Note from Melissa: Robert Brady of Clix Marketing is here with another guest post on LinkedIn PPC!
Since LinkedIn launched in May of 2003 it has grown to become the de facto virtual resume for professionals. Want someone to know your job history and accomplishments with each position? Put it on LinkedIn. Want someone to know your education, skills, recommendations, awards and many other professional bullet points? Put it on LinkedIn.
This detailed information, provided by the users themselves, makes LinkedIn a gold mine for any marketer that can define their target customer (often called a persona) in work-related detail. For many B2B marketers this is easy.
LinkedIn Targeting 101
Many advertisers start with very rudimentary targeting. Here are the most popular options, which LinkedIn shows by default as someone creates a new campaign:
• Location
• Company Name
• Company Size
• Industry
• Job Title
• Job Function
• Seniority
By itself, this would be a powerful set of options to choose from. For example, let’s imagine that we’re putting on an education conference for California teachers. Here are some ideas of how we could reach those people:
Location: California – 13.3 million LinkedIn users
Industry: Primary/Secondary Education – 58K LinkedIn users in California
Companies:
• California Department of Education – 1015 LinkedIn users in California
• Los Angeles Unified School District – 29K LinkedIn users in California
Job Title: Teacher – 149K LinkedIn users in California
Job Function: Education – 623K LinkedIn users in California
Any of those would be a great place to start, but you could run into a couple problems. First, you might not get enough traffic. Second, you may want to be a little more specific with some of these. Let’s talk about how we can solve each problem.
Targeting For More Volume
To start off you’re going to want to click that blue “More targeting options” link you see in the image above. That will open a lot of new options for us to explore. It will look like this:
Now let’s look at some other ideas for this education conference:
Skills:
• Teaching – 347K LinkedIn users in California
• Educational Technology – 42K LinkedIn users in California
Groups
• National Education Association – 1091 LinkedIn users in California
• Teacher’s Lounge – 9K LinkedIn users in California
• Elementary group for teachers – 3K LinkedIn users in California
Degree
• Bachelor of Education – 3K LinkedIn users in California
• Master of Education – 18K LinkedIn users in California
As you can see, this allows you to target in even more ways to reach your potential audience because now you’re looking at them beyond just their job title and industry. Now you’re looking at groups they’ve identified with. You’re looking at skills that other people have endorsed them for. You’re looking at their actual degree (because LinkedIn is a digital resume, people put this information as well).
Targeting For Highly Qualified Traffic
Disclaimer: While “highly qualified traffic” sounds perfect you need to keep in mind that this is effectively display advertising. The placements are a little 3-pack of ads on the right side or a sponsored update that gets slipped into a user’s feed. These people didn’t go looking for you so the click-through rate (CTR) will be low and you need fairly large audiences. LinkedIn won’t let you advertise to an audience unless it has at least 1,000 people, but you’ll find that any audience under about 5K will struggle for clicks.
That said, how do you get this awesomely qualified traffic? Layering & exclusions.
• Layering – This is quite simply combining 2 or more of the above targeting ideas. For example, “teaching” as a skill seems a little broad. Layer on top of that an Education job function and you’ve got someone with teaching skills that works in education. Much more qualified.
• Exclusions – You’ll notice below each targeting option you can add targeting to exclude. Looking at our teaching skill target, you might use it but exclude “Biblical teaching” (it’s really in there). If the conference is for K-12 then you might exclude “College teaching” and “University teaching” as well.
Conclusion
As you can see LinkedIn offers a variety of ways to target your potential audience. You can stick to the basic location, company & job title areas, but I would recommend you also get into the additional “hidden” targeting options as well. Layer them together, exclude poor targets and you’ll find that you can reach highly qualified prospects with your advertising.
Robert Brady is Senior Manager: Software, SMB, Strategy for Clix Marketing. He has worked on PPC accounts of all sizes across many industries and has a soft spot for helping small businesses succeed with paid search. Robert loves to share his expertise with others by blogging regularly on PPC topics on the Clix Marketing blog, Search Engine People & his personal blog, Righteous Marketing. You’ll also find his posts on SmallBizTrends.com, PPC Hero, FBPPC.com and the Trafficado blog among others. He is also an active participant in #PPCchat on Twitter.
