Convert your audience on LinkedIn with earned persona targeting
If you’re a B2B event marketer, then your target audience is on LinkedIn. It is the world’s number one B2B database after all. It’s all about how you reach each individual person with messaging that resonates with them. You should know by now that the spray and pray approach doesn’t work, so don’t even try to justify it.
On LinkedIn, your tactics can be split into two clear categories: earned and paid. I’ll focus on earned persona targeting in this blog, so check back next week for information on paid persona targeting on LinkedIn.
Earned persona targeting on LinkedIn
- Your personal network (1st level connections)
Your personal network gives you one-on-one messaging capabilities, perfect for one-on-one invitations. When you message someone in your network they get notified via email, the LinkedIn inbox, the app and the website. And for Europeans, this is 100% GDPR compliant. What’s more, this allows you to publish content that will be seen by this persona.
For precision targeting of specific persona segments use LinkedIn Sales Navigator to build highly targeted, 1st level connection personas lists, then save them as ‘saved searches’. You can then message/invite the personas within the saved search.
There are a number of automated growth-hacks to implement the above at volume (while still being extremely targeted). All while self guarding your business from someone leaving with ‘your’ connection list of personas. Contact us directly about these growth-hacks.
- LinkedIn Groups
LinkedIn Groups that you own and manage are the most underappreciated yet most powerful social media assets for persona targeting.
Once a persona becomes a group member, LinkedIn gives you the ability to message them directly, which is ideal for one-on-one event invitations. Exactly like messaging 1st level connections, when you send an invitation to a group member the message goes to their email, LinkedIn inbox, app and notifications. This communication is also 100% GDPR compliant.Also, similar to communicating with your 1st connections, you can use LinkedIn Sales Navigator and do advanced searches within your group. This way, you can build a specific LinkedIn group persona list.
NB – We’re getting 5% of event registrations from single LinkedIn Groups, which in many cases is more than organisers total social traffic.
Obviously, before you can target personas in your group, you need to grow your group with members that fit your persona segments. This is truly where you ‘‘earn” this channel. A solid group growth strategy brings in 200 to 300 members per month, so a LinkedIn group strategy is not a short term play.
- LinkedIn Content Sharing
LinkedIn Content Sharing is one of the best precision outreach methods available to target individuals and or persona segments on LinkedIn.
Once you’ve built a targeted search (hopefully using LinkedIn Sales Navigator) you can ‘share’ your persona-based event marketing content to the entire search, one-by-one.
On average you should get a 5% to 10% click-through rate using content sharing if your message is based on your personas.