Today, LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional social networking platform. This social networking site has the advantage of being the place for white-collar professionals to network, meaning its population is highly desirable since it is a high-income and highly educated user base. According to LinkedIn, its user base has now crossed the 300 million mark. Moreover, as specified above, this number is that of a much specialized crowd.
Have you considered LinkedIn as Ad platform for B2B market?
LinkedIn, more than a place to meet and greet, is fast becoming a more effective B2B marketing tool.With LinkedIn providing the option of specific targeted marketing, do not let this opportunity go by.
Understand the Demographics
Like any focused ad campaign, you will need to start with the basic principle – know your audience. Sure, the 300 million sounds great, but who are they? The answer can be found with the very handy LinkedIn Ad tool.
At 56% male members a slight have edge over their female counterparts with the bulk of their members falling in the 24 to 54 age group. Most members come from North America, followed by Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa, Middle East and Oceania.
The dominant group belongs to hi tech and finance professionals, followed by manufacturing, medical and corporate professionals.
Understand the LinkedIn Format
With its focus on professional profiles instead of more generic ones, LinkedIn offers a more focused ad campaign for B2B companies. Moreover, unlike Facebook your targeting is not confined to the ad level. LinkedIn ad tools have enough flexibility to let you strategize at different campaign levels.
For instance, an ad on LinkedIn appears at the Home page, profile page, inbox, search page and the group pages.
Evolve your Strategy
LinkedIn offers an amazingly flexible targeting format where you get to stage your appearance wherever you want. With the user data available to you, this is made considerably easier. It makes your targeting strategy much more effective.
Here LinkedIn’s emphasis on professional affiliations comes in handy. Just choose a profile that is most aligned to your own target. The fields that you will need to pay attention to are: job, title, function, seniority, industry, age gender, geography, company size and name and interest groups.
So how do you use this data? Let us explain this with an example. Say, you are looking for a finance expert in Banking. You can target by:
Location>industry>job>seniority
You can even look at special interest groups. In case you need a finance professional (as opposed to an expert), just remove the seniority factor, since it is now irrelevant. As you can see, there are innumerable combinations that can fine tune your targeting. Gender and company details are further factors you may want to consider.
For instance, you need a female health care worker from well established and large medical care centres. You can fine tune this search by:
Location>industry>job>function>company name> company size.
You can also opt for LinkedIn Audience Network which allows partner sites to showcase your ad. So, use our tips to perfect strategy and get the audience you really want to target. Have a look at some of the success stories with LinkedIn ads.
Else, contact your inbound marketing agency.
Have you advertised on LinkedIn or other social networking platforms? Please share your successes and challenges in the comments.