LinkedIn Creator Partnership Ads

Key Takeaways

LinkedIn ads partnerships are a new feature that are showing up in more and more of our client accounts, and it's something that I'm really excited about. It allows you to leverage posts on LinkedIn that include your brand name in your advertising campaigns. There are just a few quick setup steps, but for brands that rely a lot on word of mouth or review types of creative, this could be a really impactful tool. So, in this video, I want to show you where partnerships live, show you how to set them up, and discuss some scenarios where you might want to use them in your account. For the entirety of this video, I'm going to be in our paid media pros LinkedIn ads account, and we don't have any campaigns that are running. We usually just use it for videos. So, we're normally on the campaigns tab. It's going to look something like this. And if you're in LinkedIn very often and if your account has it, you've probably already noticed where the LinkedIn partnerships show up because they're over here in the lefthand navigation and they got this cool little button that says new because they are nail. So, let's go check them out. On this page, you'll see all of the posts that mention your brand name in them. Obviously, as you can tell, I mention paid media pros every so often, but there are other folks who do so as well. Now, this has to be a specific tag. They have to have actually tagged your company name in the post for it to show up, not just typed out paid media pros. So, let's kill two birds with one stone. I'm going to show you what it looks like when they tag your brand. But also, as you're scrolling through all of these different posts and you're trying to figure out which ones you might want to use, if you want to go check it out and see what the entirety of the post is, you can just click on this and it will take you directly to the post in a new window. So you can check out the entirety of the post, all the reactions that are on it. You can see all the comments. And then since this is for me, I can view the analytics of it. But now you'll be able to vet what all of these different posts are. And then if somebody has tagged your brand name in it, it's going to look like this. It'll be a blue link. It means they have to have used the at@ symbol and actually tagged you, not just wrote out the paid media pros brand name. There are a few other things that you can do on this page to try and identify which posts you want to use in your advertising campaigns. Let's say for some reason I really wanted to focus on any post that had a Google video associated with it. I could come in here into the search by keyword box. Just type in Google. And now we have a list of posts that are filtered that are only mentioning Google ads. Each one of these has Google ads associated in it. So again, a lot of these are Joe and I. But there are some other folks that are tagging the paid media pros brand in a post that also mentions Google in one way or another. One of the ways that I used a post like this recently for a client is that they offer certification in a very specific field and they are one of the industry leaders in that realm. So we used the partnerships ads to find users who had just recently passed their certification exam or people who found the certification valuable when finding a new job. And then we used those posts in our ad campaign as basically social proof to say, "Hey, I got certified here. You should too." There are some filters that you can use to find different posts. So, the first is going to be content type. You can either look at all, you can filter for just image posts or you can look for just video posts depending on which type of post you're trying to use. There is a feature where you can say that you don't want to include your company in it, but let me tell you that is all posts on LinkedIn that have anything to do with Google. Seems very strange that you would just post about anything, but you never know. You might want to find something else that doesn't have your company listed in it, but also has that. I guess if I'm thinking about it right now in the moment, let's see what shows up if I just type in paid media pros. Pretty interesting. There are a bunch of different posts that mention paid media pros or something very similar to it that don't have us included. But here's the thing, none of these have anything to do with us. That might be our brand name, but none of these actually are trying to mention paid media pros or have anything that has to do with us. So turning off the mention portion for your company could be useful if you have something very specific in mind that you're trying to post, but you probably just want to leave this filter on. Not entirely sure why that one's there. But then additional filters, you can decide again image or video. But then you can look and see the date that it was posted, whether it's anytime in the past, within the past week, past month, 3 months. And then if you know somebody specifically that has posted about you, you can filter by that creator name. I just started typing in Joe. This popped up just the same way that the LinkedIn search function works. Anyway, your first level connections are going to show up first. Then you might be able to find other people after that. Once you're ready to request a post, let's say that I want to use this one in one of our ad campaigns. I would just click request to promote. That is now requested. So, let me hop into my personal account. And although the next step should be me showing you what the alerts look like for a partnership request, I can't actually do that because, as you can tell here, I requested this post when I first recorded this video. I've since requested more posts from myself, and for some reason, none of the alerts will show up. I personally am not getting an email or a notification in the platform, but that is how a user will be alerted if you have requested their content be usable in your account. Instead, we ended up requesting some content from Joe and he got a notification in his mobile LinkedIn app that asked him to grant access to that post. In the past, I've had clients that said that they