By using LinkedIn’s audience targeting options, you can use your budget to target clients that are more likely to convert or audiences that traditionally perform better with your ads. LinkedIn groups are one of the best target options to test.
What is groups targeting on LinkedIn Ads?
According to LinkedIn, groups are “places where members who have shared interests or are part of professional associations can gather, interact, and ask questions”
LinkedIn groups are important to many members since they allow them to stay up to date on news and trends in their industry. Because of this, targeting groups is extremely beneficial for advertisers. Group members engage with the platform by consuming content, so they are not only more active LinkedIn members, but also more responsive and more likely to click on ad content.
Using LinkedIn groups targeting as a prospecting tactic, our LinkedIn advertising agency saw a CTR twice as high as all other prospecting campaigns promoting the same content.
How to reach niche audiences on LinkedIn using groups targeting
The main reason people avoid advertising on LinkedIn is cost. Being fair, this is completely understandable given that CPCs are more than 7 times higher than those on other social platforms.
As a result, you have a very limited amount of room for error, and getting it right the first time is imperative if you want a positive ROI. As a starting point for most of our LinkedIn campaigns, this article shares a targeting tip we often follow, and it has been successful for us many times.
When a campaign on LinkedIn has a limited budget, it is particularly difficult to target a very specific group of people at the same time. Whenever we are advertising something very specific, we have found that the typical methods of focusing on job titles and sectors just don’t work.
For these situations, we turn to targeting relevant groups to reach a much more targeted audience. Obviously, job titles and / or job functions can be layered on top of this targeting, but we have found that groups allow us to reach out to a much more specific and qualified audience.
Targeting sectors only goes so far, and that’s its disadvantage. The most effective way to market something that has a broad interest base is by using sectors or job functions, but if you need to go more granular, you might run out of options.
Say you want to market a whitepaper or webinar to people who run cyber security tests. Using the ‘target by functions’ option in LinkedIn, the closest thing you can do is to target those with the ‘Information technology’ function:
Case Study: How We Helped Kodo Survey Increase Demos by 167% Using LinkedIn Ads
You could of course try targeting by job title which does have some relevant options, however to capture every variation of relevant job title is going to be an inefficient and slightly annoying process, and the chances of missing some crucial job titles is high.
It is precisely here where targeting by ‘Member Groups’ shines through.
Targeting by group is based on the fact that generally people only join groups they are personally interested in. Thus, advertising to group members allows us to be fairly certain that we are communicating our message to the right people.
With our original goal of targeting people who run cyber security tests in mind, a quick search on LinkedIn reveals that the following groups would be interesting to target:
There aren’t a lot of users here, but when you’re talking to very specific audiences, smaller is often better. If you wanted to expand your reach, you wouldn’t have too hard a time finding similar groups related to security system and information system.
After changing the targeting options to ‘Member Groups’ in LinkedIn campaign manager, we see some of the groups that were identified above as well as a few other options. Start typing to find out what groups are available:
You might want to give it a try the next time you’re looking to target a very specific audience.
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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