LinkedIn has announced three new ad tools to help you make the most from your campaigns on the platform.

Documents ads, offline conversation data integration and an exciting new Media Library should be available to marketers and advertisers moving forward.

The newest and shiniest of the updates is Document Ads. Document Ads let brands advertise their long-form documents in users’ feeds, while targeted users will be shown a preview of your document in their feed, which they will be able to read.

Document Ads benefits

LinkedIn says there are three main benefits: collect quality leads, measure audience interest in your content, build awareness, and nurture key audiences.

By showing users a snippet of your brilliant long-form piece, users will be enticed to download the whole thing – this is where the lead capture comes in, as your content can be gated with a LinkedIn Lead Gen Form.

It’s worth noting that the lead gen form is optional, and you can make your document free to download. If you do that, LinkedIn will be able to give you data on who downloaded it.

LinkedIn for Business

“Learn how much of your document is read and downloaded to inform your strategy across all phases of the marketing funnel.”

The third benefit – nurturing key audiences – should probably be taken with a pinch of salt.

LinkedIn says you’ll be able to “build trust and warm key audiences through educational content and inspire them with your thought leadership”. While that could be the case for some, it may not be for others.

An area that Document Ads could fit with your existing content strategy is by using it as part of a  LinkedIn Carousel post. Carousel posts let users scroll through a document without leaving the feed. Carousel posts are good for engagement, too, so well worth exploring as part of your content mix.

How to set up Document Ads

Setting up Document Ads is easy.

1. Choose your campaign objective from brand awareness, engagement and lead generation.
2. Create your ad, decide whether to offer a free download or gate it with a Lead Gen form.
3. Track your document ROI

LinkedIn also rolled out a few other new features in this update.

LinkedIn Ads Blog

“Something else included in the update is the ability to measure offline conversations on LinkedIn by connecting your tracking tools to the platform via a supported partner such as HubSpot, LiveRamp, Adverity, LeadsBridge and Make.”

LinkedIn says Offline Conversions will incorporate your offline data into aggregate reporting on conversions, which gives you a better understanding of your marketing impact as a whole.

This latest update should appeal to those in B2B, where a high percentage of key conversions take place offline or with a significant delay.

Offline conversion mapping has long been a feature of Google Ads, Google Analytics and Meta, to name a few. Although few organisations fully utilise the potential of such features.

Another tool that will help brands better understand their marketing activities is audience insights. Located within Campaign Manager, LinkedIn says it will help you “pinpoint the wants and needs to your audiences to achieve better results.”

“Available for Matched and Saved Audiences, the tool generates aggregated insights about your audience based on their activity, such as the content they’ve engaged with, as well as their job titles, years of experience, seniority, locations, company names, industries and more.”

Audience insights should be useful for marketing managers, who will be able to use it to better inform content strategy and tactics for growing the brand on LinkedIn.

And finally, the new Media Library provides marketers with a single location for all the media they use for single image and video ads. The feature is bound to take away a lot of unnecessary admin work and should make it quicker to get your adverts online.

“You can create up to five ads at once; all you have to do is select the image or video you want to use (or re-use) from the media library and each will become its own ad. Since any marketer with the necessary permissions can access an account’s media library, it also makes collaborating with teammates within a single account much easier.”

To access the media library, you’ll need to have creative manager permissions or above or super admin, content admin or Sponsored Content poster access on your LinkedIn Page.