Targeting

How LinkedIn Targeting Works?

Targeting is a foundational element of running a successful advertising campaign — Getting your targeting right leads to higher engagement, and, ultimately, higher conversion rates. 

LinkedIn targeting is differentiated because members are incentivized to keep their profiles accurate and up-to-date for networking, personal branding, and job opportunities. With LinkedIn, you can reach a quality audience composed of influencers, decision-makers, and executives. 

When members complete their LinkedIn profiles, they provide information on their job experiences, company, skills, and more. 

This means you can target members using profile-based demographic information,  re-target visitors from your website, or upload lists of contacts or companies for your account-based marketing efforts. 

On LinkedIn, you can reach members using the following demographic targeting options:

Tips to Optimize your Targeting Strategy

Now that you’ve learned about the different ways you can target your ads in Campaign Manager, you’ll want to know how you can optimize your targeting strategy to ensure you’re getting the most out of your campaigns. 

Here are four important LinkedIn targeting do’s and don’ts to get you started: 

DO

Make sure your buyer personas are clear and well-defined. 

Break out key personas into separate campaigns and group together the options that make sense, including related industries, geographies, and job functions. This will help you deliver the right messaging to a specific subset of LinkedIn members

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

We recommend the following audience sizes for LinkedIn’s advertising products. Keep in mind, there’s no one size fits all recommendation which is why testing is crucial. 

• Sponsored Content: 300,000+ members
• Text Ads: between 60,000 and 400,000 members
• Sponsored InMail: 100,000 or fewer member

DON’T

Hyper-target your campaigns.

It’s tempting to use every targeting feature possible. However, a limited scale will hurt your campaigns.

Lump all of your buyer personas into one campaign.

You’ll likely see poor campaign performance if you use just one campaign to target professionals in different countries, from different continents, and in unrelated industries and functions. If your target audiences are all lumped together, you’ll have trouble personalizing your content for each stakeholder group.