In our last post, we provided a crash course in everything you need to know before beginning your LinkedIn ad campaigns.
Now, let’s see how we can use LinkedIn’s advertising platform to get your message to the right audience.
Why Targeting Matters
Gone are the days when you had to blindly throw ads into the crowd, only hoping they’ll land on someone who cares.
The targeting that LinkedIn’s advertising platform provides ensures your message makes it to those who matter most.
This means you’re not wasting money showing ads to people who would never buy your product or service.
How You Can Target Your Audience
You know how you can put so much information about yourself into LinkedIn? Well advertisers can use that information to target you.
LinkedIn’s targeting options are extensive:
As you can see, advertisers can target by numerous characteristics to ensure their ads find the right audience.
Now let’s explore some of the top targeting criteria we’ve seen in B2B marketing.
Company Name
If you want to get really specific, targeting by company name is your best bet. If the company is on LinkedIn, you can target its employees.
Keep in mind that you should exceed a couple thousand potential audience members, so this probably won’t work if you only target a couple small businesses.
This criteria is great for anyone who is trying to get their message heard in very specific companies.
Company Industry
Company Industry is one of the most powerful criteria that LinkedIn offers.
They offer an extensive segmented list of industries from which you can choose to target.
This is a great way to narrow down your audience without narrowing them down too much. The only problem is when your industry isn’t well represented by LinkedIn’s categories - but that’s fairly rare.
Job Title / Job Function
Not everyone at a company cares about your content.
Targeting by Job Title or Job Function lets you reach out to those people who actually care about what you have to say.
For example, if you’re promoting accounting software, why would you show your ads to a maintenance supervisor?
Member Groups
An often-overlooked criteria is the Member Group segment.
This allows you to target people who belong to specific LinkedIn Groups.
This is a great option for companies trying to reach niche markets that aren’t included in the Company Industry criteria. Many smaller markets have good communities in LinkedIn Groups, so you can send your ads in their direction.
Let’s say you want to focus on companies who use HubSpot, but not everyone who belongs to the “Marketing and Advertising” industry. You can search for HubSpot in LinkedIn Groups to find several groups of HubSpot users.
Conclusion
LinkedIn’s advertising platform gives marketers the ability to distribute their message to an audience that actually cares.
For marketers, this means more effective campaigns and a healthier budget since you’re not wasting money and time on irrelevant leads.
For our next blog in this series, we’re going to dig into the Anatomy of a Winning LinkedIn Ad.
