Due to its focus being notably different than other social media platforms, LinkedIn offers a similarly different focus for advertising. In particular, it can uniquely reach executives, C-suites, and generally people who are making decisions either on behalf of, or impacting their business.
For this reason, it is really the most valuable social media advertising platform for B2B marketing. There are a variety of ad formats, such as:
- Article & newsletter
- Carousel
- Click to message
- Conversation
- Document
- Event
- Follower
- Lead gen forms
- Message
- Single Image
- Spotlight
- Text
- Thought leader
- Video
In general, use cases are especially for lead generation, brand awareness, account-based marketing, or to gain more followers to help boost the efficacy of future campaigns.
Understanding LinkedIn’s targeting options
Accordingly, LinkedIn has a number of targeting options reflecting this. Let’s take a look:
- Location: Pretty self-explanatory — this can be very important or less so depending on the nature of your business, but is naturally one of the basics.
- Company targeting, contact targeting, and retargeting: This allows you to target past contacts and those who’ve interacted with your business before.
- Professional demographics: For example, this could be based on job title, job function, seniority, etc.
- Company targeting: Similar to the demographic targeting but for companies themselves, you can target based on a company’s size, their industry, name, and revenue.
- Education and skillsets: This can encompass a variety of factors, like someone’s degree, their field of study, or their skill tags they’ve listed on LinkedIn.
- Interests and traits: Similar to skillsets, you can target people based on if they’re members in any groups, or based on their listed interests.
We should note, however, one caveat: When targeting based on age, that isn’t necessarily accurate — LinkedIn uses the assumption that users are 22 upon their listed college graduation, which as we know is not even close to being a sure thing. So, while looking at age can be a tool on LinkedIn, it’s good to be aware that it’s an imperfect method.
Audience testing
If you’ve ever read anything by Fujisan before, you know how much we go on about the importance of testing! Guess what: In a shocking turn of events, that’s still true here!
Running tests on your campaigns — in this case, with the uncontrolled variable being different audience targeting options — allows you to see which controlled changes lead to the most optimal results. AKA: Which input leads to the best output?
For LinkedIn specifically, you have a variety of testing abilities based on how targeted LinkedIn allows businesses to be with their ads. For example, you can test targeting based on job title versus the same based on job function. You can also test targeting for prospective audiences or retargeting for audiences who’ve already interacted with you. (We should note however that targeting limitations in the European Economic Area — commonly known as EEA — may impact your testing abilities.)
This is all important because it simply allows you to identify the audience that performs the best for your campaign — while also giving you foundational insight into what audience conditions are likely to perform best for future campaigns too.
At the same time, this testing can potentially highlight previously undiscovered opportunities, and this all works together to improve your overall campaign efficiency.
Bottom line
With LinkedIn’s uniquely professional focus, there are audiences there that you won’t find on any other social media platform. For many businesses — certainly B2B ones — that means LinkedIn can give you potentially the by far most-relevant audiences.
You’re not only able to target people in a professional sphere, but you’re able to further test and refine to constantly improve your efforts to that end.
And of course, if you ever want digital marketing help — on social media or otherwise — don’t hesitate to give Fujisan a call!
