As a B2B marketer, you understand the importance of a social media platform that offers both reach and relevance. While your business might struggle on a more visually driven sites like Instagram, there's one place where businesses and professionals come together, primed to engage with valuable solutions: LinkedIn.

With over 900 million members, LinkedIn boasts a highly engaged and motivated user base. And they’re actively seeking products and services like yours. So, how do you leverage the world's largest professional network to find and engage your ideal B2B buyer?

The Power of LinkedIn Marketing Solutions for B2B 

LinkedIn stands out from other social platforms because of its focus on professional users. It's a destination where decision-makers gather, which makes it incredibly interesting for B2B marketers. In fact, 40% of B2B marketers say LinkedIn is their most effective channel for qualified leads.

Let's look at some more key statistics that showcase the power of LinkedIn for your marketing efforts:

• LinkedIn saw record engagement in 2022, with a 22% increase in the number of feed updates viewed and a 25% in public conversations and shared content.

• After visiting LinkedIn, users are willing to spend 22% more on the same products.

• Four out of five members drive business decisions for their companies.

• LinkedIn members are 25% more likely to click on relevant ads than users on other platforms.

• Brands experienced a 33% increase in purchase intent from running ads on LinkedIn.

• Audiences exposed to LinkedIn brand and acquisition ads are 6x more likely to convert.

• After their ads were seen on LinkedIn, brand perception improved, resulting in a 10-15% uplift in short-term sales performance.

These active and engaged users are interested in advancing their careers and working smarter. If you can connect with them in a way that helps them succeed, you can drive strong results.

That makes LinkedIn an essential part of any B2B brand's online advertising strategy. It provides the tools you need to find your target audience and deliver exactly the right content at exactly the right time.

LinkedIn's Unique Audience Targeting Options 

The power of LinkedIn’s marketing solutions is in its unparalleled ability to target qualified leads based on their professional attributes.

LinkedIn offers specific targeting options based on user data unique to its platform. This gives you an edge in reaching your desired audience and tailoring your messaging for each stage of the conversion process. Some of these powerful targeting options include:

• Job titles or tenure: Target customers based on their specific roles or experience levels.

• Geographic targeting: Reach buyers in over 200 countries around the world.

• Company targeting: Serve ads based on a person's place of employment, industry, revenue, connections, followers, size, or even the exact company name.

• Keywords in member profiles: Target users based on skills, endorsements, and relevant keywords in their profiles.

• Member interests and online behaviours: Reach users based on their interests, group memberships, or interactions on LinkedIn.

You are able to leverage LinkedIn’s own data in creating your campaigns. It’s possible to target companies based on a growth rate that LinkedIn has determined, so if your service is particularly suited to fast-growing companies you can add that as a criteria. The same goes if your service is better suited to slow-growing or even declining companies.

You are also able to target people based on their product and service interests. If you sell business consulting services, there’s a LinkedIn audience already created for that. If you sell data science software, there’s a LinkedIn audience for that too.

In other words, you can target your ads to only reach employees with a specific role and buying power at a specific brand you want to work with!

Which LinkedIn Marketing Solution is Right for Your Campaign?

There are five leading ad solutions LinkedIn offers to help you optimise your marketing strategy. 

Ad Targeting 

The LinkedIn advertising solution you’re likely most familiar with is basic ad targeting. This is your chance to reach your target audience using the options available on the platform. 

It’s important to understand the balance between reach and precision in targeting. With each targeting parameter you apply, you lower the potential reach of your ad. However, it also makes your targeting more precise, increasing the likelihood of conversions from the right audience.

To optimise your ad targeting, identify your ideal customer. The more details you have, the more specific and effective your targeting can be. Use buyer personas, or your ABM or sales target list to inform your targeting choices.

Use your ads to conduct audience research and get hard data on what resonates with the people you want to connect with. You can test different messages for each audience segment to find the most effective marketing approaches for your campaigns.

Align your ad solution choice with your campaign goals. For a brand awareness campaign, for example, you could consider targeting a broad audience of both C-Suite executives and senior management decision-makers with thought leadership content ads. Then, as prospects engage and move down the funnel, you can refine your targeting and customise your messages using Matched Audiences.

Matched Audiences

Matched Audiences allow you to connect with potential customers who have already interacted with your brand. This helps you deliver more targeted ads to people who are already further into the buyer journey. These audiences can include your website visitors, email subscribers, or a specific market segment you want to reach. 

There are three ways to use Matched Audiences: retargeting, company targeting, and contact targeting.

