Alex - Tower Marketing

How do you find the best agency to make your marketing project come to life? Finding the best agency can be daunting with so many choices available.

However, by knowing how to write a marketing RFP, you’ll be able to streamline the process and feel confident in your decision. Learn our top RFP best practices, so you know you’re putting your best work forward and get the best in return.

What is an RFP in Marketing?

Let’s start from the beginning.

An RFP stands for Request for Proposal, and it’s a document that your organization will put together when you’re looking for a service that you can’t provide internally or need additional assistance with.

Specifically, if we’re looking at an RFP for marketing services, it would be a document that highlights specific goals your company wants to achieve, such as increasing sales, improving outreach, or support with a specific marketing channel. Then you’ll have the ability to send this document to any vendor you’re interested in getting more information from, whether it’s an agency or a freelancer.

You might’ve heard about RFIs or RFQs during your RFP research. While all three have some similarities, there are major differences between an RFP, an RFI, and an RFQ.

What are RFIs and RFQs?

What are the Benefits of Writing an Effective Marketing RFP?

Creating an effective RFP might take some initial time and effort upfront, but this work will help save you time and money throughout your project.

1. Find the Most Qualified Companies

By being intentional about who you send your RFP to, you’ll create a sense of competitiveness and urgency within that vendor list. The vendors want to be the best option for you, so they’re going to put their best strategy forward.

If your RFP is well-organized and your goals and objectives are clear, you’re going to get high-quality responses in return. So you can feel confident that you’re going to find a vendor that provides the finest service and is best suited for your project.

2. Easily Compare Vendors

A key benefit of sending out an RFP is that you’ll have the same information from all of your vendors. This allows you to have an apples-to-apples comparison. You can see the same services and how the price, expertise of the team, and timelines vary from vendor to vendor.

All your vendors answer the same questions. So, rather than going back and forth with emails or searching for answers on their websites, you’ll have everything right in front of you.

3. Discover New Solutions

When you issue an RFP, you might anticipate a certain strategic approach. However, the responses will likely reveal a diverse range of solutions, not just one. This can uncover more thorough and sustainable methods for tackling the project than you may have initially considered.

4. Save Time for Future Projects

As we mentioned before, writing an effective RFP takes some upfront time and effort. But the research you put in now to find these qualified vendors can be used for future projects. A company might not be the right fit for your current project, but if you like what they submitted, then you can consider them for other projects.

a woman sitting at a desk and writing in a note pad.

What to Include in Your RFP For Marketing Services

Striking a balance is important when you’re writing an RFP for marketing services. You need to provide vendors with enough specific information about your needs without distracting them with information they can easily find on your website.

In general, here are a few standardized items you should include according to our RFP best practices.

Company & Project Overview: Briefly introduce your organization, its mission, and the specific purpose of the RFP. Clearly state your project goals, objectives, and the problem you want to solve. Define the project’s scope, deliverables, and desired outcomes with clear success metrics.
Timeline & Budget: Provide a project timeline with key dates stated for RFP release, question deadlines, proposal submissions, and anticipated project start/completion. Also include a budget range and specify your preferred pricing structure (for example, hourly, monthly, or quarterly) if you have one.
Proposal Requirements: Clearly outline the proposal format and what it should contain. This includes company profiles, relevant experience, team structure, proposed methodology, and client references.
Evaluation Criteria: Explain how proposals will be evaluated, and briefly describe your selection process.

By including these, you’ll create an RFP that clearly states your needs and what’s expected of an outside vendor. Since different industries have different metrics, research a variety of marketing RFP examples to gain insights about what to include in your RFP document.

Choosing the Right Vendors for Your RFP

After you’ve completed your RFP, the next step is sending it to potential vendors. It can be overwhelming to find the right candidates to make sure you’re getting the most qualified vendor.

Our best recommendation is to do your research beforehand. Create a short list of options that align with your company’s goals, mission, and values. We recommend sending your RFP to 3 to 5 vendors.

Here are some questions to ask yourself as you’re researching your vendors.

How far away is the agency? Am I okay with working virtually with them?
Do the services they offer align with my project needs?
Do they have good reviews on Google and social media?
Have they completed similar projects to what I’m asking for?
Do their professional values align with ours?

If you send your RFP to too many vendors, it becomes overwhelming and complicated to make a decision, so you should limit your list to five. It’s to make sure you’re only sending the RFP to companies you believe would be a great fit to work with.

How to Navigate the Marketing RFP Selection Process

Once you’ve written an effective RFP for marketing services and you’ve received a list of vendors, now it’s time for the selection process. There are specific criteria you should be looking for as you’re reviewing the vendors.

The criteria vary based on the purpose and the goals of the RFP. However, a general rule is to look at the vendor’s reputation, pricing, timeline, and communication style.

In some cases, you’re going to be working with this vendor for a significant chunk of time, so although price is important, you should also be looking at the quality of work, testimonials, and their values. You’ll want to learn what others’ experiences working with the company were like.

By getting a full picture of what it would be like to work with the vendor, you can better understand their credibility and authority within the industry. You’ll have a real-world perspective and prediction of the working relationship moving forward.

What’s the Average RFP Selection Timeline?

The exact timeline of your selection process depends on when you’re sending out the RFPs, and your capacity at the time. For example, if you’re sending an RFP out right before the end of the year, your timeline will likely be a little longer due to the holidays.

As a general rule of thumb, we recommend keeping the process, from start to finish, within a five-week timeline. That way, it’s not drawn out, additional questions don’t arise, and you can get your project up and running efficiently.

