Though it lacks the mass appeal of social platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, LinkedIn is perfectly situated for what it wants to be: a social platform for professional. Besides being a great place to network with business professionals, it’s the ideal place for B2B marketers to promote their goods and services. LinkedIn recently announced updates to their advertising suite that will make it easier for marketers to reach their target audience.
For a long time, LinkedIn’s advertising service matched its overall focus on business professionals. You could target people by their job title, their industry, the size of their company, etc. This however left a glaring omission in targeting options: interests. There are many times when the people that are interested in service don’t have direct connections to it on their LinkedIn profile. The update will allow LinkedIn advertisers to use new targeting options for interests.
As the company explained in an announcement, “That’s why we’re excited to announce interest targeting in Campaign Manager. Interest targeting lets you reach members with relevant ads that match their professional interests — based on the content they share and engage with on LinkedIn. With these added options, you can more easily achieve your campaign objectives and grow your business.”
As they are just getting started, LinkedIn won’t have the same level of interest options that are available on Google, Facebook or Twitter. Being able to categorize all of the content on a social network into interest groups and categories is no easy task. And it becomes harder as you increase the number of potential interest groups. At its start, LinkedIn’s interest targeting will have “more than 200 professional interest categories, like artificial intelligence, global economy, customer experience, and more.”
There are several benefits to using the interest targeting options that have been added to LinkedIn. The most obvious is the ability to craft more relevant ads. Marketers will be able to change the way people perceive their brand by making their consumers’ first contact associate the brand with the topics they care about.
Marketers will also be able to create more fine-tuned targeting for their ad campaigns. It will be possible to us account targeting along with interest targeting to reach potential buyers who have an interest in the content that’s relevant to the brand. Similarly, it will be possible to use a combination of academic degrees and interests to create a highly targeted audience.
The new targeting options have been in testing for several months, and the initial results have been very promising. As Lloyd Palmer, a Senior Paid Social Specialist at Digitas UK, stated “Interest targeting provides Digitas with a more effective way of reaching our ideal customer with the content they care about. Since using it as part of our campaign activity, we have seen a 25% increase in CTR rate. This, combined with the Carousel Ads, has without doubt helped us and our work to achieve a much higher CTR when compared to other platform use.”
Interest targeting on LinkedIn can be a game changer for advertisers who may have avoided the platform before. Interest targeting along with the other resources LinkedIn provides means they are offering a targeting system unlike any other network. So keep on the lookout, LinkedIn says interest targeting will be available to all advertisers over the next week.
For more news about changes to LinkedIn, read this article about updates to LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator.