CBD Resource : Your Quick & Easy Guide to Harness Targeting Options on LinkedIn

Sharpening your ability to target the right audience when they’re motivated to act is as important as the content you share. Match the ideal marketing message to the proper people at the crucial decision-making moment, and voila — you’re in a position to drive action.

LinkedIn’s powerful targeting tools come with unique benefits, like simply being on LinkedIn in the first place. It’s where more than 700 million members worldwide network, advance their careers, and connect based on who they are and what they do professionally. So members have ample incentive to keep their profiles current and accurate, giving marketers fertile ground to engage influencers, C-suite execs and decision makers by the tens of thousands at scale.

But with such a vast audience to choose from and so many variables to consider, where do you start? And how do you zero in on what can seem like an ever-moving target?

To access all the benefits of LinkedIn targeting, we’ve created this highly tactacile yet easy-to-follow quick-start tutorial with simple setup and visual guides. Here we’ll touch on a brief overview of getting started, selecting your audience, and how you can begin to shape your targets.

Launching With Campaign Manager

LinkedIn’s ad management tool is a self-service platform that empowers you to create campaigns, launch in your choice of 23 languages, and continually evaluate the performance of your content.

You’ll be introduced to your Campaign Manager screen and prompted to select your desired objective, from generating awareness and building brand trust, to giving your target audience compelling reasons to act upon their interest in your business.

Based on your selection, Campaign Manager will suggest your best options, including Sponsored Content, Sponsored Messaging, and Lead Gen Forms.

Audience Selection

Once you’ve determined what you want to accomplish with your campaign, it’s time to select the ideal audience to reach. Our quick-start guide shares a variety of tips for helping you define who sees your content, like reviewing a few member profiles for inspiration, special endorsed skills to consider, and expanding beyond C-suite personnel to include other key decision makers within organizations.

Learn about:

Estimating Audience Size: Use Forecasted Results as you go to understand more about your target audience, its makeup, and its scope. You’ll learn about criteria to launch your campaign (you must target at least 300 members), and what optimal scale to aim for based on the type of campaign you’re running
Segment Breakdown: Segment breakdown displays professional attributes that LinkedIn members provide. Things like job function, years of experience, company size, industries, and interest will help you adjust your targeting selections, and will update accordingly to reflect your audience.

Targeting Options

The unique power of LinkedIn’s targeting options for matching message to mindset can be a game changer, and help you consistently reach the most relevant audiences when they’re most engaged. Campaign Manager will guide you through target setup options to customize your audience.

Discover more than 200 characteristics to help tailor your targeting. Mix and match, A/B test variances in your audience, save and reuse winning combinations, and track results for maximum impact to scale your campaign and drive awareness.

Some of the different targeting facets covered in our quick-start guide include:

Location and Language: Define the Location and Language of the members you’d like to reach. Location is the only mandatory field. A member’s Location can be based on the Location included in their profile as well as their IP address.
Job Function: Based on standardized groupings of the job titles entered by members. For example, the Medical function includes doctors, nurses, veterinarians, surgeons, dentists, and other members with similar occupations.
Job Title: When members update their profile with a new role, job titles are grouped by LinkedIn’s algorithms and organized into standardized titles to help lock in on the most relevant members to your content.
Seniority: For some campaigns, targeting by job seniority can be an effective way to reach those with influence over a buying decision.
Years of Experience: LinkedIn calculates a member’s Years of Experience (YOE) by adding together the duration of each individual job experience a member has listed — excluding any gaps in experience or overlapping positions.
Skills: Skills are highly relevant keywords found within a member’s profile and skills section that indicate expertise in a particular area, and include those explicitly added by members in their skills section as well as keywords and phrases mentioned throughout their profile and summary.
Company Information: Focus your campaign on high-value targets, expand your reach and share the most pertinent content with those you want to do business with.

Ready to increase the reach of your content with the most highly-qualified audience? Put the power of LinkedIn’s Targeting to work for you. Download the quick-start guide today to shape your next campaign, and get your message to the right people at just the right time.