This document summarizes Northeastern University's marketing partnership with LinkedIn and tips for testing and scaling LinkedIn campaigns. It discusses Northeastern's approach to setting goals and monitoring campaign performance, using click demographics to test campaigns, and improving scalability through content calendars and visual templates. The presentation provides educational institutions guidance on leveraging LinkedIn marketing.
Why did Northeastern decide to partner with LinkedIn?
1) My team focuses on building the enrollment pipelines for a suite of more than 165 professional degree programs – ranging from bachelor’s completion programs to graduate certificates, master’s degrees, and doctoral program.
2) After testing some LinkedIn campaigns at a smaller scale via one of our agency partners, we realized quickly that LinkedIn’s user base was an excellent fit for a large number of our degrees target audiences:
Identify Your Goals and KPIs First - This one probably goes without saying, and should be true for any marketing campaign that you are looking to launch, but knowing exactly what your goal is for a particular campaign can go a long way in fully utilizing the targeting options available to you. These could be as simple as driving qualified leads for a particular program’s enrollment intake, to more specific targets like enrolling a more diverse student population, but identifying these prior to campaign launch will go along way towards getting the most out of your targeting options.
More specifically, having targeted KPIs in place for your campaign’s engagement data will allow you to both effectively optimize your campaigns by tracking how effective your content is in driving user engagement. This could be your overall engagement rate on Sponsored Update content, CTR on an InMail campaign, etc., but closely monitoring this data will allow you to inform your future content decisions.
When launching a new campaign, there can certainly be some guesswork to this, but LinkedIn’s team has been hugely helpful in supply industry benchmarks for us to work towards until we have enough of our own data to track against.
Insight into click demographics for our Sponsored Update campaigns have been a huge resource for us not only in scaling and optimizing our other LinkedIn campaigns (is our targeting hitting the mark with our key demographics), but it has also been a hugely successful tool for us in providing insights when we bring new programs to market.
This data has helped to inform us what the key industries, job functions, job titles, locations, etc. that our prospective students hailed from and that is data that we have utilized to optimize both our targeting and messaging for not only our LinkedIn campaigns, but also our other digital marketing strategies, as well.
We have found out (the hard way) that you can never have enough content.
Messaging
In order to be able to fully optimize your campaigns on the fly as they are live (most specifically with Sponsored Update campaigns), you need to have a bank of creative ready to swap in and out depending on what resonates with your target audience.
Building a comprehensive content calendar is a key strategy is fully scaling a successful campaign on LinkedIn
For Sponsored Updates, specifically, having 8-10 pieces of content ready for each campaign is a good benchmark in order to ensure you can proactively turn off content that is not performing and flip in new pieces as needed.
InMail - we take a wave by wave approach and tweak/refresh our creative on a month to month basis based on how our InMails have performed – which is based both on the KPIs that LinkedIn has in place (open rates, CTRs, etc.) and how our campaigns are performing on the back-end on the lead gen.
We have found out (the hard way) that you can never have enough content.
Messaging
In order to be able to fully optimize your campaigns on the fly as they are live (most specifically with Sponsored Update campaigns), you need to have a bank of creative ready to swap in and out depending on what resonates with your target audience.
Building a comprehensive content calendar is a key strategy is fully scaling a successful campaign on LinkedIn
For Sponsored Updates, specifically, having 8-10 pieces of content ready for each campaign is a good benchmark in order to ensure you can proactively turn off content that is not performing and flip in new pieces as needed.
InMail - we take a wave by wave approach and tweak/refresh our creative on a month to month basis based on how our InMails have performed – which is based both on the KPIs that LinkedIn has in place (open rates, CTRs, etc.) and how our campaigns are performing on the back-end on the lead gen.
We have found out (the hard way) that you can never have enough content.
Messaging
In order to be able to fully optimize your campaigns on the fly as they are live (most specifically with Sponsored Update campaigns), you need to have a bank of creative ready to swap in and out depending on what resonates with your target audience.
Building a comprehensive content calendar is a key strategy is fully scaling a successful campaign on LinkedIn
For Sponsored Updates, specifically, having 8-10 pieces of content ready for each campaign is a good benchmark in order to ensure you can proactively turn off content that is not performing and flip in new pieces as needed.
InMail - we take a wave by wave approach and tweak/refresh our creative on a month to month basis based on how our InMails have performed – which is based both on the KPIs that LinkedIn has in place (open rates, CTRs, etc.) and how our campaigns are performing on the back-end on the lead gen.
1) Set your goals based on your target audiences and fully utilize the power of LinkedIn’s targeting opportunities
2) Utilize click demographics as an optimization tool for all of your marketing campaigns
3) Build a content calendar. You can never have enough content, so make sure you are always planning for mid-campaign optimizations, as well as the next campaign launch.