Over the past few years, LinkedIn has become a crucial part of the ad campaigns of many marketers. And if you’re still not using this platform, you may missing out on boosting your conversion rates and increasing your ROI.
With LinkedIn, you can benefit from a highly focused user base and connect with your prospects effortlessly. Considered as the social network for professionals, expect to interact with business decision makers and senior-level influencers.
The best thing is that using the platform for your ad campaigns gives you the ability to polish your entire strategy and make it more relevant for your audience. To enable you to reach that precise target market, LinkedIn offers these targeting options:
Targeting options for LinkedIn advertisements
Compared to other paid advertising platforms, such as Facebook Ads and Google AdWords, the targeting options available in LinkedIn are more advanced. Here’s a list of the available options you can use for targeting as you’re creating your LinkedIn campaign.
1. Location
The platform offers you the convenience of targeting an audience by location, whether it’s by country, city, state, region, or zip code. Location targeting best works for when you’re focusing on a specific area for a localized ad campaign, promoting an event, or serving a particular metro area.
2. Job title
Job title targeting is another unique option offered by LinkedIn that you can’t see on many platforms except Facebook. Such criteria are very specific as you will be able to filter a narrower target. For example, instead of targeting “lawyer,” marketers can target “senior lawyer.” However, take note that job titles vary depending on things like companies. An account executive at one company might be called an account manager at others.
This option is not recommended for targeting unique, specific titles often created by several companies. For instance, you won’t be able to target a “chief happiness officer,” as this isn’t a common title and has an unknown job description.
3. Function
If you’re opting for smarter and more efficient targeting, job function is the better choice. Here you can filter the users’ job titles into various functional areas. In a way, you’ll be targeting which departments employees belong to and focusing on the functions they perform.
Some of the available job functions include arts and design, accounting, business development, media and communication, sales, business development, human resources, legal, marketing, and tons more. Opt for this option only if the professionals you’re planning to target have clear job functions.
4. Seniority
This method is ideal if you want to filter your targets by their levels of experience and responsibility. You can target LinkedIn users who are in entry-level up to those in high-level positions. Seniority options available include training, unpaid, entry, manager, director, senior, owner, partner, VP, and CXO.
A more efficient approach for your ad campaign is to combine job function with seniority. This enables you to expand audience size while still ensuring qualified targets.
5. Interests
Based on the data it acquires from members’ posts and the engagement they get, LinkedIn can associate specific interest categories. There are two criteria for this method: member interests and member groups.
Member interests are ideal for targeting audiences with interests that align with one’s business. The list includes arts and entertainment, careers and employment, business and management, marketing and advertising, society and culture, sales and retail, politics and law, and many more.
Member groups are for users who share traits, interests, and professional associations by belonging to the same LinkedIn group. Users active in LinkedIn groups are typically avid readers, so this is an excellent approach to the highly engaged parts of LinkedIn members.
6. Skills
If you’re opting to target prospects via technical and applicable knowledge, the skills option is ideal, which is said to be more specific than the job title method. Such skills can be seen in the Skills & Endorsements sections of the users’ profiles.
This targeting option is also ideal for marketers planning to promote trade shows and conferences. Depending on your ad copy and messaging, you can increase ticket sales and gain event visibility as well.
7. Industry
Industry targeting is the recommended method for businesses that serve limited or niche markets. Not to be confused with job function targeting, this allows you to connect with users based on their companies’ primary industries.
Some examples are arts (performing arts and fine art), corporate services (accounting and human resources), design (planning and architecture), entertainment (broadcast media and motion pictures), media and communications (writing and editing, marketing and advertising, and publishing), and many others.
8. Company size
If your brand services certain company sizes, this is the targeting option for you. You can select different sizes, from those with eleven to fifty employees up to ones with around ten thousand staff members.
The approach for this type of targeting may vary depending on the size of company you’re targeting. Nevertheless, you can create several campaigns that vary according to company size, then customize your ad copy for that target.
9. Negative targeting
A different way of targeting is to exclude certain options. So if you are planning to target large-enterprise organizations, you can exclude companies with fewer than ten thousand employees. The downside is that it’s not actually ideal to use exclusion targeting if you’ll obtain more scale rather than including.
With a multitude of targeting options to choose from, make sure to utilize and combine the right methods to effectively engage with different buyer personas and, of course, achieve your campaign goals.
Tips to optimize your LinkedIn company profile
Prior to setting up your campaigns, you need to first ensure that your company profile or page is optimized. It serves as a valuable asset for interacting with your target audience, so you need to ensure it’s ready to engage. To help you optimize your page and boost your presence, here are five tips for creating a compelling company profile.
1. Have an up-to-date profile photo and cover photo
The profile picture is the first thing LinkedIn users will see when they search for your company, so it has to look great. Pick an image that is straightforward, like one with your company logo in it.
The ideal image specs are in PNG format, square layout, maximum of 8 MB, and 300×300 pixels. Putting on a profile banner is also recommended, with specs of PNG format, rectangular layout, maximum of 8 MB, and 1536×768 pixels.
Opt for the approach that suits your brand’s aspect. You can choose simple and sleek images if you want a cleaner look or active/actionable images with your brand hashtags to drive better engagement.
2. Create your About or Summary section
Aside from the page images, you also need an About Us section that tells a story. A well-optimized one is not too long and straight to the point. It should include details that the visitors should know about your company. Ideally, it needs to answer these basic questions:
- Who are you?
- What does your company offer?
- What is your brand voice?
- Where is your company based?
- What are your business values?
- How can people get in touch with you?
Make sure that all information is accurate and up-to-date, especially your contact number, email, and official website URL.
3. Don’t forget the other key fields
According to LinkedIn, complete company pages receive about 30 percent more weekly views than those incomplete pages. To make your page more discoverable, be sure to fill out fields such as your address, URL, industry, company size, and HQ country. By providing such details, the visitors can have an idea about how many employees you have or if your brand is global or not.
4. Create Showcase Pages
Another thing to do is to create Showcase Pages to highlight your initiatives, as well as your products and services. Every page should have a unique product banner, description, and logo. You can also post content on such pages.
Furthermore, your Showcase Page should have a good tagline that tells visitors what the page is. Use a 120-character tagline to describe your page and the content you’re planning to share. Talking about content, it’s advisable to regularly share page-specific content, focusing on a certain aspect of your brand. Other uses for these pages are to highlight your team’s accomplishments, advertise new products, and build a learning center.
5. Request recommendations
Just like a testimonial, asking for recommendations will allow you to show how good your products and services are. If you use an automated delivery system, you can incorporate this into the delivery form so the customers can readily give you a review, or just ask for them every time you sell your products.
The best part is, once a LinkedIn user gives you a recommendation, it will show up on their news feed as well. The more news feeds you appear on, the better. After all, news feed marketing is beneficial to boosting engagement and exposure for your brand.
Launch it and engage!
If there’s an excellent place to launch your engagement campaigns, it’s your LinkedIn company page. Always be on the lookout for new features to get the best of the company-level engagement that the platform offers. Follow the above-mentioned tips and prepare to see some action on your page.
Want to get started with a kick-ass LinkedIn Ad campaign? Don’t hesitate to contact us and let our team of marketing professionals take your advertising to another level!
