LinkedIn is a community of millions of professionals, entrepreneurs and executives who have identified who they are, where they work, what they do, what interests them, what skills they have and what education they have received.  With LinkedIn’s paid ad services, you can reach these individuals by creating highly-targeted campaigns through the use of this demographic information.  This platform delivers the best results to business-to-business offerings.  Having some creativity with targeting options can help you achieve conversions in your LinkedIn campaign.  Here is a breakdown of a few of the platform’s targeting options and how you can use them to reach your ideal audience.

Location

You have the ability to target large geographic areas (North America, Middle East etc.), countries, states/provinces, and larger city “areas”.  This can be extremely useful if your product or service is only available to or may only appeal to individuals in certain areas. If you would like to target several regions/states/countries, try creating identical campaigns for each region or grouping of regions.  This will allow you to determine if your campaign is performing better in a certain geographic location and prompt you to allocate more budget to the better performing regions.

Groups

By joining a group, a LinkedIn user could be revealing their interests, skills, or proficiencies.  Group targeting allows you to identify and target a large audience or a smaller niche audience.  This is a great way to reach people who may be interested in your product or service. Try searching for Professional or Trade Associations that your audience might be involved in.  After you begin selecting groups to target, LinkedIn will suggest similar or related groups.  Also, make sure your targeted groups have large enough membership so that your potential reach is still sizable.

Job Title

Within LinkedIn’s job title targeting section, there are three different options to choose from: function, seniority, and title.

• Targeting by job function allows your ads to be shown to people who are in the broad job function(s) that you select.  You can choose from job functions such as administrative, healthcare services, and information technology.
• Job seniority targeting allows you to reach individuals who identify as entry, director, owner and more.
• Title targeting involves targeting individuals with specific job titles.  This option can serve as a blend of the previous two targeting options.
  • For example, if you choose to target a “Director of Finance” you are reaching people whose job function is finance and whose seniority is director.
  • Keep in mind that organizations tend to have different names for the same role and an ad will only be served to a LinkedIn user if their title matches exactly.  If you target “Director of Finance”, you should also try “Finance Director” and other similar titles that LinkedIn suggests.
  • You can also target job titles as general as CEO.
  • If you choose to use this targeting option, you won’t be able to exclude job titles or target by function or seniority.

Function and seniority targeting can be too broad used individually, and title targeting can be too specific.  Combining function and seniority is often the best option.  When using these targeting options it is important to identify who will be making the purchase decisions.  For example, if you are selling office supplies, targeting a CEO would not be the best idea.  

Skills

You can also target your audience based on the skills they provide on their LinkedIn profile.  Like job title and group targeting, once you begin typing in some desired skills, the skills targeting option will provide a list of related and more specific skills. The skills provided by LinkedIn users may or may not be related to their current job, but if they are, using skills in conjunction with job function or title can create a highly-targeted campaign.  For example, if you are selling accounting software, selecting “accounting” as a job function as well as various software-related skills could bring you closer to your desired audience. A drawback of LinkedIn advertising can be incomplete profiles.  Users may leave out certain details in their profiles such as job title or function.  Using a variety of LinkedIn targeting criteria can help you reach the right audience. Comment below or find me on Google+ to continue the conversation.