Here are the most widely used steps of an RFP process:

Week 1: Send out your RFP to 3 to 5 vendors.
Week 2: Review questions from vendors and conduct initial meetings.
Week 3: Vendors send their final proposals to you.
Week 4: Pick your final vendors and call their references.
Week 5: Meet internally and decide on what vendor to choose.

Questions to Ask in the Marketing RFP Process

By week 2, you’ll be answering vendor questions and then scheduling initial meetings with them. Asking the right questions during the selection process is vital since this is your opportunity to learn more about them and their experience. This isn’t just about vetting—this is about finding a collaborative partner.

Below are a few key questions to ask to help you during the interview process.

Who will my contact person be?
Where are you located?
How long have you been in business?
How many clients do you currently have?
How many projects have you completed of a similar nature to mine?
How many employees do you have?
Do you outsource your work, or use consultants for any of your projects?

Some Final Best Practices for Marketing RFPs

Now that we’ve reviewed how to write an effective RFP for marketing services, questions to ask during the selection process, and a recommended timeline, we’ll provide you with some final RFP best practices.

1. Make Sure You’re Ready for the Project.

Before you take the time to send out the RFP and get information from vendors, make sure your organization is ready to take on the project. Ask your leadership and project managers questions to ensure they can handle the workload and that a budget is approved.

2. Be Specific About Your Project’s Wants and Needs.

Clear communication is key throughout the entire RFP process. To avoid any confusion, be clear and specific in your RFP, and anticipate questions your vendors will have so you can include them in your RFP.

3. Make Your RFP Easy to Read and Understand.

Whenever possible, make bulleted lists and include headings so a vendor can easily read through your RFP to find out the most essential information.

How Should I Format My RFP?

4. Your RFP Shouldn’t Replace a One-on-One Meeting.

An RFP is beneficial to streamline the selection process, but it shouldn’t replace an initial meeting with a potential vendor. The one-on-one meeting is crucial to get a full understanding of that vendor and how you could work together.

5. Evaluate Your RFP Responses With a Scaling System.

Your selection criteria will vary, but no matter what, you should create a scaling system so you can equally evaluate all responses. Define what your most important characteristics are as you start to select your vendors, and then rank each vendor for that characteristic.

We recommend using a scoring system to evaluate RFPs. Score the responses you receive on a scale from 1-5 or 1-10. This helps you make more apples-to-apples comparisons so you get the best value for your money.

6. Don’t Make Cost the Main Focus of Your RFP.

Although cost is a valuable factor as you make the decision, it shouldn’t be the main focus. Think of it as a three-legged stool; without equal factors, your project may become unbalanced. Ideally, you should consider the following three characteristics.

Speed. How long will the project take?
Cost. How much will the project cost?
Quality. Will you be happy with the result?

We follow the good, fast, and cheap method. You’re likely only going to get 2 out of these 3 characteristics. So if you want something fast and cheap, it’s likely not going to be very good.

7. Only Ask for References From Your Top Vendors.

Your vendors are going to be asking clients to be a reference for your RFP. This is a big ask, and it takes time out of a client’s day to have the meeting or phone call. So, as an RFP best practice, we recommend only asking your top vendors for references so your interactions are more valuable.

8. Notify the Vendors Who Didn’t Get the Job.

The vendors work hard to put together a proposal, and that also takes time and effort. As a courtesy, let vendors know when they weren’t chosen so they aren’t left waiting around.

Now that you’ve learned how to write a marketing RFP, connect with our Business Development team to submit one and find the perfect partner for your next project.

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Budgeting in any industry can be overwhelming, let alone if you’re putting together a nonprofit marketing budget. It can start to feel like everything is a priority as you sit down to plan. At the same time, it’s important to go into a new fiscal year being mindful of your spend. As you sit down to plan your overall finances for the year, setting up a nonprofit marketing budget is key to achieving the goals and initiatives you’re working towards.

Establishing budgeting goals and marketing objectives doesn’t have to be a daunting task either. When executed properly, they can help you make objective decisions and lay out steps for future success. We’ll cover the importance of creating a strategic nonprofit marketing budget, tips for getting started, and ideas for managing your budget throughout your fiscal year.

Why Is A Nonprofit Marketing Budget Important?

So why exactly is a budget important for your nonprofit, specifically when it comes to your marketing? From a high-level view, it’s key to pre-plan your marketing initiatives and make sure you have the right resources behind them.

If you’re curious what the average marketing budget nonprofits have in place is, research shows the average marketing budget for a nonprofit is 5-15% of your operating budget. However, one surprising study found that almost 20% of nonprofits had no firm budget and simply played it by ear, month to month.

As a nonprofit group, you likely put a lot of energy into impact initiatives like fundraising, donor relations, or event planning. But at the end of the day, marketing is an important piece to all of those activities.

By establishing budgeting goals up front, it’s a lot easier to advocate for the day-to-day support you’ll need before you’re in the midst of marketing work. Plus, when it comes time to review the year with your board, it makes reporting on your marketing strategy’s ROI much easier to track.

6 Best Practices When Creating a Budget for Nonprofits

You should start establishing your nonprofit marketing budget roughly 2 ½ to 3 months ahead of your new fiscal year. The average marketing budget for nonprofit organizations needs to account for cash flow, programs, advertising, and more.

Starting early will give you enough time to set up deadlines for internal and board approvals so you’re ready to get started when the fiscal year begins. Plus, it allows you to engage any outside vendors or marketing agencies that can offer extra outside support.

If you’re not sure where to begin, here are some great nonprofit budgeting tools from the National Council of Nonprofits and some best practices you can use as you’re putting it all together.

