Audience Targeting in Asia: A How-To Guide

Asia is a continent of contrasts. With a mix of mature, emerging and frontier markets, each at different levels of economic maturity, the region’s diversity may be exciting for businesses, but it poses a challenge for marketers. How do you identify and connect with the people who matter to your business? And, just as importantly, how do you do that quickly, accurately and at scale?

It helps that 25 million professionals in Asia are already LinkedIn members. To make the most of the personal branding, career and networking opportunities that the platform offers, they’re motivated to maintain an updated profile. This makes LinkedIn a data-rich source for savvy marketers who want to ensure that their campaigns are speaking to the right audience. Because getting your targeting right leads to higher engagement and, ultimately, higher conversion rates.

LinkedIn’s targeting capabilities are designed to help you to build a target buyer persona based on a variety of demographic facets, such as:

• Experience: Job Function, Job Title, Seniority, Years of Experience
• Company: Company Name, Industry, Size
• Education: School, Degrees, Field of Study
• Interest: Skills, Groups
• Identity: Age, Gender, Location

While it may be tempting to apply all these filters to one campaign, we recommend limiting yourself to two. One popular combination is to target by Job Function + Seniority. This is great for identifying decision makers with a specific expertise but in fields like IT and Finance, which tend to be heavily targeted in Asia, you’re likely to face plenty of competition. Rather than let the competition drive up your cost per click/lead, you can take a more creative approach.

The Skills + Seniority approach, for example, is a sound alternative. But in certain Asian markets like Thailand, Philippines, Japan and Hong Kong, where the buyer pool tends to be smaller, don’t limit yourself to just high-level executives. Instead, consider lowering the Seniority criteria to include managers and individual contributors too. You may be surprised at the influence they have on the decision-making process.

This is true particularly in the B2B buying process, which is a complex affair that could involve up to 20 people in a single organisation. Hypertargeting is risky because you may miss out on the working level people whose gates you need to pass before reaching the final decision maker.

Broadly speaking, an effective campaign should have reach at least 1,000 members (or 300 if you are using Matched Audiences) although we recommend 50,000 or more. In fact, if we were to break it down by advertising type, we’d say:

• Sponsored Content: at least 100,000 members
• Text Ads: at least 100,000 members
• Sponsored InMail: at least 50,000 members

At the end of the day, audience targeting is both an art and a science. Start with a clear understanding of your buyer persona and define this creatively with LinkedIn’s extensive demographic filters — but don’t forget to keep testing and tweaking your target audience. This way, you’ll find your sweet spot soon enough.

For more targeting tips and insights, download your copy of Unleashing LinkedIn’s Targeting Capabilities in Asia now!