LinkedIn Overview
LinkedIn Advertising allows you to get your message out in front of professionals in your area. LinkedIn has fairly sophisticated target marketing. You can create an advertising audience which is a subset of LinkedIn members broken down by their company, job title, industry and personal or professional interests. You can also connect to a large group of contacts.
When it comes to garage door company marketing LinkedIn isn’t a great fit. LinkedIn is geared more towards professional networking, and not your services – which are typically needed on an urgent basis.
In this post, I cover some of the highlights for LinkedIn and why advertising on the platform probably isn’t a great idea for garage repair pros. The one exception is if you’re trying to develop relationships with organizations that have responsibility for maintaining large numbers of properties.
As an example, it may be worth trying LinkedIn as a way to build relationships and raise brand awareness among property management companies, HOAs – or any other types of companies responsible for community maintenance. Your goal would be to develop a relationship with these people so that when garage door problems come up, they’ll call you first.
Marketing your garage door business like this probably only makes sense for the largest of garage door services companies.
I already have an ad account on LinkedIn, so I’ll run you through some of the basics.
Setting up a LinkedIn Ad Campaign
You’ll sign up for LinkedIn and create a business page on LinkedIn prior to starting this process.
Here, I’m creating the basics for a LinkedIn Campaign
Campaign Group and Campaign
You’ll set up a campaign group that allows you to set up your campaign parameters for all things unique to this particular campaign like budget and run dates (duration of your ad campaign).
Campaign Objective
Within this new campaign group we created, we’re going to create a new campaign. You’ll have many objectives to choose from. Almost all of your customers will be in urgent need of a garage door repair. On search engines, your goal would be lead generation or website conversions.
LinkedIn is a bit different though, no one goes to LinkedIn to get their garage door fixed. Instead, the goal would likely be to attract the eye of property management companies or HOAs. The goal is to build relationships with these types of customers. You’ll want to choose one of the Awareness or consideration options (highlighted in yellow). As an example, I’ve chosen Brand awareness.
Audience
For most online advertising, you’ll only want people within your service area to see your ads. These are the homeowners and businesses whose garage doors you’ll be servicing.
LinkedIn is a bit different in that you may have to cast a wider net. If you’re looking to build relationships with organizations responsible for properties in your area, their headquarters may be located outside of your service area.
This may mean you have to choose a larger geographic audience. You’ll want to research the types of companies you’re attempting to target and where they’re located. For now, I’ve selected the United States (A).
Selecting the location where your ads will run (A) and your target audience by job title (B)
Next, we have to select a target audience. I’ve gone ahead and selected property manager and numerous related job titles (B). LinkedIn has many different types of targeting options so that you can get your message in front of people working at the companies you’re interested in, or people that have a job title that would make them a good match.
Ad Format
LinkedIn offers many different types of ads. You’ll have to select what works best for you. I’m partial to video as it tends to attract the most attention. Note: using YouTube garage door marketing videos will likely be a better bet than LinkedIn video ads.
The many different types of LinkedIn Ad Formats
Placement
Here, you have the option to opt in to the LinkedIn Audience network. This sounds similar to a setup like Google’s Search partners, where you really don’t have a clue where your ads are going to run. I’d opt out of this option as there is no guarantee people needing your garage door services will see your ad.
Budget & Schedule
In this section (A) below, you’ll set your daily budget and the duration of your campaign. You’ll also have a chance to modify your optimization goal which you set up during your Objective selection. Finally, you’ll choose a bidding strategy – LinkedIn had “Maximum Delivery (Automated)” selected for me by default and I was unable to modify it.
Your daily budget needs to be at least $10. LinkedIn Ads have the potential to cost at least $300 monthly, so you’ll want to make sure that LinkedIn Advertising is a great fit for your business – and for most of you, it is not a good fit.
Budget, Schedule and Conversion Tracking for Campaigns
Conversion Tracking
With conversion tracking (B) above you can track the effectiveness of your campaign based on who has made contact with your business as a result of your ad campaign efforts. Our goal is related to brand awareness in this sample campaign, so conversions aren’t all that important.
Ad Creation
You’ll then have the opportunity to create a new ad campaign. In the image below, I started the process to create a single image ad to be shown on LinkedIn. After your ad is created, you’ll go ahead and launch your campaign.
Should Garage Door Pros run Ads on LinkedIn?
No.
While you should still have a LinkedIn Profile and a LinkedIn Company Page, running ads on LinkedIn doesn’t make much sense for almost all garage door repair companies.
Garage door services are generally an instant, direct response type of marketing environment.
Only if you’ve exhausted other, likely much more effective forms of online marketing – like SEO, Google Ads and Microsoft Ads should you consider running ads on LinkedIn. Even then, the type of advertising campaign you’ll be creating on LinkedIn is a campaign to build relationships with property management companies or similar organizations who are responsible for managing garage doors.
