Audience LinkedIn: How to find your target ?

Today is the day 🎉 where we are finally going to talk about audience LinkedIn. Are you targeting the right one?

If this topic sparks your interest, let’s talk about all the tips we can give you 💁‍♀️ to achieve reaching the best target audience LinkedIn. 

LinkedIn, this social network for professionals has gained power through the years. It has become the ultimate place to find jobs, internships, learn new skills and connect with potential clients that can help you grow your business. So what are you waiting for ? Let’s go on LinkedIn and let’s target this right ✔️ audience ! 

 

How to find your target on LinkedIn?

If you are a B2B marketer (but you don’t have to huh), we bet that there is a chance that one part of your job is to find the right audience. If not, we would like to tell you that the right product or service needs the right people to sell to. That would be a shame to sell butter 🧈 to a tailor… 

And on LinkedIn, there are few tips you should know to build a really powerful audience and have funnel of conversion optimized.

In order to help you find the Holy Grail, LinkedIn has thought about everything for advertisers who desire increase the reach of their campaign.

It exists an audience expansion that will allow you to find additional audiences from the one you are already targeting 🎯. Here if you are use to building audiences, you will get more relevant data. But before diving in that, let’s start at the beginning!

 

Targeted audience : what is it?

First of all, what is an audience? We are so glad 🤗 you asked because we are going to explain this to you.

An audience is a group of people that can be reached by a communication support. These people are most likely to be interested in your service or product and be part of your sales funnel. They will share common characteristics or set of behaviors that can be their :

• Age range.
• Gender.
• Relationship Status 💕.
• Work field.
• Revenu.
• Job.
• Place of residence…

These common characteristics or demographics are defined by all the criteria that you are going to implement to find your targeted audience.

 

Posting to target your audience LinkedIn

One of the easiest way to build an audience is by posting ✍️ on LinkedIn. That is the very first step which, moreover, is completely free. All you need to do is to share content about the things you know. By doing this, you will have more chance ☘️ that people from the same industry as you will see your content but not only !

Other people different from your work area will be also able to see it and comment your different posts.

What you need to do is pick topics that could potentially interest other professionals and talk about your successes and failures related to your work environment. You could also talk about subjects that matter to you and that you master.

What you might need to know is that it is not only about posting your content but also posting comments in others feed and be able to add valuable information to their content (or you could be a boomer and just react 🤔 without adding any important information). Social media marketing should definitely be a part of your social media marketing.

Either way, it is as important to make yourself known on this network in order to find potential customers. You will be seen and people will be interested to see what is going on with your content and your profile. You spark 💥 their interest and that is exactly what you want!

So what can you concretely do by posting?

• Help members by answering their questions.
• Share your own content.
• Reshare others’ contents by mentioning them and giving your opinion.

If you are familiar with posting already, did you know that you could also save time by scheduling your LinkedIn posts?

 

Scheduling your post to reach your audience  LinkedIn

Scheduling? For something as trivial as social media? Yes, absolutely. You cannot say that you haven’t time to post on LinkedIn because multiple tools exist in order to help you in this area.

The main benefit of scheduling is that you will be able to reach your target 🎯 audience when they are on the Internet even if you are not on it at this particular moment.

When you are implementing a communication 👄 strategy, you also create content. You will need to focus on when to write, which subject you are going to talk about and on which media you are going to post it.

It is the same story for all of us, particularly when it comes to social networks. You need to be organized in order to be able to give the right information. And in order to be organized, you will need to schedule your post.

Doing this, it will allow you to :

• Earn precious amount of time.
• Post at the right moment.
• Touch your audience at the right time.

We insist on how important it is to schedule your post because if your target see 👀 that you are not very active, it can affect in a terrible way your business.

Unfortunately, LinkedIn cannot help you in scheduling your post. But you can use softwares such as Hootsuite or Buffer.

Another sweet tool to help you do that is Podawaa. Definitely a game changer!

 

What is a good audience size for LinkedIn? Reach your audience by scheduling with Podawaa

We love powerful and easy tools that can help you grow your audience size. That’s why Podawaa is the ultimate one we like to use when we need to schedule 📅 our post. Because we love gaining time and we love being able to do other thing than posting on social networks (wait a minute…).

If you want to know everything about this chrome extension, we highly recommend to have a sneak peak here.

What you’ll need to do is simply :

• Install it and add it to your browser. (Don’t forget to pin it so you won’t lose it for future uses).
• Open your Podawaa extension while your LinkedIn account is opened.
• Go to “Posts”, click on “New Post”
• Select “Schedule” and begin to write ✍️ your future post.

