For B2B marketers, effective targeting is make-or-break. When our content and ads are misaligned with the people they’re reaching, it tends to be a costly setback.
At LinkedIn, we’re fervently focused on helping marketers hit the mark and avoid delivering the right message to the wrong person. Our newly updated playbook, Mastering Targeting on LinkedIn, walks readers through the ins and outs. As a preview to the full guide, we’ve created an infographic that drills down to the bare essentials of getting started.
You can scroll down to find that below. But first, let’s hit on some key points and takeaways.
A Primer for Targeting & Reaching the Right Audiences on LinkedIn
The LinkedIn platform hosts a community of more than 700 million professionals from all over the world. How can you take advantage of LinkedIn’s tools and capabilities to make sure your campaigns are being seen by the right people? It begins with...
The Fundamentals
Before you can start leveraging LinkedIn’s targeting tools to reach an ideal audience, you need to know exactly who it is you want to reach. A few things to keep in mind:
- Reviewing a few member profiles can give you the inspiration you need to choose the right targeting attributes. Pay special attention to their endorsed skills, current and past positions and seniority levels.
- There are 61 million senior-level influencers and 65 million decision makers on LinkedIn.
- An estimated 34% of young millennials (19-25) and 41% of older millennials (26-35) have decision-making responsibilities.
- Senior individual contributors have an increasingly large say in purchase decisions.
- In other words, while it is important and valuable to reach executives and C-level players, there’s more to successful targeting than that in the age of expanding buying committees.
Targeting Tactics, Tips & Tricks
Once you’ve gained a solid grasp of who you want to engage on LinkedIn, it’s time to start activating the many tools and techniques at your disposal. Here’s a sampling of the pointers shared in our infographic and playbook:
- Combining two or three targeting parameters holds the key to enhanced precision. For example, you might target a specific job function and then layer in seniority level to improve your odds of reaching those with greater influence.
- Using the interest targeting and groups targeting fields can help you zero in on your audience’s unique professional interests and proclivities. The more deeply you understand and align with what your prospects and customers truly care about, the more you’ll resonate and differentiate.
- As a general rule, we recommend starting broad and then narrowing down with the scope of your campaigns. A minimum of 300 members is required to launch a campaign, but for maximum efficiency, it’s advisable to have at least 50,000 in your target audience.
- Use A/B testing to continually refine and optimize your targeting strategy while minimizing reliance on guesswork and assumptions.
Use What You’ve Got
You don’t have to start from scratch when it comes to building out your target audience on LinkedIn. These capabilities help you get a jumpstart with lists and assets you may have already developed:
- If you have an existing list of contacts or accounts, you can easily upload it into Campaign Manager to start targeting them on LinkedIn. You can also port customer data over from another source using one of our numerous data integration partners.
- Using the retargeting features on LinkedIn, you can build audiences based on who’s visited your website or engaged with your Video Ads and Lead Gen Forms. Conversion rates tend to skyrocket when you’re reaching members who already expressed interest in your brand.
- A great way to grow your audience while keeping it acutely relevant is to utilize lookalike audiences, which have been shown to expand reach by 25-45% compared to matched audiences alone. Lookalike audiences will draw information from your existing customers and highest-quality prospects (lower-funnel website visitors, sales-vetted leads, etc.) and automatically build a larger audience based on key similarities. If you’re seeking to hit that 50,000+ sweet spot for campaign scope, this Audience Expansion tool can be very helpful.
A World of Targeting Facets and Attributes
There are more than 200 characteristics you can choose from as you narrow down your precise professional audience on LinkedIn. You’ll find them all listed in the infographic below, spanning the following categories:
- Job Experience
- Education
- Firmographics
- Interest
- Matched Audiences
- Demographics
Get the full scoop by dowloading our infographic, and if you’re ready to take the next step in becoming a true LinkedIn targeting maven, grab the full playbook and shore up your expertise.
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