5 LinkedIn Ads Audience Targeting Tips for San Diego Businesses

3
Nov 2020

Placing carefully curated advertisements in front of a qualified audience is one of the best ways for San Diego businesses to drive conversions. With digital advertising, businesses have the opportunity to do this online, spending marketing dollars to show their messaging only to an audience they have prequalified by applying various targeting parameters and filters.

While popular ad platforms like Google, Bing, Facebook, and Twitter allow you to qualify, or target, people with your ads based on demographics and personal interests, LinkedIn is the only platform on which you can target people based on what they do professionally. This makes it a superior choice for B2B marketing and networking to generate leads, as it allows advertisers to specify the industry, company size, company name, job title, and more of the individuals they want to see their display ads. 

But how do you know which audiences to target, and how to do so correctly? Here are our top 5 audience targeting tips for effective LinkedIn advertising. 

 

1. Build Your Audience

You can choose your audience from a wide range of targeting options, including:

 

  • Location: Define where you would like to reach LinkedIn members. Get specific with a city or metro area, or broader with a state or country.
  • Company: Company Connections, Company Followers, Company Industry, Company Name, Company Size
  • Demographics: Age, Gender
  • Education: Degrees, Fields of Study, and Member Schools
  • Job Experience: Job function, Job Seniority, Job title, Member Skills, Years of Experience
  • Interests: Groups, Member Interests

 

2. Create an audience template

If you’re new to advertising on LinkedIn or need some help setting up targeting, try using one of LinkedIn’s audience templates. Audience templates can help speed up the process of choosing audiences to target, such as Wedding Planners, Nurses, College Graduates With a Master’s Degree, Gen Z, and more, without the manual process of choosing the right targeting criteria individually.

 

3. Avoid Hyper Targeting

While having too broad an audience means you may be paying to put your message in front of a less qualified group of people, going too far in the opposite direction can lead to hyper targeting, and this limited scale will hurt your initial campaigns. By casting a wider, higher volume net initially, you can analyze insights to inform future data-driven decisions; try starting out with no more than 3-4 targeting facets.

Pro tip: keep your target audience over 50k for Sponsored Content and over 15k for Direct Message Ads. And don’t forget to take advantage of Campaign Manager, which will show you the estimated reach with your targeting decisions and make suggestions as you build your audience. 

 

4. Always Use Specific, Tailored Content

Content isn’t one size all, so be sure to craft unique messaging with your audience’s wants and needs in mind. Give your target audiences individual personas, and make sure you create a balance of content relevant to each segment. 

 

5. Utilize A/B Testing

By testing two similar campaigns with different variables, you can evaluate which combinations are most effective. 

Change only 1-2 criteria at a time to isolate which part of your test impacted performance. Try testing Skills versus Job Titles, Industry versus Job Function, etc. Once your ads are running, closely monitor the data in Campaign Manager so you can make data-driven decisions to optimize performance. If you continue refining them over time, you will learn how to reach the people who are most likely to convert and therefore are most valuable to your company.

Whether you’re just starting out or you’re a LinkedIn ads professional, get creative with your audience targeting! Often there are untapped markets and segments of prospects looking for your products or services from an angle you haven’t thought of. 

 

Why Understanding Lead Generation is Vital to SuccessFour out of every five B2B marketers use LinkedIn.

Don’t get left behind, work with KWSM to develop a powerfully targeted digital advertising campaign that will expand your reach to generate leads and more potential customers. 

CONTACT US to learn more about developing a digital advertising campaign that will generate awareness, traffic & leads.

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