• Once your post written, you will need to select the time and the date of your LinkedIn post

And that’s all folks ! That was pretty easy 🤓, right ?

 

Audience targeting: LinkedIn ads

There is a reason if digital marketers are targeting on LinkedIn for their marketing strategy. First of all, it is the number one social media platform for B2B.

And as you may know, LinkedIn’s database is absolutely huge with nearly 800 million members. That would be an error ❌ not using it to find your audience.

Moreover, the data you are going to collect won’t change over time because LinkedIn users are required to verify and update their profile information.

Just like its colleagues Facebook and others, it is absolutely possible to create ads on LinkedIn. For your advertising campaigns, it exists many advertising formats on LinkedIn which are:

• Text 📜 ads that appear at the top of the page or in the right column if you are using a desktop version.
• Single image ad that promote your message directly in the LinkedIn feed.
• Carousel 🎠 image Ad that will tell a story with swipeable cards in LinkedIn feed.
• Video ad that will broadcast an interactive content in the LinkedIn feed.
• Sponsored messaging that are delivered in LinkedIn messenger.
• Dynamic ad that will deliver personalized ad to members according to their data in their profile.

Indeed, the network allows you to target your potential clients in a work environment 👔 by combining many criteria such as:

• Titles on LinkedIn.
• Level of education.
• Environment field.
• Work area.
• Students (or workers).
• Companies…

See, it does look like Facebook Ads and just as it, you can target audiences in order to advertise.

If you want to try it yourself, here are some few tips to maximise your conversions determined by what you will implement.

 

Build your audience with ads

As said before, you cannot sell butter to a tailor so you definitely need to create your persona.

You should definitely go through this important step because you want to have the portrait of the ideal customer. With that in mind 🧠, you will be able to deliver the right message at the right time because you’ll have insights of what your potential client would like to have from you.

Ok, things are getting pretty serious right now 🥵. It’s time to use Campaign Manager for some ads online and start to define your audience. If you are not familiar using this tool, we will show you a piece of it.

• Start by connecting on Campaign Manager.
• If you have not settled it, you will have to create an Ad account (but it is really easy, with name and currency to fill up).
• Next step is to create a Campaign Group.

• Once in it, you will need to create a campaign.
• From here, you’ll have to click on next (you will see a small recap of your Campaign group).
• It’s time to chose your objective ✔️ according to what you have in mind for your business.

• Fun part incomiiiiing concerning audiences: selecting your target and implement your targeting options.

• From audience attributes, you select your first demographic.
• We are not going to stop 🛑 here, of course not! It is time to narrow down the selected audience by adding other criteria. You just need to click on “Narrow” and add what you need.
• Once finished, you can then chose your ad format, associate a Company or a Showcase page to associate with the account.
• Set up your budget and schedule.
• Chose your bidding strategy.
• Launch your campaign.

 

LinkedIn’s Audience Expansion

As said before, if you are used to build audiences, this tool could be very practical for you, as an advertiser, and your communication tactics. LinkedIn Audience Expansion comes out very handy for some campaigns.

Among your existing audiences, you will be able to do some audience segmentation inside of these ones. This tool 🛠️ will help you increasing the reach of your campaign by broadcasting your ads to audiences that share common traits with your existing targets or even existing customers.

To give you an example, you can expand one of your target 🎯 members by adding another traits of their profile or you can also exclude some characteristics inside of an already existing audience.

Let’s say you want to reach people who are UX designers, with Audience Expansion, it is absolutely possible to add a particular skill (UX designers with project management skill for example) or you can exclude UX designers who work in a specific company.

 

How to reach niche audience with LinkedIn Groups

Ok, we know how to do ads on LinkedIn to find your audience, but there is something that we haven’t talked 💬 about yet. A little tip that can easily be exploited by you.

If you don’t know anything about it, it exists on LinkedIn things called groups. Inside of these ones, you share content related to your work area with people who have the same interests as you. You can either join one already made and begin to discuss with other members or create yours.

This trick could do good 🔥 to your business and improve your targeting options.  If you join a group, people from this group are most likely to share the same interest as you. Or you join a group in order to find new customers for your business.

You will aim at the exact right target and moreover, already qualified.

How do we know that? Quite simple! If you chose to join a group by yourself, that means that you are explicitly interested in the topic chosen. You see where we want to go here ? You have the topic, and the people in the group match your demographics, you can even build a nice persona from all the information you will collect 💽.

Then, to reach them, it’s as simple as going back to our beloved Campaign Manager and when it comes to choosing your audience, you’ll use the search bar to find groups.

We are pretty sure that if you want to have a better ROI, you should use LinkedIn groups in order to target the right audience.

