Guide to LinkedIn Advertising

Wondering how to advertise on LinkedIn effectively? Learning how to do so can be highly beneficial, especially for B to B companies because of the professional audience that the site attracts. Before you dive into targeted ads on LinkedIn, take a look at all of the categories and options that it offers to familiarize yourself with the different ways you can create a specific persona to gear your ads towards.

Experience

Job Function

Based on standardized groupings of job titles such as accounting, consulting, etc.

Job Title

The job title category helps you get more specific with your ads. Are you looking for a marketing consultant or a marketing executive? Job titles can also be used to target the level of expertise.

Job Seniority

Job seniority targeting allows you to select from a number of categories of rank, including entry level, director, vice president, owner, etc.

Years of Experience

This category helps you target an audience based on how much professional experience they have had during their career.

Skills

LinkedIn offers a list of skills that are targeted based on keywords added by members in the skill section, as well as throughout their profile. If the job title isn’t specific enough for what you’ll need, the skills category is a great place to get picky about the member persona you want to target.

Company

Company Name

You can target up to 300,000 different companies on LinkedIn if you are looking for people who work for specific employers.

Company Industry

Industry targeting is a great way to find employees who work in a specific sector.

Company Growth Rate

LinkedIn compiles company growth data and allows you to advertise to individuals based on the growth rate of their companies, such as 3%-10%, or 20%+.

Company Category

This category allows you to identify individuals who work for companies that are innovative and fast-growing, with options from publications that allocate titles such as “Forbes World’s Most Innovative Companies” or “Fortune 500.”

Company Size

Looking for someone with experience in very small businesses who know how to be versatile and take on additional responsibilities? Or someone who is used to collaborating with large teams and communicating through ranks of other employees? Company size is a great way to build your customer persona even further.

Education

Schools

If you’re looking for someone who went to a specific learning institution, go ahead and select it from the offered list. LinkedIn will show your ad to those alumni.

Degrees

This category can be used both to find individuals who have a specific degree, or to seek out someone who is interested in furthering their education.

Fields of Study

Fields of Study allows you to find individuals who have specific skills that were learned during their studies. For example, you can narrow your scope to people with business degrees or teaching degrees.

Interests

Interests

As LinkedIn members interact with different content on the site and engage with certain topics, their interests are inferred and then able to be targeted. Looking for someone who is passionate about a topic such as environmental conservation or business management? The interests category can help you find them.

Groups

LinkedIn members have the ability to join professional groups where they can learn and share. They are usually based on expertise areas, such as finance professionals.

Demographics

Age

Not everyone on LinkedIn includes their age, but it can be used as a way to target those with certain levels of experience.

Gender

Again, gender isn’t a required field on a LinkedIn members profile, but can be used to further hone your audience search.

Layering

A smart strategy for targeting a specific audience on LinkedIn is layering categories to fulfill a very specific audience persona. For example, if you are looking for someone who is interested in furthering their education in a specific area, such as getting a masters degree in Industrial Engineering, in the Job Function category, you would select Industrial Engineering, and in the Degrees category, you would select bachelor’s degree and leave master’s degree excluded. The combinations of categories can allow you to build a very specific customer persona for your ad to target.

Once you understand the specific categories that you can target, understanding how to advertise on LinkedIn becomes much simpler. Try out our FREE worksheet to help you to create a customer persona to whom you want to advertise.  For your convenience, within this free worksheet, we’ve also compiled a list of the industries available on LinkedIn, including major categories and the subcategories within.

Now that you’ve created a thorough customer persona, do you need help developing ads that will be effective on LinkedIn? Contact us and let us know, we’d be happy to help!