When it comes to creating an advertising campaign, the secret ingredient to success often lies within your audience targeting.
Without being clear on what your ideal buyer persona is, it’s likely your marketing efforts will get lost in the endless ether of ads, meaning the best potential leads aren’t likely to see them.
Luckily, LinkedIn can help you. Building a list of potential leads on LinkedIn is quick, easy, and laser-focused. But that’s not all. There are tricks of the trade to ensure your ads are reaching the best possible suitors.
So, with this in mind, our LinkedIn Ad Agency has put together a list of the best practices for audience targeting..
LinkedIn Job Title Targeting
Once a B2B brand fully identifies exactly who its target audience is, harnessing the power of LinkedIn job title targeting becomes quick, simple, and extremely fruitful.
Understanding your target audience means discerning the job titles of the users whom you wish to target, and owing to LinkedIn’s extensive focus on members’ professional detail, this method of targeting is easy and effective because the platform enables you to create an ad campaign that targets via job title.
Job Titles on LinkedIn
LinkedIn makes it easy to draw your research on prospective leads’ job titles, and the simplest way of doing this is to type in the job title/s of the users you wish to target into LinkedIn’s search bar.
This brings up a search results list of users who have their job title details included within their profile, giving you the opportunity to click on their profiles and see if the other info provided suggests that they are a good fit for your targeting.
Targeting Via Job Title on LinkedIn
As for targeting via ‘Job Title’ on LinkedIn, here’s what you need to do:
- Sign in to your Campaign Manager.
- Head to the ‘Audience’ section.
- Click ‘Audience Attributes’ and then ‘Job Experience’.
- Click on ‘Job Experience’, then ‘Job Titles’.
- Type in the titles you wish to focus on.
Similar Job Titles
Depending on your industry and the focus of your campaign, you may not find the exact job titles you are looking for, in which case you’ll need to look at similar areas.
Conversely, you may find exactly what you’re looking for but will want to target similar titles to expand your audience, being mindful, of course, to keep your buyer persona in your mind’s eye at all times, so as not to deviate from that.
Narrowing Your Targeting
During the audience-building process, you can use company attributes to help narrow your targeting. This includes:
- The key industries you wish to focus on.
- Company size/number of employees.
Targeting By ‘Job Function’
This essentially allows you to target via specific departments (e.g.: ‘HR’, ‘marketing’, etc.).
What’s great about LinkedIn is it is so laser-focused on targeting that when you’re looking into ‘Job Function’, you can utilize the platform’s mapping system that allows you to hone in on ‘Job Title/Job Function Relationship’.
How to Target Via ‘Job Function’
Once you’ve completed the steps mentioned in the previous section, here’s what to do next: Click ‘Job Experience, then ‘Job Functions’.
Depending on your focal area, you may find this is too broad and will need to further narrow your targeting, in which you can:
- Narrow your search by inputting ‘Company Size’ (if you’re aware of what size organizations you wish to target). Do this by clicking on ‘Company’ > ‘Number of Employees’.
- Target via seniority/decision-making status: Click ‘Job Experience’ > ‘Seniority’.
Targeting Via Skills
You can build your audience by targeting users based on their skills, which users’ own networks can ‘endorse’ to validate.
How to Target Via Skills
Stay in your Campaign Manager and head to ‘Job Experience’ > ‘Member Skills’. Here you can type in the skills you require of your desired audience. This will then list people with these skills listed in their profile.
Again, you may find the results to be literally thousands of users, which may mean your targeting is too broad, so you will need to further narrow your search. You can do this by applying another targeting option, such as ‘Job Title’.
Targeting Via Groups
LinkedIn allows its users to join relevant industry/topic-focused groups, which marketers can also take advantage of when targeting.
How to Target Via Groups
You have two options here:
- LinkedIn’s search bar: Type in the interest in mind, then select the ‘Groups’ option, and then hit ‘Search’. This will bring up a selection of potentially relevant groups for you to browse through.
