. If an ad is doing well in one country, you should translate it and test it for another country.

Consider hiring a freelance translator if your company doesn’t have a native speaker of the target country’s language. You can easily find a Translator by creating a profile on a freelancing website like Upwork and interviewing a few of them. There are thousands of freelancers available who work on an hourly basis. When you find a translator, discuss your content. Ask the translator to handle your Landing pages as well.

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

5 – Focus on Simple language

Our tests have shown that shorter, clearer ads convert much better on LinkedIn ads. Complex and jargonous copy ads often lead to poor conversion rates. You want your audience to understand your message clearly. You can be creative, but make sure you get right to the point.

Also, to reduce the risk of your message being misunderstood, use clear language. A minor translation error – be it in terms of conventions, grammar, or vocabulary – can damage the credibility and engagement of your Linkedin posts.

6 – Pay attention to the nuances

A lesson that we have learned over the years is that wording or phrasing in our own language does not automatically translate into other languages. The same goes for the job titles. For example, we’ve worked with several B2B companies in the United Kingdom and a handful of them were targeting “President” or “Vice president” job titles. However, the job title ” President” is very much an “American-style” word; people in the UK generally use the word “managing director” or “director” instead.

7- Structure the Ad Campaign

Setting up a Linkedin ad campaign structure correctly is crucial when scaling into new countries.

After you’ve set up your funnel and implemented the pixel, you should structure you campaign in the most effciient. Ideally We recommend to separate each countries in different campaigns but sometimes due to budget restriction or small audience size it is not possible. In this case, group the countries with similar cultural values in the same campaign.

For example:

France and Belgium
America and Canada
Australia and New Zealand

Conclusion

There are many ways to scale your business internationally with Linkedin ads, but when entering new international B2B markets, you should focus on personalizing the customer journey from the first moment they see your ad to the moment they complete the action you want them to take. You need to consider language, cultural differences to see optimal results.

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.