A staggering 3.5 billion people are on social media every day. This number is on the rise and expected to hit nearly 5 billion by the end of this year.
For B2B marketers, having a solid approach to reaching the right people with the right message at the right time is instrumental in advancing business goals. LinkedIn is making the process a bit simpler with some important new updates for reaching and engaging with audiences.
Here are the highlights along with how to use them and their key benefits:
New combinations of criteria: ‘and’ or ‘or’
Based on what LinkedIn learned through recent surveys and conversations with professionals using the platform, there is an increasing need to have more diverse criteria to utilize per campaign. This includes job function, interests, seniority, and titles.
As a solution, the platform is giving marketers greater flexibility and ease in finding the specific people they’re looking for based on these different criteria. For instance, if you’re targeting software engineers with a senior title or above, you can set up a single campaign that reaches these specific individuals by job title or skills, while also getting granular about their years of experience and seniority level. If you want to refine your target audience even further, you can exclude certain companies by title or size.
The platform put together a comprehensive how-to-video that lays out how this can work for your next campaign.
Reaching important contacts: improved fields for matched audiences
A common issue many have when prospecting or targeting on LinkedIn is knowing the person you want to reach out to, but not having enough specific information to do so like their email address.
To address this, LinkedIn took several months to test a variety of new fields for matched audiences including first and last name, job titles, their company name, and their mobile device ID. The results? Marketers who tested these fields saw an average of a +30% improvement in their number of Matches.
The important benefits to note here: any of these fields can help you boost the number of professionals in your audience or, when used in combination, to enhance the precision of your matches. In other words, you can use the update to simultaneously micro-target and create niche segments as well as broaden your reach.
Customizable forecasting panels
Today’s advertisers share a common concern, that is, how can they be certain their ad dollars are being well spent to connect with the right audience and shape their campaigns accordingly.
To bring more light to the issue, LinkedIn revamped its forecasting panel within the LinkedIn Campaign Manager. Now, you can better recognize the details about your audience that are most important to know before a campaign launch that includes reach, type, and spend. Recognizing the panel as it may not work for every company as a cookie-cutter solution, the platform has added the capability to customize it for certain characteristics varying from top industries to years of experience to company sizes.
With so much at our disposal over the course of the past decade, effective marketing can feel like a never-ending puzzle. From juggling creative demands to budget limits and emerging platforms, what works and what doesn’t is in constant flux. In 2020, B2B marketers should focus on what is unarguably the biggest determinant in guaranteeing your long-term success: your audience.
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