1. Set Your Strategy

To start, you’ll need to know the overarching objectives of your organization for the year. Marketing for brand awareness is great, but it’s not the only way you can use marketing to your advantage. Your marketing choices should be flexible enough to offer support in a variety of ways to different impact initiatives.

For example, marketing campaigns to help raise a specific donation amount vs. hosting an event to engage current volunteers look very different. Work with those top nonprofit-wide initiatives and then research how marketing will play a role in achieving them.

2. Determine Your Marketing Goals

Next, shifting our focus to defining nonprofit marketing goals, it’s time to establish specific goals that’ll directly support the broader organizational objectives you’ve identified through your research. These should be clear and measurable, and can include:

Gain new members or donors
Raise awareness of your mission
Broaden your volunteer network
Increased donations or support
Driving qualified website traffic

As an example of how it all fits, consider a nonprofit that wants to find new volunteers. If there’s a sign-up form on the website, a marketing goal could be to drive more qualified website traffic to that landing page/form.

Increasing site traffic with visitors who have similar interests will give the organization greater visibility and help boost those volunteer numbers over time. Plus, as your site traffic grows over time, you’re likely to build your expertise, experience, authority, and trust (EEAT). This means you’ll perform better in search algorithms as well.

Another way to determine your marketing goals is to use the SMART Framework. This is a simple approach to creating achievable goals.

Specific: Be clear about what you want to achieve
Measurable: Set metrics and criteria to track progress and evaluate performance
Actionable: Set goals that are realistic with the available resources
Relevant: Set goals that align with your broader business objectives
Time-bound: Establish clear time frames and deadlines to check progress

Once your goals are established, it’s time to consider the specific marketing actions you can take to reach them.

3. Understand Your Nonprofit Target Audience

Understanding your nonprofit target audience and how they prefer to communicate, as well as where they spend their time online and offline, is an important part of your marketing strategy. Selecting the right marketing channels for nonprofits to effectively connect with your target audience is the first step. This will prevent you from wasting resources on platforms where your audience isn’t present.

For example, knowing that 32% of donors are most likely to give via social media, followed by email at 30% can help you budget more money towards social media than print ads.

To maximize your reach and engagement, you should diversify your marketing channel mix by using a variety of platforms. This lets you connect with a broader spectrum of potential supporters.

Also, tailoring your messaging to each platform is key. Using the right messaging on the right channel makes sure that you’re not only seen but also heard and acted upon by your audience.

4. Pick Your Tactics & Plan Ahead

Keeping with our analogy, if your marketing goal is to drive more traffic your tactics may include investing in a PPC campaign or focusing on a content marketing strategy to help you work towards those goals.

And while you’re planning out your tactics, make sure that you’re including a good mix of both traditional and digital marketing efforts.

Some traditional marketing tactics to consider are:

Print advertising
Direct mail campaigns
Radio messaging
Billboard messaging

And some effective digital marketing tactics you can pair with these include:

Social media advertising
Internet radio messaging
PPC / display advertising
Organic internet marketing
Website redesign or hosting and management updates

From there, decide how to allocate your budget, keeping those main goals in mind as well as any spending requirements. For example, there may be minimum spend amounts needed to do advertising via radio or social media.

If your nonprofit marketing budget also needs to cover events, consider setting up buckets per event. You can include budgeting to cover each event’s postage, signage, security, rental fees, printing, design, and more. That way those hidden costs won’t be unaccounted for in your budget.

As an extra safety net, consider also setting up a miscellaneous fund so you can plan for the unexpected and field any last-second requests. This can also come in handy for items with larger costs like photography, videography, or traditional media placements like TV and radio.

Once you’ve settled on which tactics are most important to reaching your marketing goals, you can start to craft your best marketing budget.

Two teammates work together to develop their non-profit marketing budget and marketing strategy.

5. Communicate with Your Nonprofit Team

Nonprofit marketing typically covers a wide range of mission pillars from event planning, execution, follow-up, and everything in between. The key here is to have your action steps planned ahead so you have enough resources to cover all these demands.

While putting together your nonprofit marketing budget, there may be necessary tactics that require clear communication with the board or fall outside the scope of your team. For example, you might need to redesign your website to improve your branding, but if you don’t have the right dev and design support, that can be a challenge. If this falls outside of your budget, then you’ll need to discuss this with the nonprofit’s top stakeholders.

As you start to outline your marketing budget, communicate what’s needed for your marketing tactics to be successful, and also advocate for the resources your team will need to accomplish them. Establishing expectations at the start will make the months ahead easier to navigate.

6. Evaluate Performance & Measure Your Effectiveness

To get a sense of how well your marketing campaign is performing, it’s important to check your key performance indicators. For each marketing channel and the specific goals associated with them, it’s crucial to track relevant metrics and regularly assess how things are moving.

Tools like Google Analytics 4 (GA4) can be incredibly helpful. Setting up tracking from the beginning allows you to monitor site visitors, important actions (key events), how engaged users are with the content (engagement rate), and more. This provides valuable insights into what’s working and where adjustments are needed.

Managing Your Costs Throughout the Fiscal Year

Once your nonprofit marketing budget is in place, the next hardest part can be sticking to it and managing it throughout the year. Since the average marketing budget for a nonprofit is a small percentage of your budget, it can be easy to go over or use that for a different project. Here are some of our recommendations that can help, especially if you’re trying to maximize your dollars throughout the fiscal year.

Use Your Volunteer Network

It’s easy to think within the confines of what your team can do, but don’t forget there’s an entire community behind you that believes in your cause! Consider ways that organizations, volunteers, or other partners you have exposure to can help open the doors for growth and help you carry out marketing goals in a cost-effective manner.

