LinkedIn has become one of the most trusted social platforms used today. It is an indispensable channel for business to business communication, customer prospecting, and lead generation. Ad placement has risen significantly over the past few years, and LinkedIn is continually implementing new tools and strategies for better reach.
We recently attended a LinkedIn Marketing Lab to learn more about the newest updates LinkedIn rolled out the last quarter of 2019, and is planning to roll out through the first half of 2020.
Stronger Targeting
In the past, LinkedIn targeting was a more direct process. For example, if a profile had Sales Manager as their title, they would be included in your Sales Manager audience. LinkedIn’s new, smarter capabilities can now crawl all areas of a profile to analyze if that user fits within the intended target audience.
This is beneficial because a job description can be just as telling as a title, especially if a user has a less direct job title listed (you know who you are, Assistant to the Regional Manager).
In addition to gleaning more from a profile, LinkedIn has better ways to track and focus geotargeting. This update works with multiple touch points. The first part is allowing people on LinkedIn to more narrowly describe where they are located. From another touchpoint, LinkedIn now searches a users location from profile information as well as IP address.
In addition, when creating ads it’s now possible to target by continent, country, city and designated market area. This type of hyper targeting can help businesses for both B2B marketing and prospective employee searches.
Blended targeting
One of the updates we’re most excited for is the new capabilities surrounding the AND-OR targeting features. Being able to target a group by the title of “Data Scientist” OR the skill level “sales analytics” can increase the reach of the audience you are looking for.
In contrast, adding another qualifier to that same group, like “AND people with 10+ years experience” can narrow the focus to make sure you aren’t targeting people who wouldn’t be interested in your services.
Essentially this new range of options gives us the ability to expand your audience in a focused way to share your message to a stronger subset of people. Along with this benefit, it also allows for more flexibility to test audience types and discover the best target for your ads.
The best news is, we are already working with these new changes in current marketing efforts, and continue to track and analyze the data gained from these new tools for segmentation. Because one thing we love here is seeing results go up. Another thing that makes us happy? The next round of LinkedIn updates we’ve been teased are coming in the next few months!
Stay tuned for more…