How to Leverage LinkedIn’s new Targeting Features
LinkedIn is a social networking platform and its ad-targeting features are amongst the best things to happen to B2B marketers in terms of lead generation.
On 20th of April, with the launch of LinkedIn’s new targeting features – a) Lookalike audience, and b) interest targeting with Microsoft Big Data, and c) audience templates, the marketers will be able to reach the ideal customers’ profiles, to scale their marketing efforts and improve ROI. The ad targeting features just got better.
Reaching the right people is paramount to the success of LinkedIn’s ad campaigns. With the launch of LinkedIn’s new targeting features, marketers now have three more new and exciting ways to easily target an increased number of their target audience from LinkedIn’s network comprised of about 610 million professionals.
One of the toughest things about advertising is reaching the right people. There exist numerous ways to define the target audience, and deciding how to reach your target audience can be tough.
Let’s see how LinkedIn’s new ad targeting features can not only help you reach your ideal customers but also the ones similar to your ideal audiences who might be interested in your business:
1. The ‘Lookalike Audiences’ feature helps you grow your Business
Marketers are always looking for new ways to tap into the new audience bases similar to their ideal customers. There is a high probability of the audiences similar to your ideal persona to engage with your products or services and generate the required conversions.
Lookalike audiences are amongst LinkedIn’s new ad targeting features that help marketers combine the traits of their ideal customers with the rich member and company data, accessed from the LinkedIn’s platform to help marketers reach the new groups of professional audiences, website visitors and target accounts similar to their existing customers.
The lookalike audiences are the active LinkedIn members who are in the right frame of mind and professional enough to engage with and respond to a particular brand.
Lookalike audiences is an important addition to LinkedIn’s new ad targeting features because of the following reasons:
- It helps you reach a high converting audience base
With the help of lookalike audiences, which happens to amongst LinkedIn’s new ad targeting features marketers can discover audiences similar to those who have already expressed an interest in their businesses by performing actions such as, engaging on the businesses’ websites or submitting their contact info.
- It can help you boost your conversions
The ‘lookalike audiences’ functionality is unique among LinkedIn’s new ad targeting features and helps marketers extend the reach of their campaigns to more qualified prospects.
With the help of the lookalike audiences feature, the marketers are able to improve the reach of their campaigns by 5-10 times without compromising on the high-quality of the audiences, i.e. the ones that resonate the best with their businesses.
- It helps you engage with new target accounts
The B2B advertisers using account-based marketing can use lookalike audiences to target their ads to additional companies. Thus, the lookalike audiences functionality that falls under the latest additions of LinkedIn’s new ad targeting features, helps marketers to reach out to additional companies that they might never have previously considered. These new companies have a similar company profile to the ideal customer detailing list provided by the marketers and thus, the marketers stand a better chance to win more deals.
Create a Matched Audience in the Campaign Monitor to get started with the lookalike audiences functionality. The list of lookalike audiences can include the list of target accounts from the businesses’ CRMs or the list of the audiences that visited the businesses’ websites.
2. The interest targeting from LinkedIn and Microsoft allow the marketers to own the Conversation
Of late, LinkedIn’s new ad targeting features announced include interest targeting in Campaign Manager. This feature allows the marketers to reach the members with the description provided in the ads, having the same professional interests that the marketers wish to target. Now, LinkedIn has expanded it’s interest targeting dominion and allows marketers to target based on a combination of their audiences professional interests on LinkedIn and the professional topics and pieces of content that the marketers’ target audiences engage with, using Microsoft’s Bing search engine while prioritizing the members’ privacy concerns.
With the help of audience templates, finding the right audiences becomes simple. For those who are new to LinkedIn advertising or an existing advertiser aiming to reach new audiences, audience templates can prove to be highly beneficial.
This functionality is amongst the most amazing LinkedIn’s new ad targeting features, in that it gives the marketers an option to choose from a selection of more than 20 predefined B2B audiences (and growing) to help marketers get a faster start to begin with.
Several audience characteristics such as member skills, job titles, groups, etc. are included in these templates, all of which can be activated with a single click. With the help of this functionality, marketers can actively reach the professional audiences that matter the most to their businesses. Also, the set up is quite uncomplicated and marketers needn’t spend hours on it.
Wrapping Things Up
Overall, the marketers using LinkedIn’s new ad targeting features, including lookalike audiences, audience templates and interest targeting using LinkedIn and Microsoft Bing data have positive things to say.
Harold Christensen, Digital Account Director at Labelium states, “We use lookalike audiences as one part of our strategy to drive lower-funnel conversions. We were able to reach a highly relevant audience that generated more contacts and leads in a way that was profitable for our clients.”
In another statement Matt Campbell, Multi-channel Marketing Specialist at SAS Institute stated that they used interest targeting on their brand awareness campaigns and they got extremely satisfactory results.
Now that you understand LinkedIn’s new ad targeting features, it’s time to apply them to get the most out of your LinkedIn ad campaigns.
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