LinkedIn is an incredibly valuable platform for reaching an audience of professionals in a targeted industry. This social platform can optimize your boosted posts to reach meeting planners and engage them on the spot. It is a valuable component to any destination Content Marketing Program designed to reach meeting planners and other professionals that considered in the meetings and conventions clientele.
But the ad platform is fickle and minor changes can have a major affect on your results. For Park City’s LinkedIn advertising campaign in May, we noticed that while they were increasing our budget on the social platform, the quality of the audience was dropping and so was the CTR. This happens when you reach a specific budget threshold on LinkedIn. When it does it’s time to change optimization strategies.
The team at Digital Edge worked to increase engagement and results from the boosted LinkedIn posts despite taking decrease in Visit Park City’s budget through the summer (off-season) months.
Solution for the First Budget Decrease
We decreased our budget in June, so to adjust, we took a closer look at the campaign and attempted to tweak the allocation of the funds to help the dollar stretch further.
We did this by adjusting the bid type to cost-per-click, rather than cost-per-impression; and we bid higher than the average daily rate for placements, but kept our daily limit much lower.
Results from June
In June, with a budget decrease of >10%, our total impressions and clicks more than doubled, average CPC decreased by 75% and engagement had increased!
But then came July…
In the dead of summer, when most meeting planners are planning meetings in the winter, it was difficult to expect a budget increase from a beautiful mountain town like Visit Park City. Winter meetings are quite a hot commodity for this fabulous mountain town. So again, we faced a decrease.
But, this time, the strategy had to change yet again. We had fallen below the threshold of optimizing for clicks. For the campaign to be effective for the entire month and not just for part of the month, we had to adapt.
Adapting Goals & Strategies to Budgets
This time we optimized for impressions, but we paid close attention to delivering content that would have a higher expectation to convert for social engagement. We did this by looking at our previous posts and created similar posts that produced the highest organic social actions.
We also adjusted our goals to optimize for higher quality impressions and a more targeted audience. This way, our posts would increase brand awareness to a more quality audience, so when we do begin optimizing again for clicks, we will have already made an impression on the audience we wanted to convert the most.
Awesome Results
In July, our budget decrease directly matched out CTR, but that’s okay, because we were seeking social engagement and a more qualified audience. Typically, when a budget decreases any more than 10% in a campaign optimized for clicks, the effects can be far more dramatic.
However, we reached 12% more employees in higher level positions in July (we like to call them “the decision makers”) and we increased our reach of our targeted companies that ranged from 50-200 employees by 6%, hitting another audience quality goal. Our total impressions increased by 28%, and here’s the best part…
Our social engagement rate increased by 64%!
Takeaways
It is the little changes and attention to detail that makes all the difference in social media campaigns, especially when you are trying to reach a more narrow audience, like meeting planners. You have to be willing to keep your finger on the pulse and continuously adapt. It’s all about the long game.
When you are planning your goals, it can’t always be about CTR or other online macro-conversions. If you take into consideration the budget that you have to work with, you might find that the finer micro-goals will set you up for a greater success in the future. And, this is a great example of how budget doesn’t have to affect the success of your marketing campaigns.
