B2B LinkedIn Targeting: Best Practices for Reaching Your B2B Audience

Are you struggling to reach your B2B audience on LinkedIn? With over 900 million members, LinkedIn can be a valuable tool for businesses to connect with potential clients and customers. However, without the right B2B LinkedIn targeting strategies, your message may go unnoticed by the people who matter most to your business.   

That’s why in this article, we’ll be discussing the best practices for B2B LinkedIn targeting. We will help you effectively reach and engage with your ideal audience. We’ll cover everything you need to know to make the most out of your LinkedIn marketing efforts. These include defining your target audience to optimize your content for maximum impact. 

So, whether you’re a small business owner or a marketing professional, read on to learn how to use LinkedIn for businesses to its fullest potential and grow your B2B audience. 

Best Strategies to Reach your B2B Audience 

Every business relies on the backing of loyal customers. If you aim to reach a large audience through one of the best platforms, you can do so by following some of the tips mentioned below.

Let’s discover these strategies together, one by one!

Start your B2B LinkedIn Targeting by Setting Objectives 

LinkedIn is the most professional platform with millions of users around the world. It is one of the best platforms to market your product, reach your favorite companies and most importantly your target audience. 

Starting your LinkedIn advertising campaign by setting objectives is important practice for reaching your B2B audience. When the objective based advertising technique was launched, marketers immediately had tools to evaluate their marketing strategy. 

Also, objective based advertising helps you understand what you want to achieve at the end of the campaign. You can strategize your marketing to reach loyal customers or achieve a high ROI. 

There are varieties of usage of LinkedIn for businesses. Therefore, it’s your responsibility to identify your objective, and align it with your business goal. Only this way your business will grow to its full potential.

Basically, there are three types of objectives in LinkedIn marketing strategy:

Brand Awareness: The goal of brand awareness is to familiarize your brand name, image and characteristics with your potential customers.

Consideration: This is the second step. Once you know that more people know your brand name, you can move to the next step. The purpose of this is to increase your website visits, bring in more customer engagement and more views on your content.

Conversions: Conversion rate is the percentage of website visitors who take the desired action. These actions include lead generation, website conversion and job applicants.

If you want to reach your target audience, it means you don’t just want to increase brand awareness. Instead, you want more customers to visit your website and take the desired action. Therefore, set objectives for each step and measure success metrics for each step. 

Identify your B2B Audience

As we have already mentioned, there are more than 900 million users on LinkedIn. Some of them might share similar objectives of using the platform but not all of them. Some students might be seeking employment, some teachers might be rendering their services in educating kids etc. 

So, it is again up to you to identify your target audience, it means who you want to reach at the end of the campaign. Also, your business or product does not necessarily need to be useful for everybody. If you have correctly identified your audience, it means you are reaching people who have business in your business. Otherwise it will be a waste of both time and money. 

Personalize your Marketing Content for specific Audience

Once you have defined your objectives and identified your target audience, personalize your message for them. Your message must be like it is talking to them, it is addressing their problem and only you have the solution for them.  

In B2B marketing, it’s important to target not only the decision-makers in a company but also the influencers who can affect their decisions. These influencers can be in various roles, such as end-users, procurement team members, or executives. To effectively target these influencers, B2B marketers need to create separate campaigns for each persona and develop a unique targeting strategy for each campaign.

This will allow them to tailor their messaging to address the specific needs and interests of each group, making the content more relevant and effective. By personalizing your messaging and targeting strategies, you can increase your chances of reaching and engaging with your target audience. This will lead to more successful campaigns and better business outcomes. 

The four Favorite Core Targeting Facets 

In Linkedin, there are a dozen targeting categories to choose from. To make things easy for every business, the targeting category is divided into four major ones.

The categories are as follows:

Seniority:

This targeting facet allows businesses to target individuals based on their level of seniority within a company. For example, you can target executives, managers, or entry-level employees.

Function:

This targeting facet allows businesses to target individuals based on their job function or role within a company. For example, you can target individuals in sales, marketing, human resources, or finance.

Industry:

This targeting facet allows businesses to target individuals based on the industry or sector in which they work. For example, you can target individuals in the technology, healthcare, or education industries.

Company Size:

This targeting facet allows businesses to target companies based on their size or number of employees. For example, you can target small businesses with fewer than 50 employees or large enterprises with more than 500 employees.

By specifying these categories into four doesn’t mean you can not use other categories like job title etc. You can employ additional categories, as your business sets its foot print in the industry.  

Test Different Routes to the Same Target

There are multiple ways to reach your business goals of reaching the maximum number of loyal customers. While there are no hard and fast rules when it comes to reaching your audience, businesses can experiment with various combinations of targeting categories, including job titles, to effectively reach their specific target audience.  

The key is to test different routes and strategies to see what works best for your business and target audience. Ultimately, what matters is achieving your end goal of reaching and retaining loyal customers. 

Therefore, businesses should be open to trying new approaches, testing different targeting methods, and analyzing the results to optimize their marketing efforts and achieve the best possible outcomes.

The Best Practice for B2B LinkedIn targeting is to be Creative   

This implies that to effectively reach and engage with potential customers on LinkedIn, businesses should be creative in their approach. With the platform’s vast user base of professionals and businesses, it’s crucial to stand out from the crowd. You can do so by being innovative and unique in your messaging, visuals, and overall strategy. 

By being innovative, you can capture the attention of your target audience and avoid them seeking out alternative products or services. Being creative can also help to establish your brand as a thought leader and build trust with your audience. This can lead to increased conversions and customer loyalty. 

Therefore, investing in creativity is an essential best practice for any business looking to succeed in the platform’s competitive environment.  

Use the Marketing Campaign Groups on LinkedIn

LinkedIn Campaign Groups are a valuable tool for marketers to target their specific audience. Similar to Facebook campaign groups, they allow businesses to organize their campaigns based on their goals. These include  brand awareness, video views, whitepaper downloads, and demo requests.  

By using separate campaign groups for each initiative, marketers can keep their structure clean and organized. They can also apply specific budgets and run times to each campaign as a group. 

However, despite being around for a few years, not many businesses are aware of this feature or its potential benefits. By utilizing LinkedIn Campaign Groups, businesses can improve their targeting and achieve better results from their LinkedIn advertising efforts.

Final Thoughts 

This article provides best practices for B2B LinkedIn targeting to help businesses reach their target audience. It starts by suggesting setting objectives for the marketing campaign to help evaluate the strategy and align it with the business goals. The next step is identifying the target audience to avoid wasting time and money reaching the wrong audience. Personalizing marketing content for specific audiences is also important for successful campaigns.  

The article suggests four core targeting facets on LinkedIn: seniority, function, industry, and company size. Also, testing different routes to the same target is encouraged to find the most effective targeting strategy for a business. Finally, joining LinkedIn campaign groups will provide the best platform for you to organize your marketing campaign. 

Are you looking for assistance in developing an effective marketing campaign for your business? Our team of digital marketing experts is here to help! With their expertise and strategies, we can create personalized LinkedIn advertising for your B2B business that will yield impressive results. 

Don’t wait any longer, get in touch with us today and experience the benefits of working with our team.