Are you using LinkedIn Targeting as part of your current Financial Inbound Marketing Strategy? If not, you’ll want to keep reading to discover how to integrate this powerhouse into your arsenal.
LinkedIn is synonymous with creating professional connections. As the original trailblazer of online networking, LinkedIn stands head and shoulders above other platforms as the networking gold standard and demographic data treasure trove. With over 690 million members worldwide, LinkedIn represents one of the best platforms to reach your target audience.
Unlike other platforms that collect broad-based digital data such as IP address, LinkedIn differentiates itself as an invaluable resource for financial institutional marketing since it collects and stores target-rich user data like:
- Level of Education
- Job Experience
- Member Skills & Interests
- Business Connections
In addition to highly targeted consumer data, LinkedIn is trusted by its users and, as a result, enjoys tremendous engagement. Users on the platform report having greater trust for content in their feeds – meaning that LinkedIn users are more likely to trust the marketing and advertising found on LinkedIn.
The engagement, user trust, professional nature, and unique demographic data of LinkedIn make it a particularly good choice for B2B marketing, especially among financial institutions. By hand-crafting the ideal audience, and by reaching out directly to the decision-makers at organizations and accounts, their targeting capabilities are particularly powerful.
The Fundamentals of LinkedIn Targeting
LinkedIn’s targeting feature is user-friendly but be aware. You must be judicious about how fine you target a segment. While there’s enough data available to segment by ultra-specific parameters, getting too narrow can significantly limit your reach. Here’s how they suggest using their campaign manager to maximize your marketing power:
- Utilize LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager tool to generate campaigns.
- Define your objective. This feature of LinkedIn’s targeting tool makes choosing an audience extra easy. You can opt for awareness, consideration, or conversions, which will influence who you’re targeting.
- Define your target audience.
You can target your ads to reach people based on the following themes: Location, language, and even known contacts from your databases and marketing automation platforms. You can target your audience using five significant themes:
Job experience
This theme allows you to target your audience based on job function, title, and seniority. This strategy can put you directly in front of prominent decision-makers and buyers with the expertise and clout you seek.
The Campaign Manager will generate other suggestions, such as related job titles or functions that complement the one you’ve already selected. You can also combine “years of experience” with a specific job skill to yield even more influence over major company buying decisions than seniority alone.
Company or institution
For B2B marketing, you can target up to 100 companies or institutions at a time. You can also use exclusionary features to target smaller companies whose leaders may be on LinkedIn but without their own company page.
Education
Universities, colleges, and other educational organizations can be segmented in addition to specific degrees and programs. Combining the seniority parameter with a field of study can render highly targeted decision-makers.
Interests
This theme segments based on member interests and content that members search for and engage with and the groups they are a part of. This is an excellent function to use in place of awareness objectives and categories found in other themes.
Demographics
LinkedIn determines age and gender using names and users’ graduation dates, which can render this particular theme unreliable.
Scaling Your Strategy
LinkedIn helps users scale by expanding their audience reach using three distinct functions:
Audience Expansion distributes your marketing to candidates who closely match your target audience or targeting criteria.
Matched Audiences use contact targeting, account targeting, and website retargeting.
Contact Targeting connects to your existing contacts, while website retargeting uses your website visitor’s interests to serve them relevant content on LinkedIn.
If you want to replicate your audience again or tweak it slightly for A/B testing, save it as a template for other campaigns. Once you’ve identified your target audience, LinkedIn’s campaign manager will suggest ad formats, like text, single image, carousel, video, or dynamic.
After running your campaign, the Campaign Manager can also provide demographics reporting to determine who is responding to your campaign.
Best Practices
Create clear, highly defined buyer personas, but avoid the temptation to become so restrictive that you miss your target audience. To begin with, LinkedIn recommends selecting only two additional targeting options aside from location and aiming for an audience of 50,000 or more.
LinkedIn is ideally suited for B2B marketing, especially among financial institutions, because of its engagement, user trust, professional nature, and unique demographic data. In addition to being able to reach out directly to change-makers in organizations and accounts, their targeting capabilities are particularly effective.
Want to scale your financial services marketing efforts leveraging the full functionality of the latest digital tools?
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