How to Target Customers Using LinkedIn
With over 690+ million members strong in over 200 countries and territories, LinkedIn offers unique segmentation attributes that can’t be found on other advertising channels.
In this article, I will share with you how to engage your target audience on LinkedIn to help drive sales and retention, power brand awareness and enable your business.
You'll also learn what you can do on LinkedIn to maximize your organic opportunities.?
Data is everywhere
Every advertising platform collects?its own and unique set of data.??
For example, Google has information that Facebook doesn’t have, such as users’ historical searches on millions of topics.?
On another hand, Facebook collects data that Google doesn’t.
E.g. Who your family and friends are, how you interact with them etc.
The information collected by advertising platforms will be used by advertisers like us to reach our?target audience...
...and LinkedIn has its own collection of professional data too.
LinkedIn Exclusive Targeting Criteria?
LinkedIn targeting is unique because its members are incentivized to keep their profiles accurate and up-to-date for networking, personal branding, and job opportunities.
That allows us?to target ?by?very exclusive criteria?that you will not find anywhere else, such as:
?And many others.?
LinkedIn gets this data by extracting it from the LinkedIn profiles of its members, organizing it in relevant, anonymous clusters that we can use later on within our marketing campaigns.
When we set up a campaign on LinkedIn, it shows the forecasted result with information such as Target Audience Size and Segment Breakdown.
That allows us to estimate the scale of the campaign and adjust our budget accordingly to our objective.?
*LinkedIn system needs at least 300 members target size to launch any campaign. Usually, I'll aim for an audience size of 50K or more to have an optimal scale for our campaign.
?Sales + Marketing = Great Result
To effectively use all those targeting, marketing need to work closely with sales to gather information about the prospects/existing clients.
For example, if you know that your sales colleagues are going to be pitching to a prospect, you can include the prospect in the targeting, such as telling LinkedIn that we want to target people from the Investing team who work in XXX Bank, so that we can build the top-of-mind position and create a halo effect.
The information you get from sales will also form the baseline for you to expand, add and/or update your targeting options as you optimize your paid marketing campaigns.
It's time to use the digital magic to enchant them!
Using 1st party data
Other than using LinkedIn members data (owned by LinkedIn), it's also important to make use of Matched Audiences to reach your targeted audience.
Matched Audiences can be used to?retarget your website visitors, reaching?those who?took an action with your Video Ads or Lead Gen Forms?(data from LinkedIn), market?to decision-makers at?target companies?for your?account-based marketing programmes .
By doing so, it enables you to interact with people who are warm to your brand. Making it easier to engage them for better conversions.
Building Thought leadership with Always-On Promotion
As a new dad, I learnt that children need to be offered a new food as many as?10-15 times?before they will eat it.
That's quite the same as marketing.
We need to consistently put ourselves in front of target audience before they are willing to speak to us, or even remember us.
As part of a sound social media strategy, we want to engage with?target audience?with the right message at the right time?- we want our?target audience?to think of us whenever they are looking at investments.
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Many Content Types
To achieve that, one of the strategies is always be there for the customers.?
Depending on your content, there are different format available in LinkedIn for you to create an engaging experience for your audience.
Engaging Ad Format
Depending on the content type, you should choose the appropriate format to deliver the ad as your paid solution.
Within LinkedIn advertising (Some not available for organic posting), you can use these:
Having these formats in your pocket will enabled you to mix and match the content and format to optimised for highest audience engagement, based on your objective and budget.
For instance, when you want to make sure your video is watched by?target audience, please use Video Ads?for its auto-play feature to capture the attention of viewers.
When it is about promoting your weekly?thought leadership?article,?Single Image Ad?works the best as it appears native in the news feed to avoid ad blindness.
However, when the content/structure of the article is different, such as an article with multiple great points, Carousel Image Ads?are a way to showcase the mentioned articles highlighted in the article so that?each article pops?in its own way.
Lead Ad Form, by itself, is a feature that is great when you have something of value to offer (E.g. White Paper) in exchange for?target audience's information like their email and phone number. You can?read more here .
As you can see, LinkedIn has many Ad Formats catered for each content type, and combining them correctly is important for the best user experience.
?
Organic LinkedIn Growth
Other than paid amplification, you should leverage your staff enablement programme to extend your brand voice and support growth.
For example, in my company, we share regular updates to internal staff on what organic post has been published on social media, and encouraged everyone to like and share to strengthen our brand.
Trending coworker content on LinkedIn
Did you know that your organic LinkedIn post is being showcased within the company (Only viewable by the employee and not the general public)?
LinkedIn has this feature known as “Trending coworker content”, where you will find recent posts that received high levels of engagement.
It showcases popular employee-posted photos and videos.?
Content is displayed in the gallery based on a relevance algorithm that populates trending photo and video posts.
Trending posts are identified according to the number of impressions, reactions, comments, and shares received.
This is a great place for us all to be?inspired by what our colleagues are sharing?on LinkedIn and also to?engage with their posts.
Finding the right decision marker using LinkedIn Sales Navigator?
The LinkedIn Sales Navigator solution is a tool dedicated to commercial management & prospecting new & existing clients.?
It allows you to follow the news of key decision-makers and companies that interest you which in turn enable us to establish relationships more efficiently.
In addition, leveraging the Salesforce integration, you can send LinkedIn messages directly to Salesforce, and see LinkedIn information on your contact records.
Watch the 2-minute overview video below:
Okay, that's the summary of how we are targeting/finding investors using LinkedIn. I hope I didn't miss anything out! ;)
Now...
Alright, if you think this article is helpful, do?like, comment and share it so that we can demystify online marketing! ??
To learn more about digital media marketing, connect with me on LinkedIn:?https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/javelim/