 

Use Waalaxy to target audience in LinkedIn Groups

Of course, LinkedIn Ads is not the only solution here, you could potentially use Waalaxy in order to target some of your audience through groups that you already joined. Here’s how to do it:

• Be part of a group (Thank you Captain Obvious!).
• Click on “See all” in the upper right corner.

• Narrow the audience by typing ⌨️ a specific research (here I was looking for a digital marketing consultant).

• Open Waalaxy and import the group members.

• Once you finished importing all your prospects, create your campaign, put in place your advertisements and watch your business grow. Easy as that!

 

Use Waalaxy to gain visibility

Ok, you can find prospects through groups but you can also just gain visibily with our fantastic tool by connecting with your potential clients as well.

Just like we showed you, once you finished building your audience, then you need to import all the new leads in Waalaxy. What’s next? Messaging. Yes, you are going to send personalized messages 📧. It would be a very good time to showcase your landing-page for example in order to see how many clicks you can have on your link and gain visibility.

If you want to know more about how to create a personalized message, we suggest you to go here.

And as Waalaxy is very complete, you will be able to measure the opening rate of your messages on the dashboard.

 

 FAQs of the article audience LinkedIn: how to find your target

Throughout this article, you learnt how to find your target audience LinkedIn and how to set it. We know that we say this a lot, but social medias are humongous 🦖 database that could help you find the best prospects for your product or service. The best advice we could give you is : “JUST USE IT”.

You can use it for B2B marketing, B2C marketing or just prospecting around in order to find THE product or service you’d like to offer.

What is absolutely amazing ❇️ is the fact that LinkedIn gives you the opportunity to target the audience thanks to their titles, their position in a company, their interests or job functions. It is a very powerful tool. Obviously, don’t forget that you need to define a target, a persona, because it is the key to find your ideal customer.

 

LinkedIn target audience

As you know now, targeting 🎯 is part of your foundations to run ad campaigns. Of course, your targets will change over time according to your objectives, according to your campaigns (is it conversion? Is it visibility?) and your products or services.

What is really interesting 🔥 on LinkedIn is that you can classify your audience thanks to:

• Enriched demographic data.
  • Filtered by hierarchical level, function, sector or geography for example.
• Interests.
  • Filtered by skills, their area of study, their group membership…
• Profils.
  • Filtered according to their activity data, if they are job seekers…
• Your own data based on your audiences.

Targeting your audience is so important because a well-defined customer will allow you personalization within your marketing messages.

This step is not to be neglected in your advertising strategy: a well defined audience has more chance ☘️ to match with what people need and, by this fact, your potential customer will value your product or service. That means that you will be able to dope your return on investment or ROI (sweet little name).

 

How do I reach a large audience on LinkedIn?

One of the best marketing strategies can be sometimes free 💸. If you like talking about your experiences, your work and your area of expertise, you can easily do so by posting on LinkedIn.

What we mean by posting is not only about creating content, it is also by replying to others’ posts or reshare them. And who knows, you might be one of the best influencers on LinkedIn and by doing so, attract your type of client!

If you want to be successful on it, you will need to deliver relevant AND valuable information. You need to show to your network 🕸️ that you are an expert in your area, so do not hesitate to provide helpful, valuable and inspiring content.

That is not all, you need to be consistent. Your content strategy need to be thought out and to do this, you need to think long term.

 

Find your audience LinkedIn with ads

LinkedIn ads is working quite similarly as Facebook Advertising. They even have audience templates to help you at the beginning of your targeting (and they also have an audience insights like Facebook). That’s to use when you are having troubles defining your audience and need a little help 🆘.

There are numerous 📈 options such as customer professional experience, members with a particular degree, members who have expertise in a specific area, decision makers and so on.

If you want to access it, when you are in your campaign manager, click on “audiences” next to “saved audience”.

From here, you will have access to the audience template that could give you some tips to define your customer.

Investing 💰 in LinkedIn Ads can help you develop your brand-awareness and also help you reach a professional audience that has up to 2 times more influence power than the ones you could find on other platforms.

We obviously know that there is a cost to it but you can have explanations in this article to help you make your decision.

 

Conclusion: What is LinkedIn Audience Network?

Now, you have everything in your hands to help you build your ideal customer and understand how LinkedIn audiences work.

There is no magic ✨ recipe to find your potential clients because you will have to test different audiences and do this over time.

What you will need, is to focus on your customer’s wants with all the data you could possibly collect. This is why you should be extremely precised on your persona. Your ROI will thank you later.

Defining your ideal customer 🎯 is fundamental in order to give the most personalized marketing message. And if your message is personalized and matches everything we said above, ding dong, your business will go from earth to sky 🚀.