March brought quite a few updates from LinkedIn regarding its marketing and advertising offerings. While it has received some criticism in the past, these updates and changes sound promising.
Data partnerships
LinkedIn recently announced that it had joined forces with Adobe and Microsoft to give marketers “a more efficient pathway to reaching their prospects and customers.” For Adobe Experience Cloud users, this means an almost seamless experience for identifying and targeting audiences. Furthermore, with both Microsoft and Adobe having already been in a relationship, key data sources will be available via Marketo Engage and Microsoft Dynamics 365 when utilizing them for LinkedIn campaigns. This integration of LinkedIn Marketing Solutions with both Adobe and Microsoft is a huge step forward for B2B marketers as it will provide a more targeted approach for paid campaigns.
Lookalike audiences
Lookalike audiences is nothing new – but it is for LinkedIn Marketing Solutions! According to LinkedIn’s announcement, their lookalike audiences “combine the traits of your ideal customer with our rich member and company data to help you market to new professional audiences similar to your existing customers, website visitors and target accounts.” For B2B companies, this is an amazing tool as it allows for use of your CRM, targeted accounts, and your website visitors. You can set up a lookalike campaign with LinkedIn’s Matched Audience option in their Campaign Manager.
Interest targeting
As we mentioned above, LinkedIn recently partnered with Microsoft and users can now access Microsoft Bing data in their ad targeting. In LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager, you can now provide additional targeting around “professional topics and content” that your audience has engaged with through the Bing search engine. This lets users take audience targeting to a whole new level, instead of just targeting by professional interests on LinkedIn.
Audience templates
This offering is interesting as it provides more than 20 predefined B2B audiences to ease companies into LinkedIn Campaign Manager. This is great for those just starting out and want to get a feel of how to target and run an ad campaign. The templates are quite robust, including audience characteristics like job titles, members skill, and groups, and can be activated in one click. While this does save on the time it takes to create a custom audience, and serves as a good learning experience, ultimately you will want to create a campaign based on your brand’s target audience and goals.
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