Volunteers support their local non-profit by spending time packing and organizing boxes.

Look for Trade or Pro-Bono Relationships

Be vigilant for any opportunities to create a mutually beneficial relationship that also helps you stay on budget. This could include:

Trading venue fees for sponsorship highlights on event materials.
Trading a free, mission-driven in-office lunch and learn for event volunteers.
Trading board membership dues and seat for marketing support.

Don’t Just Think in the Present

It can get difficult if your staff gets bogged down with immediate fundraising needs or focuses on the event happening right now, with no preparation for what lies ahead. This short-sighted focus can hinder any necessary preparation for your next significant impact initiative, which could hinder its potential future success.

Most importantly don’t just stay in the moment with your marketing. Always keep an eye a month or two ahead, even while you’re evaluating the past months, to make any nonprofit marketing budget adjustments and stay on track.

How An Agency Can Make The Most of Your Money

As you begin establishing your goals and marketing budget, remember that you are not alone. If you’re finding that there are certain marketing goals that fall outside what your team’s expertise or you need help creating a well-rounded marketing plan, having an outside perspective can help.

Working with an agency can generate creative ideas for expanding your mission awareness into new markets at a reasonable cost. Streamlining your outsourced marketing support by working with a single agency can lead to long-term cost savings. It can also create a consistent support system for your marketing efforts.

Hiring a marketing agency can help you find the best strategy based on best practices and a more integrated approach. Instead of spending time and dollars on tactics that don’t work, a marketing agency will develop a strategy to generate results.

Outsourcing some of your marketing needs provides flexibility and access to specialized skills without having to pay full-time salaries or benefits, which can be hard to do at a nonprofit due to budget concerns.

Agencies have access to a variety of tools and other resources that could be expensive for individual businesses to acquire on their own. Using tools, agencies can deliver targeted campaigns quickly and efficiently.

Many nonprofits have trouble developing effective marketing strategies that connect them with their audiences and help them achieve their goals. Working with an outside agency can help you find the correct strategy quicker and not waste time with guesswork.

Plus, an experienced agency can help you when allocating funds for marketing channels you aren’t familiar with. They can help you determine the best spend for your money so you can make the best impact.

Looking for more advice on creating a nonprofit marketing budget? Listen to our podcast for insights from experienced nonprofit marketing professionals.

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The big countdown to GA4 is finally coming to a close, and it brings a lot of changes, which include user engagement metrics. We’ve outlined the 8 key GA4 differences you can expect, but now we’ll explore how to use the engagement metrics in Google Analytics 4 to your advantage.

Once you become familiar with user engagement in Google Analytics 4, you’ll be able to use these metrics to better define your marketing strategies and ultimately gain an extensive understanding of your audience.

What User Engagement Metrics Should You Track?

There are a lot of metrics for you in GA4, and trying to track all of them would be very overwhelming. On the other hand, if you’re not tracking the right ones, you might become more confused about what’s successful for your company and what needs work.

As you consider what metrics to track, you should align this with the purpose of your website and your company’s marketing goals. For example, if you’re looking to sell your products or services online, your KPIs are going to look slightly different than a company looking to provide thought leadership to its audience.

Below, we’ll outline some of the most influential user engagement metrics you can track to know the effect of your marketing strategies.

In appropriate sections, we’ll highlight an industry average or target range. This may vary depending on what type of industry you’re in, so you can always use Google’s benchmarking tool to find specific averages on user engagement.

Users

There are three different types of users that you should be aware of in Google Analytics 4. Each is similar but tells you a slightly different story about what your audience is doing on your website.

New Users. In Universal Analytics, each device counted as a new user. However, GA4 will use cross-device tracking to recognize the same user on different devices.
Total Users. Similar to what you’ve seen before, total users let you know the number of users that had an event on your website during a specific period of time.
Active Users. Active users are a new metric you can track within Google Analytics 4. These are engaged users, or someone who stayed on the page for longer than 10 seconds, had a conversion event or visited more than 2 pages on your website. Ideally, a good benchmark for active users is 60% – 70% of your total users.

*Note that in Google Analytics 4, active users will be labeled as just “users”.

Why is this metric important for understanding user engagement? Increasing new users is a really great indicator that your brand awareness is growing. If you want to take this a step further, you can also see how many of these users are engaging with your website, viewing multiple pages, and spending more time on your site.

If you’re noticing that you have a lot of new users but not as many active users, it may be because your site needs some UX improvements so visitors are given a great first impression of your website.

Engaged Sessions

The engaged session metric will also be something new with Google Analytics 4. Just like with an active user, an engaged session is when someone spends more than 10 seconds on your site, viewed more than 2 pages, or completed a conversion.

An additional, new metric in Google Analytics 4 is engaged sessions per user. This number can be found by dividing the number of engaged sessions by the number of total users. So, if you have 683 engaged sessions and 1,100 total users, your engaged sessions per user is 0.62, or 62%.

Just like your active users, a good benchmark for your engagement rate is anywhere between 60% – 70%.

Why is this metric important? What we provided above highlights your entire website’s engagement. But you can also narrow this down to specific pages. By finding specific pages that have higher engaged sessions, you can continue to promote that product/service/insight on multiple platforms.

On the other hand, you can find pages that aren’t performing as well and have lower engaged sessions. This could be a great indication to rework those pages, rewrite the blog, or to better promote the page across different mediums, like social media and email blasts.

