With 610 million professional users, LinkedIn makes up more than half of all social traffic to B2B websites and blogs.
LinkedIn offers many practical features including sharing ideas and articles as well as networking online and researching companies. Recently, its platform made marketing improvements, too. If you’re in the B2B space, we highly recommend looking into using LinkedIn for advertising, as 40 million of its users are company decision makers. Here’s what you need to know about LinkedIn’s most recent updates.
Lookalike Audiences
The first update to LinkedIn’s advertising platform is the ability to define a similar audience based on your existing ideal customer targets.
Savvy companies can put LinkedIn’s analytics right into their websites, which in turn tracks the demographics and other important target information of visitors. Then, you can use this information to create an audience on LinkedIn similar to those who have been checking out your company online, which could potentially result in a higher conversion of audiences.
Other benefits of lookalike audiences include expanding the reach of your campaigns to more qualified prospects and targeting ads at companies you might not have previously considered.
If you’re working on marketing to a corresponding audience or are simply deploying a new ad campaign, this update makes it easier. Customers on LinkedIn’s pilot testing of the lookalike audience were able to improve their campaign reach by between five and 10 times, while still maintaining audience quality!
Audience Interest Targeting
Interest targeting allows marketers to reach LinkedIn users with relevant ads that match their professional interests. LinkedIn now uses Bing search engine data as well as information gathered on their platform to help select audiences by interest.
Audiences can still be created by targeting individual roles as well as companies, the latter of which is unique to LinkedIn. Combined, these audience targeting tools can increase your LinkedIn marketing dividends!
Audience Templates
The last update is LinkedIn’s new audience templates, which removes the lengthy process of creating a targeted audience for every single ad. Once you’ve created an audience for an ad, you can save that profile for later use.
The new template tool also comes with 20 predefined B2B audiences that can help you get started creating your targeted audience. These templates include defined member skills, job titles, and even groups of professionals you can target. Plus, they will be adding more predefined audiences over time so look for those in the future.
The Bottom Line
LinkedIn’s new advertising audience components make it easier to use their distinctive professional network to get in front of executives, decision-makers and promising talent.
If you’re using LinkedIn for your marketing, you now have more tools to target content while maintaining high-quality viewers and expanding your reach.
Want to learn more? Connect with our Digital Marketing Director, Kevin, to hone your overall digital marketing strategy. You can also call our offices anytime at 717-884-0014 to chat with an expert!