Chapter 1
The Cost of Advertising on LinkedIn
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.
Online Advertising expert
"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.”
How to leverage your own data and take LinkedIn targeting to the next level
Matched Audiences enables you to leverage your own data to reach people on LinkedIn that you know are relevant to your campaign – and to reach them at scale. Using these tools effectively can significantly lower your cost-per-lead by creating your own bespoke segments that others won’t be able to identify in the same way. When you are confident of these segments clicking through at a high rate, you can switch bids to a cost-per-impression (CPM) basis, and reduce the cost of those clicks.
"With LinkedIn, we can do it on a scale and with precision that no other platform is able to provide"
I really love company targeting for Account Based Marketing (ABM). With LinkedIn, we can do it on a scale and with precision that no other platform is able to provide. ABM is the feature of LinkedIn advertising that most impresses clients when I introduce them to it. It’s a feature that there is absolutely no substitute for across any other platform, and it’s magical.”
AJ Wilcox
LinkedIn Ads pro