In our first two articles, Reaching Your Exact Audience Using LinkedIn’s Comprehensive Demographic Targeting (Part 1) and (Part 2), we gave an overview of the targeting types available for LinkedIn. In a few examples, we showed how you can focus in on a very specific set of Job Titles and Functions, and filter even further by specifying Company Size to reach the exact target you desire. Today, in the final installment, we focus on Group targeting, and recommend some other combinations of segments to approach your targets from all angles and give yourself the best opportunity for success.
Segmenting using Skills Targeting
LinkedIn uses many different types of targeting options designed to allow you to target your advertising to focused groups. Much like Job Title and Skills targeting, the Group targeting option allows you to type in some groups and drill down into similar groups to build out a comprehensive list intended to target your ads. For example, we started with the term Advertising and can see a list organizations and groups such as Advertising Professional, Mobile Marketing & Advertising and Advertising & Professional Merchandise in our suggestions. In an earlier example, we mentioned a focus on mobile, so to properly narrow our targeting, we picked Mobile Marketing and Advertising. Some additional groups we might use for the Mobile campaign are shown in the screen shot.
As we have shown before, use the “Consider adding:” suggestions in LinkedIn to provide ideas on how you might better or more narrowly focus your campaigns. As you continue to add in groups, LinkedIn updates the total number of LinkedIn members that fall into that category. Just like any other targeting, adding additional groups will add members to your audience but be conscious targeting to keep it tightly focused. As with any combined targeting, if you plan to add additional targeting like Company Name or Industry, your numbers will drop significantly, so do keep things broad until you have added limitations and then check to see if your audience is a manageable size.
Putting Focused Targeting Together
At this point, we need to put together all the targeting we discussed from the all of the articles. In the Companies category targeting field, we selected Marketing and Advertising. To further focus, we added Marketing and Media & Communications job function category targeting to find job titles of individuals actively involved in marketing functions. We want to target by skill name to reach individuals who list Mobile Advertising and Mobile Marketing as their skills set. Finally, we picked a few group names like Advertising Professionals, Digital Marketing and Digital Media Living to complete our targeting by individuals who belong to target organizations. The audience for our new campaign contains 12,103 individuals and focuses directly on our desired Mobile Advertising and Marketing professionals.
The targeting we just created sets a template for additional campaigns. By removing the Mobile Advertising and Mobile Marketing skills and can add Search Advertising, Display Campaigns and Ad Networks to reach individuals in a different but associated marketing area. Obviously, many varied additional skill names give us plenty of options to target and test.
In our three articles, we looked at the many options for laser focused targeting of LinkedIn campaigns. Using these targeting techniques to reach potential clients for your products and services allows you slice your advertising into very small target audiences unmatched on most other advertising platforms.