Bounce Rate

Since engaged sessions are now an engagement metric in Google Analytics 4, you can use it to get a better idea of what your bounce rate percentage is. Simply inverse the percentage of engaged sessions to get your bounce rate.

This bounce rate will tell you how many users stayed less than 10 seconds on your site. So, continuing with the example above, if the engagement rate is 62% that means that 38% of total users went to your site and then immediately left.

Average Engagement Time

This is an important metric to show you how long your active users are spending on your website. If you’re noticing that people aren’t spending a lot of time on your page, and aren’t converting, it’s likely that something needs to be adjusted.

Again, use this metric to see where users are spending the most time on your site. If you’re noticing that your blog posts, case studies, landing pages, or other online materials are getting little engagement time, try creating evergreen, engaging, and authentic content.

Events

Now the main difference you’ll see in UA vs GA4 engagement metrics is it’s now tracking events rather than goals. Ultimately, this is going to help you see a more well-rounded view of your users and their engagement.

An event now includes any activity on your website, from a form being filled out to a user viewing one of your pages. This is where it is essential to analyze what you want to know about user activity on your website.

Make sure the events you are tracking are the most important for measuring your marketing strategies. So, if you’re an eCommerce website, you probably want to be tracking when users are browsing the inventory, adding products to their carts, and eventually checking out.

If your website’s main objective is to disperse information and show yourself as an industry expert, you should be tracking events that occur on your blog posts or case study pages. Events like page scroll depth, video progress (if relevant), and clicks.

a screenshot of conversion examples in Google Analytics 4.

Conversions

In Universal Analytics, you had to set up goals that would then track your conversions. It’s going to look a bit different in Google Analytics 4. All goals have turned into events, and you can mark your most important events as conversions.

Simply toggle the switch to indicate which events you’d like to mark as conversions. We recommend marking events like form submissions and phone calls as conversions.

two events that are showing they can be marked as conversions in Google Analytics 4.

Why is this metric important? No matter the purpose of your website, you’re going to want users to take action. Conversions are one of the best ways to track user engagement in Google Analytics 4.

Not only can you see specific actions being taken, but you can see where these conversions are coming from. You may see conversions come from an email campaign you sent out, a social advertisement, or a pay-per-click campaign.

Especially during a time when you need to reevaluate your strategies, being able to see where conversions are happening can help you focus your attention on those specific channels.

How to Improve Engagement Metrics in Google Analytics

With a little time, specific tools, and website testing, you can make changes that will benefit users navigating your site.

Explore the Why

In marketing, there isn’t usually a one-size-fits-all answer as to why things are happening. Here are a few tips you can explore to gain a more accurate depiction of ways to improve your engagement metrics.

Depending on your industry, there could be multiple reasons for a decrease in engagement. If you work in an economically dependent industry, this could play a huge factor in site engagement.

There will be similar effects if your business has a seasonality factor. If that’s the case, try comparing year-over-year data rather than month-over-month, so you can get a better view of what’s happening through each season of the year.

If you are seeing dips in engagement, don’t panic! What’s important is that you’re continuing your strategies and creating engaging, evergreen content that can be used across multiple platforms to engage more of your audience.

Encourage Engagement Across Multiple Channels

It’s important to reach your audience where they are. Cross-promotions allow for your message to spread to a wider audience, nudging them to visit your site and discover your content.

You can use various internet marketing tactics like content writing, email newsletters, social media advertising, and pay-per-click advertising to capture your user’s attention and send them to your website.

Test Your Theories

As we said, there sometimes isn’t a definitive answer to why engagement is increasing or decreasing. So, it’s never a bad idea to test what you think may be the reason for the fluctuation or try implementing a new strategy.

When you’re A/B testing, make sure you’re not changing everything at once. You should only change one element at a time, so you can accurately identify the most positive effects on your user engagement in Google Analytics 4.

Need help analyzing your current strategies and pinpointing areas of improvement on your website? Contact our specialists today!

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This blog was originally published on September 25, 2019, and updated on June 28, 2023.

We’ve already created a Facebook Ads Checklist, but that’s not the only great social media platform to advertise on. LinkedIn can be an exceptional tool to target the right audience and move users through the customer journey.

LinkedIn can also be overwhelming and intricate until you really nail down your audience, ad formats, and campaign objectives. This is why we’ve created this LinkedIn Ads Guide, so you can feel a little more confident as you start the process.

Before Starting Your Campaign

Before we get into the meat and potatoes of your LinkedIn ads guide, you’ll first want to set up a LinkedIn business account. Once the page is made, you’ll know it was successful if you have an “advertise” icon on the top right page of your personal LinkedIn page.

Your campaigns will only improve the more you post organically on your business page. This is the same across all platforms. As you start to advertise on LinkedIn, your profile will be gaining more traffic, so you want to make sure there is credible and beneficial content on your page.

Step 1: Set Up Your Campaign Group

There are three levels in LinkedIn Ads Manager that are listed below. We’ll go through each level and give you insight into how to succeed at each step.

Campaign Group
Campaign
Ads

If you’re familiar with Facebook advertising, think of your LinkedIn Campaign Group as a Campaign in Ads Manager. It’s the first step and the shell that will hold all of your individual campaigns.

You can organize your campaign groups however you feel fit. At Tower, we create monthly campaigns, so we organize our campaign groups annually. Meaning, we create a new campaign group once every year.

By organizing your campaign groups in an easy way, either annually or bi-annually, you’ll easily be able to look back at previous campaigns and consider running the same ones again.

Step 2: Add Your Campaign

The next few steps in this LinkedIn ads guide are all under level 2, or the campaign level. You will choose a campaign objective, audience, ad format, budget, and schedule. Under each step, we’ll cover LinkedIn ads’ best practices so you can create a successful campaign.

