If you're trying to grow awareness for your B2B brand, products, or services, you likely know that LinkedIn is an important and valuable channel to be on. Despite some challenges, it remains the platform of choice for professional networking and odds are good that the people making or influencing buying decisions within their company will be present and active (even if they just lurk and don't actively post).
In addition to offering an avenue for organic growth, LinkedIn is a great channel for running B2B advertising campaigns because of the ability it provides to target people by their professional role and business-related interests (versus Meta or other social platforms, which have limited targeting options of this kind). Of course, LinkedIn knows how valuable this data is and as a result, clicks are comparatively expensive, while the profile of a potential buyer for a B2B offering is inevitably limited regardless of the size or type of business that you're selling too. After all, while the buying pool for shoes or personal injury lawyer services is close to "any adult," the buying pool for B2B is constrained to specific roles even at the biggest companies.
As a result, its critical to be on-point with your ad targeting, especially if you have a smaller ad budgets and don't have a huge list of contacts to create lookalike audiences from. And even with these, additional targeting constraints will be needed so that you don't end up serving ads to a long roster of entry-level marketers that have no ability to influence a buying decision even if they wanted to.
While there are many ways to slice and dice the professional layer cake to get at the specific people you want to see your B2B content, here are three that serve as my go-tos when building LinkedIn ad campaigns for B2B clients:
Job titles can be misleading and inconsistent across various departments. Instead, concentrate on the Job Function and Seniority level options.
Using these together allows you to more easily reach the people who are most relevant to your message. For example, if you’re targeting marketing managers, you'll want to pick their function (marketing) and seniority (managers), rather than specific job titles to avoid having to try to catch every last permutation of the "marketing manager" title that LinkedIn may surface. This strategy is more effective in reaching the right segment of your audience.
Interests on LinkedIn can be superficial and may not accurately reflect a user's professional needs or behaviors. Instead, target LinkedIn groups where engaged professionals discuss and share insights about specific topics.
For instance, if you’re selling a product or service related to Search Engine Marketing (SEM), targeting members of SEM-focused groups can be more beneficial than targeting anyone with a general interest in SEM. These group members are more likely to be active SEM professionals that are responsive to your offering than marketers that just have SEM as skill listed on their LinkedIn profile.
Audience expansion may seem like a good way to increase your ad’s reach, but it often leads to your ads being shown to irrelevant audiences as it's a black box function. This is particularly crucial when you consider the costs of clicks and leads for LinkedIn ads. Stick to your defined audience parameters to ensure that your ads are seen by the right people. Remember, in B2B marketing, specificity is key. You want to target a niche audience that’s most likely to respond to your offer, not a broad, undefined group.
As I mentioned above, these are just jumping-off points for building a target audience that often need to be refined further by industry, company size, and other variables relevant to your sales profess. And because of the ease with which you can spend our entire budget without getting a single result if you do it wrong, running LinkedIn ads isn't for the inexperienced marketer.
If you're looking to leverage LinkedIn ads to grow your B2B business, it's best to work with an experienced paid media professional to ensure your campaigns get set up properly and deliver the expected results. I've helped dozens of companies succeed across a variety of verticals - reach out today to set up a quick call to learn how I can help yours.