Target Your Audience Smarter, Not with Hypertargeting

LinkedIn stands out as the social media platform that can target members based on their first-hand professional information like company name, job title, skill, etc., which delivers high quality engagements for B2B marketers.

However, many marketers find it difficult and sometimes costly to generate quick results on LinkedIn. This is often caused by a very common mistake: only using hyper-targeting.

It is understandable that every company wants to hyper-target their highest-value customers, out of ROI concerns. Ironically, it is the least ROI-friendly strategy for emerging brands. CPC is inevitably pushed up by your competitors with stronger brand awareness and higher budget.

How to smartly balance cost and engagement quality? Based on 300+ ad account management experiences, I would recommend the Concentric Circle Strategy.

This strategy is based on one important fact that many marketers are not aware: many of your ideal customer companies are not under the industry that you assume. A drug development company could be under chemistry manufacturing, biotech, or pharmaceutical manufacturing. The industry categorization is set by millions of company page admins who have different ideas of brand positioning.

Therefore, it is important to include the bigger circle in targeting with related industries, to avoid high cost caused by direct competition in hyper-focus industry.

To apply the strategy effectively, rule No. 1: DO NOT mix two circles of audience in one campaign.

The CPC of hyper-targeting audience is usually much higher than that of related-audience. Separating two audiences in different campaigns gives you clarity in performance data, and flexibility in allocating budget.

How to tell the differences of hyper and related audiences? Here's an example:

A robotics client was selling warehouse automation solutions to oversea markets. For them, hyper-targeting audience is the decision-making stakeholders in warehousing business:

However, narrowing to only warehousing industry ends up with very small audience size, and inevitably high CPC.

To expand reach, include related audience in manufacturing with warehousing demands:

By expanding audience to related-industries + hyper-related function, the company was able to lower 50% cost in generating results.

Another client was able to close business deals in a new and related industry compared to traditional customers, by applying Concentric Circle Strategy on LinkedIn campaigns. The success showed a whitespace of business growth that the client did not expect.

In short, the Concentric Circle helps to jump out of the box and identify new opportunities. Campaign cost can be lower, not because of expanding audience size, but because of discovering a blue sea market.