When you initially create your campaign, you have to put it under a campaign group. This is why it’s important to accurately name and organize your campaign group.

screenshot of a how a user can select a campaign group for their LinkedIn campaign to go under.

Create a Campaign Objective

When comparing Facebook ads vs LinkedIn ads, you’ll notice there are similar campaign objectives to choose from. Below is the list of each available LinkedIn campaign objective.

Brand Awareness. This will get your advertisement out to as many people as possible, showing them your product or service. This would be a good campaign objective for a newer LinkedIn business profile. The main objective in this campaign will to be increase impressions.

Website Visits. If you’re looking to drive traffic to your website, then we suggest using the website visits objective. You can choose to take consumers to a contact page or a specific landing page related to your advertisement.

Engagement. Creating engaging content should be a goal for your campaign no matter what, but this objective will show your advertisement to users that are likely to follow your page and engage with your content.

Video Views. If you’ve created a great promotional video, then this LinkedIn campaign objective is for you! If you choose this as your campaign objective, you must use the LinkedIn video ad format. Your ad will be shown to users that are most likely to watch your entire video.

Lead Generation. LinkedIn lead gen ads allow the user to fill out a form directly from your ad. This information can then be found under “Assets” and then “Lead Gen Forms”.

Talent Leads. This LinkedIn campaign objective is used for your company to engage with potential employees for your organization. You’ll likely want to send users to your career page so they can learn more information about your company.

Website Conversions. Linkedin conversion ads are only available if you have conversion tracking set up. If these are set up, LinkedIn has the ability to track conversions from your advertisement.

You are able to track conversions within that window between a determined time period (usually up to 90 days) after the ad runs. So if a user doesn’t immediately take action, don’t worry! LinkedIn will still be able to track the conversion.

Job Applicants. This is similar to talent lead ads. LinkedIn will show your job opportunity to users. Your audience is a crucial part of this ad objective because you want to receive views and engagement from qualified candidates.

Note: Once you click “save and exit” at the bottom of the page, you will not be able to change your campaign objective without starting over!

Step 3: Craft Your Audience

Throughout this entire LinkedIn Ads Guide, you’ll find expert insight into best practices, but we believe that the most crucial step is crafting your audience. LinkedIn gives your company the ability to specify a variety of characteristics.

An example of a LinkedIn audience within Campaign Manager

These audiences are very intricate and granular, which at first glance, can be overwhelming when you first start. Don’t worry, sometimes it takes months to craft an audience where you see high click-through rates and engagement.

In your LinkedIn audience, you can specify the following:

Location
Job title
Job functions
Age
Years of experience
Company names

The characteristics above can be excluded from your audience as well. For example, you won’t want to show your advertisement to competing companies. Or if you’re restricted to a certain location, you’ll want to exclude outside areas.

This helps you get the most out of your budget, which we will talk about more in step 5. However, with these specific characteristics, comes finicky rules. Sometimes, you can’t include something in your audience and then exclude another thing.

At first, this can be confusing and perhaps a little annoying. But here’s an example: you cannot include Job Titles in your audience and then exclude Job Functions. LinkedIn will give you are warning message and grey out the attribute.

An example screenshot showing that Job Functions cannot be excluded when Job Titles are included.

As you are building your audience, you’ll see “Forecasted Results” on the right-hand side. This is a great indicator of the size and segmentation of your drafted audience. It helps you get an idea of who will be seeing and engaging with your audience. So, if it’s not exactly the right fit, you can adjust the audience before the campaign goes live.

Retargeting Audiences

In addition to the audiences above, another benefit of LinkedIn ads is the ability to retarget specific contacts or companies. This technique enables you to pull together an audience very specific to your ideal market.

Another type of retargeting audience on LinkedIn is pulling information on who has visited your profile, or website, or filled out a lead generation form. This type of audience typically has a higher click-through rate because there are fewer barriers if they’ve already interacted with your site. In time, this could lead the customer to convert further down the consumer funnel.

These functions can be found under “Assets” in your Linkedin ads manager.

Step 4: Choose Your Ad Format

It’s finally time to review the different LinkedIn ad types you can choose from within your campaign. We’ll provide an overview of each type here, but you can find more information on LinkedIn’s support page.

The options you have for your ad format will change depending on what you choose for your campaign objective.

A screenshot showing the different types of ad formats that you can use in your LinkedIn campaign.

LinkedIn Single Image Ad. Simple enough, this ad will show one photo with ad copy.

LinkedIn Carousel Image Ad. Give users multiple photos and headlines in one ad. The call to action will have to be the same across each image card.

LinkedIn Video Ad. Highlight your promotional video through a LinkedIn video ad. You must provide a headline for this type of ad, but additional ad copy, or introductory text, is optional.

Your video can be used with a variety of campaign objectives depending on your company’s marketing strategy. For example, if you want to use your promotional video to drive traffic to your site, you can use the website visits campaign objective.

LinkedIn Text Ad. This ad is shown on the right-hand side of your LinkedIn desktop feed. You’ll have a limited character count to capture your audience, so this ad format needs to truly stand out.

LinkedIn Spotlight Ad. Spotlight and Follower Ads are personalized to a LinkedIn profile. Spotlight ads show a specific offering that aligns with your target audience.

LinkedIn Follower Ad. On the other hand, Follower Ads are also personalized but are used to promote a company page rather than an offering.

LinkedIn Document Ad. This is a relatively new ad format that LinkedIn has introduced. You can now let users read and download documents directly from the advertisement. This is beneficial for sharing high-quality content with your targeted audience.

