Chapter 2

The success of any LinkedIn campaign depends on working out which audiences you need to reach and then using the power of LinkedIn profile data to reach them. It’s important to recognise that this can be an ongoing process. Early in my time at LinkedIn, I assumed the easiest question I could ask a client was: “who do you want to see your message?” I came to realise that the answer can be quite nuanced – and it’s often important to let it emerge over time.

A buyer persona helps to give your marketing strategy direction, and that’s why it’s a worthwhile investment of you and your team’s time. It matters because the ideal customer isn’t always that easy to pin down – buyers are constantly evolving and what isn’t relevant to someone today could be the ideal solution for them tomorrow. A persona can move your strategy beyond a dependence on behavioural targeting. It enables you to reach relevant buyers throughout their buying journey, not just in the closing stages when they are sending their strongest signals of interest.

The most effective campaigns on LinkedIn have a good idea of who they are trying to reach – but they don’t have a rigid, fixed idea of how they are going to reach them. So much of our advice to clients involves urging them to pull back from hyper-targeting, balance accuracy with scale, use LinkedIn demographics to gather insight on who’s engaging and converting, and refine their targeting approach as they go. This doesn’t just help them to reach relevant people at scale, it often lowers the amount that they have to bid because they are not completely dependent on the targeting parameters that everyone else is using.

Use your own insight about the audiences that are relevant to your objectives and then take an open-minded and evolving approach to how to reach them, testing targeting strategies in the same way you would test creative. Use LinkedIn’s Matched Audiences tools when your own data enables more precise and bespoke targeting. You can retarget your website visitors, leverage email addresses on your database or upload a list of target accounts as part of an Account-Based Marketing (ABM) strategy. 

How to adapt and evolve your targeting approach to maximize ROI

"The mistakes that I most often see with LinkedIn campaigns is people starting out with a target audience that's too small"

This often happens when marketers are drawn to using ‘job title’ as a targeting option. It’s tempting to target this way because it’s a targeting facet that’s only available on LinkedIn. However, it’s vital to remember that there are 28,000 standardised job titles for you to choose from when you target this way – and if you choose one, you exclude the other 27,999. This can often involve missing out people who are highly relevant for your campaign, but just have a job title that you didn’t expect. Instead, I recommend using the 26 job functions that these 28,000 job titles are mapped to – and combining this with seniority to get the audience that you are interested in.”