Working in the B2B space sometimes feels like a constant uphill struggle, particularly in comparison to our consumer marketing counterparts. Not only do we have to work much harder to drive our prospects through the conversion funnel (90% of a B2B buyer’s journey is complete by the time they engage with a sales team1), but we’re often dealing with an incredibly niche target audience who are time poor. We know how important it is to get our message to them, but sometimes it can feel impossible to find the people who really matter.
Add GDPR and increasingly limited options for email marketing, LinkedIn is becoming a marketer’s best hope. Whilst many know it’s a useful channel, not everyone knows how to make the most of what the platform can offer.
Website Demographics
Launched last year, LinkedIn Website Demographics gives highly valuable demographic data on website visitors – and it’s completely free. There’s no reason that you shouldn’t have data on the exact companies, industry sectors and job titles of the users who are interested in your product. You can even set up custom audience groups for a group of pages, meaning you can even understand demographic differences for each of your products.
To set up a Campaign Manager account, generate a LinkedIn Insights Tag for your page and add it to the HTML of your site. Once you’ve reached over 300 visitors, you’ll be able to access this data and use it to inform your sales strategy.
Matched Audiences
he insights tag has another use for paid campaigns. When you set up an audience group, either for those visiting certain pages or your own list of email targets, you can choose to target these audiences specifically in your campaign. If they’ve visited certain product pages, then you can then re-target them with creative specific to that product and need. If they’re looking at pricing or contact pages, then you might want to follow up with a personalized InMail from one of your sales reps.
Audience expansion
Even if your LinkedIn campaign is achieving good results, you might want to also try expanding your targeting out to similar groups. Through an algorithm called lookalike modelling, LinkedIn can profile users in the target group that you set, and add into the mix other users who have similar attributes and behaviors – and therefore a similar propensity for engagement and conversion. Reports suggest a trip-digit percentage increase in value for advertisers who make use of this option2.
Custom audiences
Whilst the options for LinkedIn targeting are already pretty great – being able to target all financial planners at a company for example – sometimes we need to be more specific. LinkedIn has a ‘secret menu’ of targeting groups, which increase the likelihood that your media budget is spent only where it counts and decrease the amount of time spent building a targeting set.
Unique options include:
- On-the-up startups: Businesses under 200 employees who are growing faster than their peers. Great if you want to identify businesses with growth potential, or who might have just received a large investment
- High-net-worth individuals: A modelling algorithm to identify LinkedIn users who possess over $100k USD in investible assets
- The IT Committee: A modelling algorithm for those who have IT decision making or influence in their companies
- Opinion leaders: Users who regularly influence public policy and opinion as well as members active in groups, polls, sharing and blogging
- Business travellers: Another model which identifies users whose IP is frequently changing
These bespoke options are only available through a LinkedIn Account Manager, so get in touch with Cognito if you would like to know more.
LinkedIn Network
Just as Google has a display network for banner ads across third-party websites and apps, LinkedIn also introduced its own in September 2017. Sponsored content which was previously only available to users in the LinkedIn newsfeed can now be served to your audience across the web. When setting up your campaign, select this as an option and choose the categories of websites where content should appear. You can also upload a custom block list.
1 Forrester, Buyer Behavior Helps B2B Marketers Guide the Buyer’s Journey, October 2012