With retargeting, you can segment your audience and deliver unique content based on actions they’ve taken with your brand. To use retargeting, click “Create an Audience to Retarget” while building your ad. To retarget based on actions taken on your website, you can place the LinkedIn Insights tag to ensure your ad is only visible to people who have visited relevant web pages.

With company and contact targeting, you can securely upload a custom list of up to 300,000 specific users or companies you’d like to reach. Company targeting can enhance your account-based marketing campaigns by targeting key companies and decision-makers within your desired industry or niche. Contact targeting allows you to use the platform to focus your ad spend on known contacts and high-value prospects.

Use any combination of these options to nurture relationships and build trust. At this stage, there’s no need to introduce your product or service. Instead, you can develop marketing campaigns around social proof, user-created content, or product videos that address specific needs, demonstrating your company’s ability to provide solutions.

Lookalike Audiences

Did you get the desired results from a specific Matched Audience segment? That’s great! But how do you expand your reach once you’ve exhausted your own lists and databases?

That’s where Lookalike Audiences come in. 

You can use Lookalike Audiences to scale successful campaigns and reach more people with a proven message. They allow you to find people with similar characteristics so you can expand your reach with a more targeted, audience.

This option combines factors such as industry, company size, job role, and interests to help you find ideal audiences. It does not use demographic attributes such as gender or age range. 

If the lookalike reach is too broad, a campaign manager can manually tinker with specific facets to refine the search. 

These audiences never include the original matched audience list, so you don’t have to worry about saturating your followers with the same ad. You can also delete the original campaign, and your lookalike campaigns will continue operating as before — it just won’t have any more live updates. 

Audience Expansion 

Audience Expansion ads empower marketers to increase the reach of a campaign by showing it to consumers with similar attributes to another ad campaign. This option is a lot like Lookalike Audiences, but it doesn’t need that original data source to get started. 

Since both are used to increase your reach with a similar market, why would you use Audience Expansion instead of a lookalike audience?

Audience Expansion is best when you have a targeted ad producing strong ROI, but there’s a possibility you’re missing out on people in that target group.

There are a lot of targeting options for your LinkedIn ads. Unless you’re a specialist who spends all day in the system, you won't know every parameter you can use to optimise your ads. With Audience Expansion, LinkedIn will find them for you. 

For example, you may have an ad targeting workers in “Online Advertising.” If you see success there, you can expand your audience. The platform might add people with experience in “Interactive Marketing” to your targeting. It’s another demographic that has a lot of overlap with your original audience, you just didn’t know to search for it. 

You’ll likely use this early in the funnel when you’re casting a wide net, and you want to scale quickly without losing the targeting precision. Lookalike audiences, conversely, still use very specific targeting and are best for prospects who are already more receptive to your messaging. 

LinkedIn Audience Network

As with most major social media advertisers, the Audience Network offers a way to show your ads on third-party networks. It allows you to reach millions of users who may not be on the LinkedIn platform. 

Audience networks used to scare companies unfamiliar with social advertising because it felt like there was less control over where your ad was visible and how it was displayed. LinkedIn, however, offers brand safety steps so you can exclude categories that may not align with your brand (such as news sources, political sites, and so on). 

If you’re using the Audience Network to advertise beyond LinkedIn feeds, only three ad formats are currently permitted: single-image ads, carousel ads, and video ads. This restriction ensures your advertisement is always optimised properly. 

Audience Network is the fastest way to scale your ad. It could be a great option if you need to reach the maximum number of people in the shortest amount of time. 

Harness the Power of LinkedIn's Expanding Marketing Ecosystem

LinkedIn is projected to grow by over 100 million users worldwide in the next four years. Now is the perfect time for B2B marketers to capitalise on its increasingly specific and effective advertising solutions. While other social platforms have their merits, LinkedIn offers a unique advantage. It allows you unparalleled access to specific B2B audiences not found elsewhere.

Navigating the world of paid media can seem daunting. But LinkedIn Marketing Solutions simplifies the process. It can help you target and expand your audience, and provides the tools you need to connect based on their position in the purchase journey.

If you're unsure about where to begin or how to revitalise your paid media strategy, the experts at 1827 Marketing are here to help. We can audit your existing programs to identify growth opportunities that align with your goals, or build a firm foundation if you're starting from scratch.

Don't miss out on the opportunity to leverage the power of LinkedIn Marketing Solutions for your business. Start a conversation with 1827 Marketing today and set yourself up for success in the ever changing world of B2B marketing.