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Here’s How Audience Targeting Gets Easier with Objective Based Advertising on LinkedIn

Every advertising campaign in history has had an objective. They just haven’t always been clearly defined, and therein lies the problem. It’s tough to stay on course when you don’t have a specific destination in mind.

This is what drove us to create objective-based advertising, which helps marketers pursue their goals on the platform with laser focus, partially by making it easier to select and reach your ideal professional audience.

What is Objective-Based Advertising?

OBA is a complete reconfiguration of Campaign Manager, designed to keep your business objectives front-and-center at every step of the way. All the features that make LinkedIn a top destination for B2B advertisers are still available (and in many cases upgraded); we’ve just made them easier to find, use, and customize around your specific goals.

Among the changes you’ll notice as part of this initiative:

  • Easier, smoother navigation with snappier interface
  • New forecasting panel, showing estimated results based on existing benchmarks
  • Live ad previews, displaying what your ad will look like in real-time as you build it
  • Redesigned targeting experience

Today, we’re going to delve a little bit deeper into that last item, which might be the most important refinement of all.

Using OBA for Targeting on LinkedIn

Taking advantage of LinkedIn’s extensive targeting capabilities is one of the utmost keys to unlocking its full potential as a B2B advertising tool. Choosing the right audience is essential to meeting your objectives, which is why maximizing the simplicity and intuitiveness of targeting was a central emphasis for our Campaign Manager overhaul.

You can learn a bit more about how we’ve tweaked the audience targeting experience on LinkedIn in the video below:

To recap, audience setup in Campaign Manager is now a more straightforward, step-by-step process with ambiguities removed from the equation. As you build your campaign, you’ll choose a language, select audience location(s), then dictate your targeting facets. Categories include: Company, Demographics, Education, Job Experience, and Interests.

During the final step, you can also incorporate any of the three powerful features available through Matched Audiences, which enable you to integrate your own business data into campaigns. Depending on your objectives, you may be inclined to utilize any of the following:

  • Website Retargeting: Re-engage your website visitors by serving them relevant ads on LinkedIn
  • Contact Targeting: Nurture prospects you’ve already added to your system by uploading an existing contact list
  • Account Targeting: Reach decision makers at accounts you’ve identified as ideal potential customers through an ABM framework

You can learn more about using each of these capabilities to the fullest by downloading the LinkedIn Targeting Playbook.

Stay on Target to Meet and Exceed Your Objectives

Whatever your objectives for a particular marketing campaign, defining the right people you want to reach is a crucial step. Brand awareness plays will usually merit a different, less familiar audience than a lead generation effort, for instance. In either scenario, you’ll want to orient toward people whose professional attributes make them more likely to be interested in your brand. The refreshed audience setup interface, as part of our comprehensive Campaign Manager revamp, makes it much easier for you to align your marketing scope precisely with what you’re trying to achieve.

Want to check out the new ad-building experience for yourself? Click on over to Campaign Manager now and dive in. Meanwhile, make sure you stay tuned to the LinkedIn Marketing Solutions blog for more updates on optimizations to come as we fully roll out our objective-based advertising transformation!