Outline
Introduction to Linkedin Targeting – Why Linkedin Targeting?, Audience Targeting Driven by Member Profiles, Match Your Targeting to Your Marketing Objectives, Knowledge Check.
How Linkedin Targeting Works – Two ways to target on Linkedin, When to use AND-OR Targeting, How to target by Audience Attributes, Knowledge Check.
Matched Audiences – How to create Linkedin matched audiences, Retargeting, Contact Targeting, Company Targeting, Audience Expansion, Knowledge Check
Optimizing your Targeting Strategy – Data Integrations with Linkedin Marketing Partners, View your Forecasted Results, Targeting best practices, Knowledge Check
About this Article:
This article will demonstrate how to use Linkedin’s powerful targeting attributes to define and reach business’ desired customers.
Explore Linkedin’s unique targeting and the important steps, best practices to tailor ad targeting strategy to the Linkedin campaign objectives.
What you’ll learn
After this article, you will be able to:
- Create target audiences using Linkedin’s first-party member data audience attributes.
- Combine business data with Linkedin’s data to create a matched audience.
- Explore the different campaign strategies you can employ with matched audiences.
- Refine targeting using AND-OR logic to broaden or narrow the audience.
- Optimize ad targeting strategy.
This article is for you if:
- You’re new to developing a targeting strategy.
- You’re interested in additional ways to target audiences.
- You want to optimize your existing ad campaigns.
Topics covered
Audience attributes, audience expansion, campaign manager, company targeting, contact targeting, forecasted results, matched audiences, retargeting, targeting.
Disclaimer: This article is inspired from Linkedin marketing academy
Why Linkedin Targeting?
Targeting is one of the most important parts of a successful advertising campaign.
When you target the right audience, you get better engagement, higher quality leads, and a stronger ROI (Return on Investment)
Linkedin stands out because it lets you target a high-quality professional audience in a professional environment.
Quality Audience
Linkedin members keep their profiles accurate and up to date for networking, personal branding, and career opportunities.
This gives advertisers access to realiable, member-provided professional data for precise targeting.
Linkedin has over 900 million professionals across 200+ countries.
It includes 58+ million companies, business decision-makers, 120,000 schools and 38,000 skills.
This broad professional network helps advertisers reach the entire buying committee involved in business decisions.
Professional Context of Linkedin
People use Linkedin with a professional mindset, unlike many other social media platforms.
Members visit Linkedin to grow their careers, build professional relationships, and stay informed.
They actively:
Share and consume professional content
Celebrate career milestones
Post work-related updates
List their job experience, skills, interests and achievements.
This rich professional information helps the advertisers identify and reach their ideal customer profile (ICP)
Industry Perspective
Kelly Cheng, Senior Marketing Specialist at PagerDuty, highlights that Linkedin’s targeting capabilities are unique because they combine accurate professional data with a business-focused environment, making it easier to reach the right audience.
Audience Targeting Driven by Member Profiles
Linkedin’s targeting is powered by the high-quality information that members give and regularly update in their profiles.
This helps advertisers reach the right professional audience with greater accuracy.
Member-Provided Profile Data
Linkedin’s targeting capabilities are based on the detailed information members add to their profiles.
Members regularly update their profiles for career growth, networking, and job opportunities.
This ensures advertisers can target audiences using reliable and current professional data.
Member-Provided vs. Inferred Data
Most Linkedin targeting attributes come directly from information that members provide or from their activity on the platform.
This means advertisers primarly use data that members have voluntarily shared and kept up to date.
Demographic Targeting
- Linkedin also offers demographic attributes like age and gender.
- These attributes are inferred from a member’s profile rather than directly provided.
- They can only be used for equal opportunity advertising.
- They cannot be used to discriminate based on age, gender, or other protected characteristics in advertisements related to employment, housing, education or credit.
Best Practice
- For most campaigns, Linkedin recommends using professional targeting attributes instead of age or gender.
- These include interests, member traits, skills and job functions.
- Professional targeting typically delivers stronger campaign performance and better results.
Match Targeting to Marketing Objectives
All the campaigns should be built around the marketing objective: awareness, consideration and conversion.
Awareness includes Job function + Seniority, Skills or Job Titles, Interest Targeting.
Consideration includes Job Titles + Member Traits, Uploaded Lists, Website Retargeting and Retargeting by Engagement.
Conversion includes uploaded lists, website retargeing and retargeting by engagement.
The minimum target audience size that Linkedin will allow is 300 members, but consider 50,000 as a minimum rule of thumb for success.
That gives enough information to find out who’s engaging with the ads.
Let’s Check if we know something
- Which of the following types of data is inferred on Linkedin?
- Gender
Company Industry- Age
Job Title
- What are the key aspects of the Linkedin audience?
- Members are incentivized to keep their profile accurate.
Linkedin infers all of its data based on member behavior.- Linkedin has the largest global community of professionals.
- Members engage with Linkedin in a professional context.
- What is the minimum audience size?
- 5,000
- 50,000
- 300
- 3,000
- You can only use Job Titles to target with Conversion objectives.
True- False
2 ways to target on Linkedin
When it comes to targeting on Linkedin, there are 2 methods to use: Audience attributes and Matched Audiences.
Audience Attributes: Target the audience by information either directly input or inferred from Linkedin member profiles.
Matched Audiences (Audiences) is the suite of targeting features that empowers an advertiser to reach an audience of members you already know by combining Linkedin’s powerful professional data with your own data.
For example, you can upload a list of companies or contacts, target people who visited your website, or import third-party data from a Linkedin Marketing Partner through easy-to-use integrations.
When to Use AND-OR Targeting
Using a combination of “AND” or “OR” can help you reach the right professionals even more efficiently.
To narrow and further refine your targeting criteria use “AND” to increase your audience to include members who meet one criterion or another use “OR”
Let’s see how using AND-OR targeting would impact the audience size.
Target using ‘OR’
- Select the targeting criteria
- Select the home icon to add additional criteria, this will ‘or’ any futher selections.
Targeting using ‘and’:
- Select targeting criteria.
- Select ‘Narrow audience further‘. It will open up a new panel which will say’And also have ANY of the following attributes’. Any selections made in this panel will ‘and’ with selections made in step 1.
Idea: Targeting by ‘AND’ or ‘OR’ works with any professional attributes and matched audiences.
How to Target by Audience Attributes
There are 3 scenarios when targeting by audience attributes
Scenario 1. Targeting by Company Attributes
Scenario 2: Job Experience + Skills and Interest targeting
Scenario 3: Targeting by Years of Experience
An advertiser can also exclude by targeting attributes.
When you’re targeting by job title, you cannot exclude job function or seniority.
It’s another way of mixing and combining specific traits to make sure that you are reaching exactly the right audience.
To familiarize with detailed descriptions of each available attribute, click here.