So you’ve decided to use LinkedIn ads and have set up your first campaign. Now what? Knowing the types of ads available and how they work is just half the battle (learn more here), that’s why we’ve put together a list of best practices to help you achieve the results you want and target your audience effectively in your LinkedIn ad.
Define the location of your target audience – Location is LinkedIn’s only mandatory targeting field, and essentially tells the platform where your ideal customers are based. Users can set the country, region or even city of the audience they’re trying to target.
Refine your audience – In addition to location, LinkedIn offers several targeting options to help you refine your audience based on the information available in their profiles.
These are:
- Company – Company connections, company followers, company industry, company name, company size.
- Demographic – Age and gender.
- Education – Degrees, fields of study and member schools.
- Job experience – Job functions, job seniority, job titles, member skills and years of experience.
- Interests – Member interests, member groups and member traits.
Avoid hyper-targeting – LinkedIn advises against being too specific when ad targeting if you’re new to LinkedIn ads as this can limit your reach. Instead, casting a wider net initially will help you to establish what content and targeting strategies are most effective for your business.
“A good rule of thumb when starting out is to keep the target audience over 50,000 for sponsored content and text ads, and over 15,000 for messages ads,” the platform says.
Campaign Manager, LinkedIn’s ad management platform, will show an ad’s estimated reach and suggest an audience range when you build your audience.
Additionally, you can run A/B test campaigns using different targeting criteria and measure the audience response to find out which criteria work best for your business. To carry out an A/B test create a campaign, duplicate it and then alter its targeting criteria
Use audience templates – LinkedIn audience templates are sets of pre-populated targeting options that are designed to help advertisers reach their key audiences without having to manually input the correct criteria.
“Audience templates can help save you time during campaign setup while still effectively reaching a precise audience,” LinkedIn says.
Tailor your content – Audiences respond to content that is informative and relevant to them. Knowing the audience you’re targeting and how they respond to your ads will help you to create bespoke content just for them, which in turn will get higher engagement from your key audience.
Struggling with your social media? At Charlie Puffin Digital, we create bespoke social media strategies and personalised content calendars. You retain full editorial control but can rest easy knowing that your content is being taken care of.
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