LinkedIn Boosting: A Best Practices Guide by LinkedIn

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This guide will help you understand what LinkedIn Boosting is, who it’s for, why you should use it, and best practices to maximize your results.

What is Boosting?

Boosting is the simplest way to expand the reach of your content to new audiences. It transforms a post from your LinkedIn Page into an ad on the feed. You can use boosting to increase awareness, drive engagement on your posts, and direct traffic to your website with just a few clicks.

Who is Boosting For?

Boosting is ideal for:

  • Social media or PR managers
  • SMB digital marketers who prefer to manage campaigns from the pages experience

Why Boost?

Boosting offers an easy way to reach new audiences with your content, allowing you to turn an organic post into a paid ad directly from the page admin experience. Consider boosting if:

  • You want to expand your reach and gain followers.
  • You have a time-sensitive opportunity, such as an event or promotion.
  • You want to experiment with a quick, paid campaign on LinkedIn.
  • You are looking for a simple way to reach new audiences.
  • You want to drive traffic to your landing page for retargeting or to boost your search presence.

Getting Ready to Boost

To boost, you need the right permissions:

  • LinkedIn Page Admin Permission: You must be at least a “content admin” of the company page you’re boosting from. There are four levels of access to a company page, and content admin is the minimum required.
  • Access to Campaign Manager (Optional): If you want to charge the boost to an existing Campaign Manager account, you need “campaign manager” access or higher for that account. To get this access, ask your organization’s marketing contact who the account admin is, connect with them on LinkedIn, and then they can grant you “campaign manager” access.

Boosting Best Practices

Follow these guidelines to maximize your results:

  1. Have an Effective Organic Strategy

Successful boosted and organic content work together. Regularly posting to your LinkedIn Page allows you to understand what content resonates with your target audience by comparing unpaid post-performance. This helps you identify successful organic content to amplify with boosting.

Tips for a Successful Organic Presence:

  • Complete your LinkedIn page: Include a custom cover image, logo, company overview, and a call to action. Completed pages receive 30% more weekly views.
  • Maintain an active presence: Create a monthly or weekly content calendar. Daily posts are recommended to stay top-of-mind.
  • Share relevant news: This can include product launches, informative content, or inspiring professional content. Developing relationships is key, as not every customer is ready to buy immediately.
  • Be open to two-way conversation: Your LinkedIn page can serve as a customer service channel for engagement and feedback. Reply quickly and channel feedback back to your organization.
  • Speak with one brand voice: Establish a single brand voice and get straight to the point. Focused messages tend to perform better on LinkedIn, as it is a professional platform.

Note: GIFs, documents, and poll posts are not currently boostable.

  1. Pick the Right Objective

Choosing the correct objective can improve campaign performance based on your desired outcome. Ask yourself what action you want your audience to take (e.g., views, follows, website visits). The objective helps LinkedIn optimize ad delivery for your desired result.

  • Brand Awareness: Aims to get as many people as possible to see your post.
    • When to use it: To increase your share of voice, nurture trust if you’re a new player or have low brand awareness, announce new news, or communicate issues to current customers. It’s crucial for establishing awareness before customers take more committed actions.
  • Engagement: Designed to maximize followers, likes, or reshares of your post.
    • When to use it: To grow your followers (it’s the only objective that adds a “follow” button to boosted posts), get viral engagement on a post, or if you can’t decide on an objective (it’s a good “catch-all” and tends to be cheaper per click than website visits).
  • Website Visits: For driving traffic to your website or landing page.
    • When to use it: To capture leads, allow content downloads, or explain your product/service in detail. It’s used for consideration (directing traffic to showcase your product/service) and conversion (actions on your website like visiting a specific page or providing lead info).
    • Note: You can only use this objective if your organic post includes a URL. Clicking the image of the boosted post will direct members to your landing page. LinkedIn’s prefilled lead gen forms are not available with boosting; for those, you need to use Campaign Manager.
  1. Use Profile-Based Targeting

LinkedIn’s strength lies in its ability to reach business professionals when they are focused on business. Targeting accuracy is high because members are incentivized to keep their profiles updated for job and business opportunities.

There are three ways to target during boosting:

  1. By dimensions or attributes of members’ LinkedIn profiles (e.g., seniority, industry).
  2. By commonly used, preset LinkedIn audiences.
  3. By professional interests.

It’s highly recommended to build your own target audience using member attributes (option #1). This allows you to pinpoint your desired audience from thousands of professional dimensions like job function (marketing, finance), seniority (manager, director), and industry. Map your personas to potential job roles and then layer on additional attributes.

  • Note: Demographic targeting is discouraged on LinkedIn, and targeting by job titles is not yet available (use a combination of seniority and job function instead).
  1. Don’t Make Your Audience Too Small

A common mistake is making the audience too small, which can hinder your boost’s effectiveness or prevent you from reaching enough people.

Tips for Optimum Audience Size (generally 50k or more):

  • Check the forecasting panel in your boosting experience to ensure your goals will be met.
  • Establish your end-goal before starting the campaign, then use the forecasting panel to see if your chosen audience, budget, and schedule will achieve it.
  • Do not use more than 2-3 targeting criteria or “facets” (e.g., if you target seniority and job function, avoid adding industry).
  • Your audience should be at least 50K or more. If it’s below 300, you may not be allowed to boost.
  • LinkedIn audience sizes are generally smaller compared to other platforms.
  • Boosting uses “AND” targeting, meaning adding more criteria narrows your audience (e.g., “directors” AND “marketing” targets only directors within the marketing function).
  • Excluding an audience is optional.
  1. Try to budget at Least $25 per day.

LinkedIn’s premium audience consists of influential decision-makers and professionals. Successful boosts have been observed for clients with high lifetime value customers, such as B2B products, and high-value B2C products like financial services, luxury goods, or educational services.

  1. Schedule Boost for 1-2 Weeks

Give your boosts enough time to seed. A minimum duration of approximately 1-2 weeks is recommended for optimal results. Check the forecast on your screen to determine if your campaign duration is sufficient to meet your goals; if not, increase the duration and/or your boosting budget.

Boosting vs. Campaign Manager

Feature Boosting Campaign Manager
Objectives Awareness, engagement, website visits Awareness, engagement, website visits plus video views, conversions, lead generation
Targeting Options Language, location, job experience (seniority, industry, job function), interests, or preset audiences, Member interests, Preset LinkedIn Audiences Language, location, job experience (seniority, industry, job function plus job titles, member skills, years of experience), education (degrees, field of study, member schools), company (company name, company industry, company followers, company growth rate, company category, company size) and traits (member interests, member groups, member traits), Preset LinkedIn Audience Templates (customizable), Interests, Matched audiences (website retargeting, retargeting by engagement, contact targeting, company list targeting), Ability to save audiences
Formats/Creative Single image and video posts Single image and video posts plus carousel, message ads, text and dynamic ads (right rail and top rail ads)
Control Must use existing organic posts (cannot edit) Create ads from scratch, add specific descriptions and call-to-action buttons
Conversions – Conversion tracking (insight tag/pixel), Prefilled lead generation forms

Boosting is considered an ad. Many LinkedIn ads are created in Campaign Manager, which offers more customized and advanced solutions with a wider range of objectives, targeting options, and formats.

 

by LinkedIn

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C. Basu

a marketing professional with over 10 years of experience working with local and international brands and specializes in crafting and executing brand strategies that not only drive business growth but also foster meaningful connections with audiences.

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