How to use LinkedIn’s new interest targeting
Personalisation is getting more and more important in social media marketing as the online users have a wide array of interests and motives for using a social media platform. Some use it for pure entertainment while others may use it for networking. Targeted advertising makes reaching your desired audience group easier. While most social media platforms offer the feature of targeted advertising based on demographics, LinkedIn has recently launched interest targeting, just like Facebook.
This is good news for digital marketers and businesses. Based on user activity – i.e. content users engage with (like, share, comment, and post), people they follow and their searches on Bing- interest marketing will enable you to translate this activity into user interests. There are over 200 professional categories, such as artificial intelligence, economy, business development, customer experience etc. that you can use to customise your ad campaign in order to reach your desired group of users.
This is how it works!
This new feature helps you to reach your campaign objective by enabling you to reach your desired audience group based on;
– The content and subjects that users engage with i.e. like/ comment/share
People/profiles they follow i.e. their LinkedIn network.
– Searches on Bing
– User’s job title and description
With a huge user base of 61 million members, and high level of engagement that increases by 30% every year, LinkedIn is an ideal platform to reach the desired people for your business.
Reach you campaign objectives;
All marketing campaigns are based on the objectives such as; brand building, brand awareness, lead generation, etc. Interest targeting is an ideal way for brand awareness campaigns. Here are a few tips you can use to achieve your campaign targets using interest targeting;
1. The first step is to identify the interests well suited with your product/ services. If you are not sure about the topics, just skim through the topics that performed well on your Business LinkedIn page or your Blog. These topics are likely to generate an engaging response in your campaign as well.
2. In the initial stages of a campaign, always choose a wide interest category. Once the campaign establishes you can then narrow down your audience to achieve more accurate results. For Example; If you sell security solutions, start by targeting business security solutions category, once a base establishes, you can then narrow it down to a more specific category such as security solutions for hospitals, airports etc. depending upon the response you receive. This will help you reach the full scale of your audience and then help you target the most interested/active chunk.
3. A lot of advertisers select multiple interests for a single campaign. Your target audience can be reached through numerous interests, but it is advised to run a separate campaign for each interest as this will help you to note down the response/engagement that you receive from each interest group. You can also narrow down your audience to the most engaging set of users.
4. If you are trying to reach a very specific group of people, you can choose another targeting facet (seniority/function) along with interest targeting. But do not add more than one targeting options as adding multiple targeting options can cause hyper- targeting, which means that you either reach an undesired group of audience or a very small chunk of desired audience.
Interest Targeting has definitely brought LinkedIn one step closer to personalised marketing. It will not only help you reach your target audience more effectively and accurately but will ultimately also help you grow your business reach.