LinkedIn Message Ad. We’re sure you have received a message ad in your LinkedIn inbox. These are a more personalized way to reach your target audience. Be wary, a user can get annoyed by the overload of ads in their inbox, so you want to make sure yours stands out from the rest.

LinkedIn Conversation Ad. These are similar to message ads but you can include multiple call-to-action buttons rather than a single call-to-action. This means you can link users to a landing page and a lead gen form, all in one message.

LinkedIn Event Ad. Advertise your LinkedIn event that will show in your target audience’s feed.

LinkedIn is a very effective way to target your audience and bring awareness to your brand but all of these options can make for a puzzling start. Our specialists are here to help you through the trial process and onto being successful with your LinkedIn campaigns.

Step 5: Set a Budget and Schedule

Similar to Facebook ads, you can decide either to set up a daily budget or a lifetime budget for your campaign. LinkedIn ads’ minimum budgets are $10 a day, or a lifetime budget of $100.

When you set up your schedule and budget, LinkedIn may warn you that the budget you’ve allocated is not enough for the entire duration of your ad. If this warning pops up, you must either shorten the duration of your advertisement or add more to your budget.

Step 6: Create Your Ads

Set up is complete! It’s now time to create your ads. LinkedIn has made it really easy to reuse photos and videos from previous campaigns through a recently added tool, LinkedIn ads library.

When creating your ad, you want to name each ad to easily identify them. This is especially important if you are creating multiple ad variants. LinkedIn has recently stated that campaigns with up to 5 ad variants can receive a 12% higher click-through rate.

LinkedIn ad specs suggest vertical images with a size of 1200 by 627 pixels. These best practices can also help increase your campaign’s click-through rate.

Screenshot of the screen you'll see when you are creating a LinkedIn ad.

Writing Your Headline and Introductory Text

Something positively different about LinkedIn ads vs Facebook ads is the character count for the headline and introductory text. You have a lot more breathing room on LinkedIn compared to Facebook.

Your character count can be up to 200 characters long and your introductory text can be up to 600 characters. LinkedIn best practices suggest having a headline of up to 150 characters so it’s concise for better engagement.

Introductory text that is over 100 characters risks being truncated on the desktop. In order to avoid this, you’ll want to keep the copy around 75 characters. However, sometimes it is necessary to add more text, and there are times these ads perform very well.

In that case, keep in mind where your text will truncate so you can complete a clear thought before the copy is cut off. Just in case a user doesn’t take the action of clicking to see the entire ad copy.

The final step in the actual creation of your LinkedIn ad will be choosing a clear call to action. LinkedIn has a predetermined list for you to choose from. It’s important to select a call-to-action that represents what you want your audience to do with the ad.

Screenshot that shows the different options a user has for a call to action button.

Step 7: Launch your Campaign!

Once you’ve finalized steps 1 through 6, it’s time to launch your campaign! LinkedIn strives to review ads within 24 hours of submission, so you should know pretty quickly if something isn’t approved.

Under each of the three levels, campaign groups, campaigns, and ads, you will be able to see the “status”. As you’re working through the campaign, the status should be “draft”. This means you can still edit the campaign and launch it.

Most commonly, if everything is approved, it will either say “active running” or “active not started”. Active running means the campaign is currently running and being shown to your target audience. Whereas active not started means the campaign is ready but scheduled to run in the future.

When the status of your campaign or ad is “active not running” it means there is further action you need to take because it can run. You can learn more about why you received this status by going to the LinkedIn help site.

Step 8: Monitor Your Ads

With any marketing tactic, it’s important to analyze and report what’s happening once the campaign is launched. There are a lot of moving factors within LinkedIn Ads Manager so it may take some trial and error for you to find the sweet spot in LinkedIn campaigns.

If you aren’t immediately seeing the results you hope for, try adjusting your audience size. It’s possible it’s either too niche where not enough people are seeing it or it’s too broad where the correct people aren’t seeing your ad.

Once a LinkedIn ad launches, you’re able to “chart” it to get more demographical information. This will help you further define who is interacting with your ad, what industry they’re in, where they’re located, and even the company they work for.

Currently, LinkedIn ads’ best practices suggest that your cost per click should be below $6 and your click-through rate should sit around .4%. These results can vary depending on your industry as well as the campaign objective you selected.

For example, if your campaign objective is video views, LinkedIn isn’t showing your ad to users that are likely to click through to your landing page, hence lowering your click-through rate.

As we finish up our LinkedIn Ads Guide, it’s okay if you haven’t mastered the platform. But you should feel confident in starting your first LinkedIn campaign. And if you’re thinking: “I want to do this, but I don’t have time,” well, that’s why we’re here.

Ready to experience the benefits of LinkedIn advertising? This LinkedIn Ads Guide is only the beginning. Speak with our social media team to learn about your possibilities.

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Your website is often a user’s first impression of your brand, so you have to make a statement. But what makes a website stand out? These days, making a website attract attention is more than just ensuring it looks good. It must be easy to use, interactive, and informative.

If you’re looking at your website analytics and noticing a lot of users are coming to your site and immediately leaving (a high bounce rate) then it might be time to make some UX improvements.

What is UX?

UX stands for the user experience within your digital space and encompasses a lot of disciplines that may be overwhelming to think about. But we are here to simplify and explain what goes into a user’s experience. By definition, UX is how the user thinks, feels, and interacts with your product, or in this case your website.

