Or Why Even Google should be worried about advertising revenue.

We all know the tales of woe coming from newspapers and printed magazines about the loss of advertising revenue to the internet, but even established players like Google should be worried about losing revenue to social advertising.

Like many digital marketing people, I have used Google’s Adwords product to get my message to a large group of people searching for keywords or browsing a particular network. Adwords’ targeting ability is a step-change better than a national newspaper or a mass market TV station, but compared to Social advertising channels like Facebook and Linkedin, even Adwords looks old fashioned.

And social advertising is not just for the B2C brands who are looking to appeal to those on Facebook. Linkedin has an enormous number of business users who can be targeted using geography, company size, job title or even the groups that they belong to.

If used properly, thinking about micro-segmentation, social advertising could be used to target a specific individual.

The LinkedIn Advertising Channel for B2B marketers.

Some have argued that LinkedIn’s valuation through its recent IPO signals a new internet bubble, but a LinkedIn user has a lot more value than an anonymous Hotmail user or Twitter account. The reason why marketing people like me prefer to use LinkedIn over Google Adwords at the moment is the quality of the available qualifying information available about LinkedIn users.

LinkedIn Advertising is easy to use and available to any existing user. Setting up an ad is run through an easy wizard and prospects can be directed to a website or to a page on Linkedin like a company or personal profile.

Micro-Segmentation and Targeting

The biggest advantage that LinkedIn Advertising has over channels like Google Adsense is the ability to target to a group of highly relevant individuals.

Ads can be targeted using the following attributes:

• Geography – Self explanatory. Choose one or multiple markets.
• Company – Target people who work for certain organisations.
• Job Title – Show your ad to people at a certain level e.g. CEO or SEO Manager
• Gender – Select male or female users or both
• Age – do you want junior or senior people?
• Group – LinkedIn Groups are strange things. Some are busy, some are quiet. Some have hundreds of thousands of members and some have barely any. But for the purposes of Social Advertising, Linkedin groups are a self selecting mechanism to target users. Groups can be particularly interesting when targeting specific industries or subject matter.

Value of Social Advertising

Depending on the industry, market and competition for advertising in your space, advertising on LinkedIn can be incredibly cost effective. If you get your micro-targeting and segmentation right, then you eliminate wastage which further increases the value of your campaign. The secret to getting the most out of channels like Linkedin is understanding segmentation and how you adapt your sales funnel to give a slightly different customer journey for each of your segments.

Facebook Advertising has similar control over targeting, but I’ll cover that another time.