- Click on the profiles of an ideal lead and see what groups he/she is a part of.
Once you’ve got an idea of what type of groups make for ideal targets, here’s what to do next:
- Go to the ‘Audience’ section of your Campaign Manager and select ‘Interests/Groups’.
- Click ‘Groups’ and input the topics you’re interested in.
This will then provide a list of relevant groups. Once you’ve done this you’ll find that your targeting is still too broad because not every single member of these groups will qualify as an ideal lead, so narrowing is required.
Here you can refine the list by looking at:
- Company size.
- Department.
You will then need to ‘segment’ these by clicking ‘Narrow’ and then selecting the targeting options to help refine your audience.
Targeting Via Interests
Next up is ‘interests’. You may find the focus of your budding campaign will be relevant to LinkedIn users per their interests. And luckily for you, LinkedIn enables targeting via this area.
LinkedIn’s Interest Targeting Options
In regards to ‘Interests’ on LinkedIn, there are currently 3 options:
- General
- Products
- Services
While ‘General Interests’ does have its benefits, you may find it is a bit too, well, general. Therefore, it can be wise to focus on one of the other 2 options. Most LinkedIn campaigns are created with a product/service as the focal point, which can make choosing the relevant one a no-brainer.
Targeting Via Products & Services
This works through LinkedIn’s nifty data-collection cookies, which allow you to see users who have previously expressed interest in relevant products or services.
Once you’ve conducted this research, you may then find useful audience candidates.
Targeting Users Who Have Recently Been Promoted
To maintain a relevant LinkedIn profile, we need to keep our details up to date – and that includes any recent promotions.
LinkedIn has a feature that allows marketers to search for users who have recently been promoted; this helps you narrow down the ‘Interests’ you’re searching for.
The reason recently-promoted users are relevant is that they may now have become key decision-makers who will implement new and innovative ideas and solutions into the company they work for, therefore targeting them with a product/service that may be beneficial to these ideas and solutions puts you at an advantage.
Targeting Via Company Names
Last but not least is targeting via companies you think would be lucrative leads.
LinkedIn allows you to target specific companies that you can find by typing them into the search bar, or harnessing them if you already have them uploaded to your Campaign Manager.
How to Successfully Target Companies on LinkedIn
Follow these simple steps to target your desired organizations:
- Search for your desired companies, either via LinkedIn’s search bar or through third-party tools.
- Create a file of these companies in a format that can be uploaded to your Campaign Manager. Upload when the list is complete.
- Create your campaign, apply the company list, and hone any other targeting options you wish to use.
Finding companies using LinkedIn’s search bar is quick, easy, and free. However, it won’t let you export the results to a separate file. To do this you would have to use the LinkedIn Sales Navigator tool.
Creating Your Company List File
For your file you will need a list with specific info:
| Company Name | Company LinkedIn URL |
| Microsoft (example) | https://www.linkedin.com/company/microsoft/ |
| Coca-Cola (example) | http://www.linkedin.com/company/coca-cola/ |
| BBC (example) | http://www.linkedin.com/company/bbc/ |
This list (which could be an Excel document, for example) then needs to be transferred into a CSV file.
Once you’ve done this, you will be able to upload it to your Campaign Manager (please note: it may take up to 2 days to fully upload, so don’t panic if you don’t see it immediately).
Targeting Specific Companies on LinkedIn
Now, you can create your campaign by selecting your list of desired companies. You may know this type of campaign as ‘account-based marketing’ (ABM), and once it’s completed and launched, these companies can now engage with the ad.
Conclusion
Few platforms rival LinkedIn when it comes to pinpointed and exact targeting, which is why it’s such an advantageous channel for B2B brands and marketers.
Once you explore all the targeting options via your Campaign Manager, you are one step closer to creating a campaign that targets your dream leads.
If you’d like to learn more about how we help B2B SaaS and Tech companies grow their MRR through LinkedIn advertising, contact us online or send us an email today at info@getuplead.com to speak with someone on our team.
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