When a user comes to your site, they may evaluate in 1 of 4 ways, which are defined below. Your website should give the user value, be easy to navigate and be enjoyable to use. To help characterize your UX, ask yourself the following questions:

Value: Is my site producing value for the user?

Functionality: Does my site have a lot of page errors?

Usability: Is my site easy to navigate and interact with?

Impression: When a user first visits my site, what are they thinking? What immediate actions are they taking?

Difference between UX and UI

The terms “user experience” (UX) and “user interface” (UI) are often used interchangeably, even though they are describing two related but different things. The UI of a website consists of all the elements a user interacts with, buttons, slides, menus, maps, etc., or the relationship between the users and the computer systems and software.

On the other hand, the user experience, as the name suggests, encompasses the entire experience of the website. UX takes into account how a user interacts with not just UI elements, but every other aspect of the website — load times, color usage, whitespace, mood, and subject matter in imagery, and even down to the amount of scrolling required to view elements on a page.

When looking to improve your website user experience, think about the big picture.

Why UX matters for your business

You may think that UX is something that will just help your website look better, but incorporating user-friendly features into your website design will also increase sales, and if applicable, products sold. If you are successful in improving your user experience, your bounce rate should also decrease.

When a user visits your site, you don’t want them to move on from your site because they are frustrated when they can’t find answers on your site. Your ultimate goal in improving your website user experience is to grab your user’s attention and convert them into customers.

A website that is aesthetically pleasing is one thing, but you also want a site that is easy to navigate, has limited page errors and motivates users to interact with your company. Creating a site with great UX allows users to trust your brand’s quality and credibility.

Google Core Web Vitals

There are three Google Core Web Vitals that help determine a website’s user experience. These are the Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, and Cumulative Layout Shifts. These Core Web Vitals will assess all aspects of the user experience and help give you an industry standard.

We’ve outlined some of our best practices on how to improve user experience on your website that help generate traffic, keep users engaged, and allow users to easily reach their goals on your site. These practices are best paired with a strategic design team that creates content for your user.

Keeping up with the Best Design Practices

1. Clear Call to Actions

What do you want your users to do while they are on your site? Answering this question will give you call-to-action ideas to incorporate into your site. The RICE marketing strategy will help you determine what types of call-to-action, or CTAs, to include on individual pages.

If you are looking to interact with users that may not be quite ready to purchase your product or service, try adding soft call-to-actions on your website pages. Soft CTAs are not directing users to perform your main desired actions. Some soft call-to-actions ideas include:

“Join our Mailing List”
“Read Some Customer Testimonials”
“Learn More”

On some web pages, your goal should be to convert the user to a customer. This stage of the RICE marketing strategy calls for hard CTAs, which motivate a user to perform an end goal, for example, purchasing the product or service.

2. Internal Linking

When laying out internal linking strategies, be conscious of the path you want the user to take throughout your site. Including internal linking allows website visitors to stay engaged on your site and easily learn more about your product or service.

3. Take Advantage of White Space

Whitespace web design is crucial for users to be able to digest and understand the content on your website. Having a website that is cluttered with information, graphics, visuals, and other various content will cause users to feel overwhelmed and confused.

Whitespace creates a visual break for the user’s eyes. When a user visits your site, you want them to see a clean, polished look that is easy to comprehend.

Your whitespace web design can include more space between each body of content, margins on either side of the page, and group-related topics with white space. Remember, white space does not mean it needs to be white, the background color of your website can align with your branding colors.

4. Write to Your Target Personas

One of the best ways to improve your user experience on your website is to design your website for the user. What needs and pain points will your website solve for the user? Who will be visiting your site?

Don’t be afraid to ask users questions or have them rate their experience. This feedback will help you shape your website to what works best for your target audience.

5. Images

Images should enhance the copy and design of your website, not make the site disorganized or overwhelming. When thinking about what visuals to include on your webpage, find ones that explain the copy, evoke emotion, and talk to your audience. Avoid using images to just “fill space.”

6. Metadata

Metadata may not be the most obvious practice to think about when looking for UX improvements, but having the correct metadata in place will help users find your website. There are a few different types of metadata, including descriptive, administrative, and structural.

Your Google snippet will encompass the title tag and meta description, which is the first thing users see if your webpage shows up on their Google search. We recommend a title tag of fewer than 60 characters and a meta description of fewer than 160 characters.

7. Mobile UX Design

The UX improvements above are all very important to consider for your next website redesign, but if your site does not perform well through mobile, you’ll lose a lot of your potential audience.

Key takeaways for mobile UX design are to make everything “thumb-friendly” as users will not have the accuracy of a mouse. Larger UI elements will ease the navigation and interaction points of your mobile website.

Additionally, remember that everything will be stacked so the content will appear much longer, requiring additional scrolling on mobile. We recommend keeping paragraphs to a maximum of three lines, so readers are able to digest the content fully without being overwhelmed.

Mobile UX design is significant because it contributes to your Core Web Vital score. It will assess the accessibility of links, content readability, and other page elements.

Two people looking at a screen with different mobile designs options

The Role of a UX Designer

The UX Designer will work with user research, front-end design, information architecture, and usability testing to increase your website’s user experience. They’ll help you make your website easier to navigate and interact with, so users are more likely to revisit and engage with your site.

UX Audits

The UX audit is the first step in identifying any shortcomings on an existing site. The marketing team will comb the entire site, examining not only the UI but the overall user experience. This is to ensure the UX is serving the ultimate goal of the website. During this process, any user pain points or site goal misalignment will be identified and remediation will be suggested to ensure UX improvements across the site.

Ready to boost traffic and engage more users on your site through UX improvements? Work with our experienced web development team to set your site apart!

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