Mastering LinkedIn Targeting for B2B Marketing Success

Amongst many of the social networks, LinkedIn has come a particularly long way. What was once pigeonholed as a living resume for job seekers and feeding ground for hungry recruiters, is now a bustling community of active professionals in all industries. Here is where modern thought leaders are born, ideas are exchanged, and networks are grown. While consumer-facing social media advertising is now no less than common practice, B2B marketers may be left wondering where to start. Fortunately, there are quite a few ways you can effectively reach your business-facing audience, using LinkedIn audience targeting.

Be Present

Showing up is half the battle! First and foremost, your company should have an established page on LinkedIn. This page should serve as the hub for potential customers to find you on the networking platform. Keeping a regular flow of content is also key to your baseline presence on LinkedIn. In fact, 94% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn to distribute their content. Tailor your postings on this network towards the audience your business-facing audience. Be sure to write about issues your prospects may be facing, as well as information on how you may fit into the solution.

Lead the Pulse

Speaking of actual content, LinkedIn has become a central hub for business leaders and companies to exchange thoughts and ideas. Not only should you be putting out original content through your company page, but company leaders as well! Consider galvanizing your business-facing employees into generating their own articles for LinkedIn. By establishing your salesmen and business development professionals as thought leaders, the process will have a much more personal touch for your prospects.

The Wide World of LinkedIn Audience Targeting

Now it’s time to get down to the nitty-gritty. After you’ve established your baseline presence and content strategy, it’s time to get that presence in front of the right people. Fortunately, LinkedIn Ads has a gratuitously robust targeting platform for targeting just the right professionals that you are looking for. Here are just a few of the tools at your disposal with LinkedIn audience targeting:

Location: Focusing your marketing efforts regionally? Going for a big national push? With the location targeting feature, you can hone down your reach. This way you can target only the locations that matter to you most.
Industry: Due to LinkedIn profiles containing a user’s current positions and links to company pages, ads are able to be targeted to any combination of specific industries. As a result, you can quickly segment your ads. Targeting, for example, only employees within the industries that you would like to reach.
Job Title/Job Function: Looking to reach only employees in the HR department? How about content specifically tailored to IT Directors? By tailoring your content and ads towards specific jobs or functions, you can ensure that your dollar only goes to those who would benefit most and be more likely to convert.
Years of Experience/Seniority: With such a high concentration of industry leaders using LinkedIn, there is a bustling community of high-level decision-makers that can see your content. For those harder-sell content pieces only geared for those with the power to pull the trigger, consider targeting to only more senior-level employees. On the flip side, this also provides you with the opportunity to put content in front of ground-level employees that may see the most immediate need for your product.

The Almighty InMail

Okay, so technically this shares the same LinkedIn audience targeting and is one of their ad products. But due to the unique nature of this highly personalized ad unit, it deserves its own section. If you are even a semi-active LinkedIn user, you have no doubt received at least one Sponsored InMail message.

These nifty ad buys are unlike no other social media ad product on the market. You can tailor a long-form message to be delivered directly to the inboxes of your targeted prospects with InMail. The message also comes from a person, not a company. This provides yet another valuable opportunity to put a face to your message. All of these targeted and powered by the robust targeting platform described above.

Want to chat more about how you can leverage LinkedIn’s potential for your B2B product? Drop us a line at [email protected].