Looking to Market to Other Professionals? How About LinkedIn Video Ads?

A recent blog post over at LinkedIn Marketing Solutions announced that they are now accepting video ads through their self-service video ad platform. Great news for those of us who have the video ads ready and who want to market to other business professionals.

So I hopped on LinkedIn today to see what it was all about. After some basic text to accompany the video ad the site will ask  you for a YouTube URL to a video of 30 seconds or less. I just happened to have a test video that is 15 seconds from another project I'm currently working on.

After that I wanted to see what kind of targeting you could do because that's really the power in advertising at LinkedIn, hitting the exact professionals you want.

Like their non-video ads you can target by a wide variety of factors including:

• Location (I chose Antarctica, where I'll reach 2,351 oddly enough)
• Company
• Job Title
• School
• Skills
• Group
• Gender
• Age

Business specific targeting is neat. Then again so is "Job Title" because if you're trying to reach C-level executives you can do that and not have to worry about losing impressions to say front line sales people or assistants to assistants of assistants.

From there it's simply putting in your CPC, Daily Budget and a few other details and you're off.

That's a Wrap

I wouldn't normally report on something like this but it struck me as being some valuable information. After all, targeting B2B with online video ads can be hit or miss at times. With the way that LinkedIn is setup as a social network of professionals and revolves around things like company, job title and skill set, it could be the perfect way to reach the exact audience you want in that realm. I don't think it would be ideal for things like CPG, etc. But for products like business software and services, online video platforms, video production services, etc. it could be the perfect targeting solution.