LinkedIn Provides New Targeting Options Including Lookalike Audiences
By: Shivam Singh, Digital Marketing Specialist
Tags: LinkedIn, Marketing, Advertising, Marketing Strategies, Digital Marketing

The careers network LinkedIn provides helpful new targeting features such as Bing search data, Lookalike audiences, or audience templates.

With LinkedIn, an internationally important social careers network has been established, which is important for the distribution of content and ads. Advertisers can find relevant target groups there because they can be segmented according to interests and their jobs. Now the platform delivers three new targeting options designed to boost advertising effectiveness, thanks to insights from Bing or pre-set audiences.

Reach millions of professionals with the right targeting

According to LinkedIn, 610 million users, who are often cited as professionals, are now found on LinkedIn. Exactly because of the information about their jobs and also their professional interests, these users are so interesting for advertisers. In order to achieve this purpose, sophisticated targeting is required. As a result, LinkedIn now offers advertisers three new features that can effectively support them. These are lookalike audiences, audience templates and the integration of Bing search data into solution interest targeting. These options are designed to strengthen LinkedIn’s marketing activities and increase advertisers’ ROI.

Especially the Lookalike Audiences should let marketers listen. These combine the requirements of the advertisers to ideal target groups with the database of LinkedIn users. In this way, people can be reached who clearly resemble the existing customer. The company provides three options in the blog post provided by Lookalike Audiences. It can be the target groups identified which exhibit a high engagement, such as Likes or visits from your page, and thus a more likely conversion can be accommodated. Furthermore, the feature helps to find more qualified potential customers. In the test, advertisers were able to increase their campaign reach five to ten times and still have access to the high-quality target groups that are relevant to their brand.

We use lookalike audiences as one part of our strategy to drive lower funnel conversions. What were the profitable ones for our clients?

explains Harold Christensen, Digital Account Director of Labelium.

In the context of B2B marketing, advertisers using Lookalike Audiences can also integrate new, as yet unfocused, companies as the target of their ads. The companies then meet the ideal customer groups as well.

Lookalike Audience on LinkedIn (click on the image for a larger view), © LinkedIn

A Lookalike Audience can be created by creating a Matched Audience in the Audience Manager. Here lists with target accounts or CRM contacts can be used. Audiences that have visited your site are also intended for audience creation.

Refine interest targeting with Bing data

The careers network had presented only in January, the solution Interest Targeting. This is to reach users who have interests relevant to the respective campaign. These are determined by content that they share on LinkedIn, like, etc. This interest targeting is now supplemented by data from Microsoft’s search engine Bing. This analyzes the target groups in even greater detail. For now, LinkedIn-mediated interests are also combined with interests stemming from searches and content that Bing’s users come into contact with. However, the data security of these users should be strictly monitored.

Interest targeting is a relevant factor at LinkedIn, © LinkedIn

Audience templates help launch new campaigns

Anyone who advertises on LinkedIn, but is not yet fully aware of which target group is optimal for the campaign, can use Audience templates on a feature that helps. After all, this will initially provide 20 — more to follow — preset B2B target groups that can be selected for the ad.

Audience Templates provide pre-defined audience options, (click on the image to get a larger view), © LinkedIn

These target groups take into account characteristics such as groups and job titles or specified skills of the users. These can be selected with one click if they are relevant for the campaign. In this way, LinkedIn wants advertisers to save time setting up campaigns. Over the next two weeks, the new targeting options will be made available to all LinkedIn marketers. If you want to know more about strong targeting and marketing on LinkedIn, you can also refer to the company’s detailed e-book.

In any case, networks such as XING and LinkedIn are different from Facebook and Instagram, and offer marketers, especially in the B2B sector, their own opportunities to reach qualified and valuable audiences who promise less engagement, and more conversions and longer-term brand engagement.