If you read my first blog article that discussed the most popular social media advertising platforms, you would have heard about LinkedIn and the different advertising products they offer. What I didn’t mention in that article was how LinkedIn has quickly become one of my favourite advertising platforms for generating leads and that most B2B businesses should be utilizing it!
For those of you who don’t know, LinkedIn is the largest professional platform in the world and has a rich, professional data set that enables you to target many individual characteristics. Let’s start by reviewing some of LinkedIn’s organic posting statistics.
Back in April of 2016, I attended a webinar hosted by LinkedIn titled: “Tactical Plan to Content Marketing on LinkedIn”. The webinar was held by the members of LinkedIn’s agency consulting team and they shared a LinkedIn statistic published by Oktopost: In analyzing over 100,000 posts across Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn, Oktopost found that over 80% of all B2B leads in this dataset came from LinkedIn.
If we look through more of LinkedIn’s resources, we can see that:
• LinkedIn drives more traffic to corporate websites and blogs than any other social network.
• 62% of B2B marketers consider LinkedIn to be the most effective B2B social tool.
• 91% of B2B marketers leverage LinkedIn.
• 77% of B2B marketers plan to increase their use of LinkedIn.
• 50% of LinkedIn members report they are more likely to buy from a company they engage with on LinkedIn.
• 80% of members want to connect with companies to enhance their decision making.
Due to these numbers and LinkedIn’s proven performance, we recommend that most of our B2B clients utilize it as an advertising platform. By advertising on LinkedIn, our clients reach more LinkedIn users and, with LinkedIn’s incredible targeting capabilities, reach the most qualified traffic for their businesses. Let’s review some of LinkedIn’s targeting capabilities now.
LinkedIn offers many great targeting options that enable you to reach professionals like never before. There are 15 different targeting options, all of them fairly unique in their own way. In order to save you some time, let’s discuss my top five.
Company Name
A targeting tactic that requires some good, old fashioned market research—one that we’ve used in the past—is company name targeting. Company name targeting shows your ads to users who are currently employed by the organizations you target, which is extremely useful if you know who your target businesses are; if you don’t, that’s where market research comes in. In the past, we have utilized a list of our client’s top 100 ideal B2B customers.
Company Industry
If your company’s products/services are applicable to an entire industry, you should absolutely look into utilizing industry targeting. This feature allows you to target users that are employed within a certain predefined industry. LinkedIn’s predefined industries range from accounting to wine and spirits, with a whole lot in-between.
Job Title
With this LinkedIn targeting capability, you’re able to show your ads exclusively to people in job roles relevant to the products/services you offer. Let’s say, for instance, your product/services are only applicable to a company’s purchasing agents. Job title targeting allows you to only show your ads to purchasing agents, affectively reaching your niche target audience.
Degrees
One of the more unique targeting capabilities is how LinkedIn can focus on your target audience’s degree level. If you feel that users with a bachelor’s degree, master’s degree, or doctorate (in a specific field) are most likely to purchase your product, utilizing this feature can be incredibly beneficial.
Years of Experience
Targeting by member age can be tough as individuals start their careers at different times; for example, a member may be 30 years old with 10 years’ experience or 40 years old with 5 years’ experience. LinkedIn has accounted for this by allowing you to target users by the years of experience they have (ranging from 1 to 12+).
There are certain limitations but several of the available 15 targeting options can be layered on top of one another, making your targeting more granular while ensuring you reach your niche audience.
Below is an example of Sigma Assessment Systems’, one of tbk Creative’s clients, boosted posts that performed very well. For this ad, we used a combination of location, seniority, company name, and company size targeting.
For another example, here is one of our own boosted posts that utilizes company name, location, job role, and company size targeting. The post is about the new Lerners LLP website we launched in May of 2016.
At the end of the day, it is all about knowing your audience and creating a targeting plan that will effectively reach them.
Conclusion
In conclusion, LinkedIn is an incredible asset for both small and big B2B businesses. The platform becomes even more effective when you utilize their incredibly granular targeting options.
If you are interested in LinkedIn advertising or other digital advertising solutions, please do not hesitate to reach out to my team of digital marketing professionals at tbk Creative.