got an email that notified them that their post was requested for promotion and then they were able to log in and give access that way. The only additional piece that I want to call out that I can't show you because again I didn't get the notification is that there are different options for what the user can either approve or decline with these requests. In the help article you can see that the different statuses here are outlined based on if they've been requested. You can have the author approve the request. They can be declined. They can also revoke the access to a post that they previously have approved. But the one thing that I want to call out is that there is an auto approved section. If the user wants to, they can say that any of their content that mentions your brand can be approved and able to be used even if you only requested access to a single post. So, there is an option for them to grant access to all of their posts that have mentioned your brand. And just let them know that and maybe talk to them about that ahead of time if you have multiple posts that you want to engage with from their account. for any post that you've requested or accepted or declined, whatever it is, you can go into this requested tab and here you'll see all of the options that are available. Like I mentioned, I tried a lot to get myself to get a notification, but the only one that actually came through was Joe's. So, from here, we can either click the check box and create a campaign or there's a campaign that's listed right here. So, let's go ahead and do that and show how you'd be able to add this in your LinkedIn campaigns. And I wanted to take the route of utilizing the create campaign button because it automatically shows you this screen. The only campaign objectives you can use for a partnership creative are going to be awareness and consideration. That's because these function a lot more like top and midfunnel actions rather than a single image post that is focused on website conversions or lead genen forms because you will not be able to add additional text, links, calls to action to any of these promoted posts if you want to have some sort of landing page included in these. You will have needed to collaborate with that user ahead of time before you actually promote the post. For now, let's go ahead and say that we're just going to use engagement. You would then run through create all of your different setups, all that good stuff, which I'm going to skip for now. And then when we come to the ad creative in this campaign, the post from Joe is already selected and added into the campaign. Now, let's say we were building a campaign from scratch and we did not have this post prepopulated. So now to get that post added to the campaign, we would just go to browse existing content. We would choose the different source where this came from as LinkedIn members. We go to requests and then down in this list here, you'll see Joe's post. You just check the box next to it, click add to adset, and now that post is available in here again. So whether you create the campaign from the partnerships page or you create it in the campaign creation process, it's all going to live under the browse existing content and the LinkedIn members page. Now, obviously, I didn't put any targeting on this. I don't actually want to spend any money, so I'm not going to go through and launch this. But just for sake of seeing what the performance is, let's hop into a different client account where we did run a video creative from a LinkedIn member and show what those stats look like. In this account, we partnered with a brand advocate who is promoting a global event. So, they were trying to get people to attend this event or at least generate awareness for it. So, we used the engagements campaign objective and promoted only his video in that campaign. And basically my point for showing you this is you'll be able to see all of the different metrics that you would be able to see for any normal engagement campaign. You can tell up here I have the engagement set of columns available. But if you wanted to switch to performance video, any of these different options, you'll be able to see all the different performance stats for these partnership posts, even if they are from somebody else's account and not your business page. Overall, I think these partnership creatives can be really useful depending on how you're able to leverage them in your account. You can see here that there are a few different types of discoverable posts in partnerships, whether they are employee posts from your organization, LinkedIn articles authored by members, newsletter articles, posts from first, second, third degree connections, or video content from vetted publishers available in the instream ad placement for select accounts. Now, as I showed you, we did have one video that was promoting an in-person event that a client utilized, but there's lots of different ways you can use all of these different types of posts to get users to engage with your brand. More and more nowadays, it seems like a lot of ad creative and messaging feels AI generated because in a lot of cases, it is. So utilizing these partnership ads can feel a lot more authentic because it came from an actual user rather than something that was AI generated from the company themselves. Whether you're trying to promote a product by utilizing posts that talk about that product and a user's good experience with it like a review post or if you're just trying to get your name out there from a reputable source in your industry. These partnership creatives can be really impactful. So hopefully this walkthrough shows you exactly how to set them up and leverage them and you'll feel confident testing them out in your account. If you have any additional questions about partnership creatives in LinkedIn or anything else in the LinkedIn interface, let us know in the comments below. Thanks for watching our video. We really appreciate it. If you liked it, give us a thumbs up below. If you really liked it, maybe think about subscribing to the Paid Media Pros YouTube channel and you'll get alerted every time a new video drops. 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