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Targeting Your Audience Using LinkedIn

Targeting Your Audience Using LinkedIn
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Targeting is a key element of running a successful advertising campaign. Getting your targeting on point leads to higher engagement, and ultimately, higher conversion rates. 

Advertising on LinkedIn gets your message in front of the right audiences and you can leverage accurate member-provided data at scale. 

Let us explore how targeting on LinkedIn works and find out how LinkedIn allows you to market your business to those who matter most. 

Targeting on LinkedIn

With LinkedIn, you can reach a quality audience of leaders, influencers, decision-makers, executives, and buyers. You can target members using profile-based professional attributes, retarget visitors from your website, or based on ad engagement. 

Creating effective targeting combinations 

LinkedIn offers Campaign Manager, a self-service platform for creating and managing your ads. This allows you to segment your audiences in various ways, combine different targeting options and reach people relevant to your business. 

Interest-based targeting

Interest targeting can also help you reach a unique set of audiences when and if other targeting options are too narrow. 

Interest targeting reaches people based on the content members engage with on LinkedIn. This is an effective way to reach a range of members based on topics or categories they are most interested in. 

Use interest targeting with Function or Seniority. This helps focus your content on a more relevant audience. 

Audience Expansion and Lookalike

Audience Expansion and Lookalike Audiences deliver your ads to members who are similar to your target audience. This boosts the scale and reaches of your campaign. 

Use the Audience Expansion and Lookalike Audience options when you want to supplement your audience metrics by targeting more people who look similar to your target audience. 

Matched Audiences

Matched Audiences is a set of targeting capabilities that empower you to reach your target audience, using existing and past customer data with:

  • Website retargeting 
  • Retargeting by engagement
  • Contact targeting 
  • Company List targeting 

Tips to optimize your targeting strategy

Avoid putting all your buyer personas into one campaign

This will negatively affect your campaign performance. If you use one campaign to target professionals in different countries. You will not be able to effectively personalize your content for different stakeholder groups. 

Clearly define your buyer personas

Divide key personas into separate campaigns and group together the options that make sense. This will allow you to deliver the right messaging to specific audiences. 

Do not hyper-target your campaigns   

Avoid hyper-targeting, as a limited scale will hurt your campaigns. 

Use fewer targeting options

Add only two or fewer additional targeting options in addition to the location option. 

The last word

Using LinkedIn’s rich professional data along with your data makes you better equipped to connect with those who matter most to your business. 

Like all digital marketing efforts, targeting on LinkedIn requires experimentation. You will need to test and optimize over time to achieve success.

About the author

Dheeraj Kapoor

A content writer with over 5 years of experience, Dheeraj has written for a variety of domains including finance, education technology, technology, and Big Data among others.