LinkedIn has added some new options to make it easier for SMBs to create LinkedIn ad campaigns, including enhanced auto-targeting, AI-generated ad variants, and improved recommendations to help you optimize your LinkedIn campaigns.
First off, LinkedIn has improved its auto-targeting tools, which are now able to help you reach the best audience for your ads with fewer inputs.
As explained by LinkedIn:
“Imagine a small B2B software startup looking to grow. Rather than spending hours tinkering with targeting settings to build a precise audience, the team simply provides LinkedIn with a few key signals - like a URL for what they’re advertising, a list of conversions or customer contacts, or the core industries and job functions they’re looking to reach. From there, Auto-Targeting combines the team’s inputs with LinkedIn’s professional signal intelligence to instantly build a high-value audience.”
As ad AI improves, this is the way that more and more social marketing tools are heading, with AI-enhanced automated targeting that can get your ads in front of a more receptive audience, without you needing to manually input the specifics.
That said, you can also implement exclusions to further refine your targeting, with some broad-ranging parameters to help guide LinkedIn’s targeting tools:
So now, you don’t need to know your audience as clearly, with AI tools often able to find the most receptive users who may well have been beyond the scope of your previous approaches.
It could be worth trying out, and seeing what results you get from LinkedIn’s evolving audience selection process.
LinkedIn’s also got some new AI tools for ad creation, with its “Draft with AI” process using your previous ad content to produce new variations.
“Draft with AI draws from ads already in your media library, Shutterstock visuals and LinkedIn’s generative AI (GAI) to quickly create ad headlines, draft intro text and suggest images in seconds. And the output is editable, so you can capitalize on scale without losing your creative expression. In short, you can produce a lot more ads with a lot less effort.”
In combination, that means that you can now generate your ads, and automate targeting to a significant degree, effectively relying on LinkedIn’s ad system to do the heavy lifting in your promotional process.
That may not be the best approach, and it is worth noting that you will be able to edit and customize each element within the process. But it’s another sign of the times, with more ad elements being "automatable," and potentially driving better response based on these signals.
Finally, LinkedIn’s also adding new recommendations into its ad manager platform which will provide tips on how you can improve your LinkedIn marketing approach.
“In the ‘Recommendations’ tab, you’ll find data-driven suggestions to help improve your ad performance and maximize ROI. We give you the option to A/B test these recommendations, allowing you to compare LinkedIn’s suggested changes safely against your current setup with a smaller test group.”
You’ll then be able to apply any of these changes quickly and easily, helping you optimize your LinkedIn campaigns.
So overall, more automation, which means putting more trust in the circuits of LinkedIn’s AI tools, but again, this is increasingly the way that all platforms are headed, with AI pattern matching able to better identify key signals of interest, which can improve ad performance.
They won’t all produce great results every time, but given that they are trained on platform data, it may well be worth taking note of these as suggestions, if nothing else.
