The Future of B2B Audience Targeting with LinkedIn

The Future of B2B
Audience Targeting
with LinkedIn
A marketer’s guide to unlocking the full potential
of LinkedIn’s extensive targeting resources and
partner tools

Introduction
Your marketing team is the driving force behind your company’s success. As a B2B
marketer, you understand the importance of properly managing and optimizing ad
campaigns to deliver measurable and meaningful results.
This guide unlocks the full potential of LinkedIn’s extensive targeting resources and
partner tools. Discover how to sharpen your audience targeting strategies by merging
your data with LinkedIn’s Marketing Partner integrations, discovering a richer and more
robust audience at scale.
Inside,you’ll uncover:
• Strategic advantages of audience targeting on LinkedIn.
• Fundamental principles of LinkedIn audience targeting.
• Advanced techniques with LinkedIn Marketing Partners
for next-level targeting.
Introduction to
LinkedIn Ads
Grasp the basics and set a
strong foundation.
Using LinkedIn’s
Ad Targeting
Master the art of precision in
your campaigns.
Getting Started
with LinkedIn
Advertising
Kickstart your advertising journey.
How to Create a
LinkedIn Advertising
Campaign
Transform ideas into impactful
campaigns.
If you’re not already familiar with LinkedIn Ads,
we recommend checking out the following
resources to get started:
Then revisit this ebook when you’re ready to plan an audience
foryour next campaign!

Why Use LinkedIn for
Audience Targeting?
LinkedIn stands out as the platform of choice for brands who wish to drive digital
engagement in the B2B arena. Access to LinkedIn’s vast repository of first-party
member data enables you to easily and precisely target your ideal customer profile
(ICP). With tools that analyze behavior and intent, LinkedIn’s audience targeting
capabilities can even help your brand unlock previously undiscovered opportunities.
Here are just a few reasons brands turn to LinkedIn to find and engage their
B2B audience:
LinkedIn offers a high-quality professional audience
1 billion
business professionals in over 200 countries and territories worldwide are on
LinkedIn, representing a range of leadership titles from 67.61 million companies and
organizations across all industries.

The LinkedIn audience
has buying power
65+ million
4 of 5
business decision makers are
on LinkedIn
LinkedIn members drive
decision-making at their
organization
“Quite simply, if you’re in B2B, LinkedIn is where your audience is, and so that’s where you
have to be too. Not only is your audience on LinkedIn, but it’s also where you have the
most integrations, tools and targeting options to maximize your investment and be sure
that you’re reaching the right decision makers with the right ad formats.”
“When it comes to B2B, LinkedIn really is the best platform for B2B audience targeting,
due to its professional nature and robust user data. It allows advertisers to reach a highly
engaged and relevant audience based on job titles, industries, company sizes and a lot
more. This ensures that their ads are seen by decision-makers and professionals in their
target market.”
Michael Pannone
Director of Global Demand Generation at G2
Crystal King
Social Media Professor at HubSpot

“A lot of our audience is on LinkedIn every day, and usually they’re there too to seek out
professional content, making them far more receptive to the content that we’re putting out there
as well. With such a large portion of our target audience active on LinkedIn, we can achieve
really high match rates that maybe we wouldn’t on other channels.”
Hannah Jordan
Senior Digital Marketing Manager at Demandbase
LinkedIn has more relevant B2B audience targeting options
• A full range of professional information is targetable on LinkedIn, so you can customize to
your organization’s needs.
• You can also target based on member intent, behavior, engagement and interest.
• Industry leaders know their audience is on LinkedIn – 94% of Fortune 100 companies
trust LinkedIn to help them reach their audiences.
LinkedIn has a more responsive audience
• Audiences on LinkedIn are 6x more likely to convert.
• Marketers see up to 2x higher conversion rates on LinkedIn

LinkedIn Audience
Targeting Essentials
LinkedIn’s expansive first-party member data and robust audience targeting
options enable full-funnel management of your ad campaigns. Discover, engage
and re-engage customers at every point of their buyer journey and beyond.
Understand your audience
These targeting tools will help you better understand your target audience, so you can
create campaigns that speak to their specific needs.
Audience Insights:
This native Campaign Manager tool
provides valuable information about your
audience’s demographics, job functions
and interests, enabling you to customize
your content and ads to better match
their needs and preferences.
Predictive Audiences:
Tap into the power of LinkedIn’s AI to
combine the millions of engagements
seen on LinkedIn with your data, to build
and reach a high-intent audience that’s
custom tailored to your business.

Target specific audiences
Expand your targeting capabilities with insights that help you reach specific segments
– and discover new audiences.
Company Targeting:
Adapt your messaging based on a
company’s size, industry or even recent
events that may affect their purchasing
decisions. This targeting method ensures
that your ads are seen by professionals
who could directly benefit from your
products or services, boosting the odds
that they will engage.
Retargeting:
Reconnect with users who have
previously interacted with your brand
on or off LinkedIn by retargeting these
individuals with tailored ads. This strategy
allows you to nurture leads who are
already familiar with your brand but have
not yet converted.
Contact Targeting:
Market directly to your existing contacts
on LinkedIn, either by uploading an
email list or integrating with your
CRM system. This form of targeting is
particularly effective for personalized
marketing campaigns, where messages
are crafted based on the specific needs
or past interactions of each contact.
Audience Expansion:
LinkedIn uses algorithmic analysis to
find and target users who have similar
attributes to your existing audience
but are not part of your current target
audience. This can help increase your
reach while maintaining relevance to
your core audience group.

Launch your campaign
Deliver your ad content to the right audience at the right time – on platforms you can
trust. These tools can help.
Ad Targeting:
LinkedIn ensures that your content
reaches the right people by offering
a variety of ad targeting options that
allow you to narrow down your audience
based on factors like geography,
company, job experience and education.
LinkedIn Audience Network:
Serve ads to your LinkedIn audience,
no matter where they’re at. LinkedIn
Audience Network extends the reach
of your Sponsored Content ads across
a trusted network of digital touchpoints,
so your content reaches your customers
even when they’re off-platform.

Behavioral insights
LinkedIn has the tools to help you track, analyze and
report on even more first-party data:
Understand and predict the future actions of your potential customers by analyzing
past activities, such as interaction with content, reaction to previous ad campaigns and
engagement patterns. This personalized approach enhances the user experience and drives
higher conversion rates by delivering the right message, to the right person, at the right time.
Guide decision-makers to conversion
You’ve found the right audience – now it’s time to win them over. Let data inform your
creative to ensure you’re guiding high-quality leads to conversion.
</>
Insight Tag:
Add this snippet of code to your website for a clearer
understanding of how tracked audiences interact with your
off-platform content.
Revenue Attribution Report:
Use your CRM data to connect your LinkedIn ads
campaigns to sales successes, and discover what is
driving conversions.
Conversion Tracking:
Share your first-party customer conversion actions with LinkedIn
to gain a better understanding of the events that led to those
conversions – and duplicate that success for future campaigns.
Conversions API:
Share your online and offline conversion event data with
LinkedIn for insights into what influenced customers to
take action.

Enrich your audience targeting with LinkedIn Marketing Partners
For every stage of the funnel, there is a marketing partner solution to help you do more with
your audience data, automate workflows, and increase your pool of marketing qualified
leads. In the next section, we’ll explore some of the most impactful partner integrations to
boost your LinkedIn Ads performance.
“Demandbase Journey Stages are fully customizable to reflect where accounts are in their
buying journey based on these different activities that they’re taking. These activities can
include website visits, intent data, campaign responses – all these different engagement
touchpoints. As you can imagine, accounts are constantly generating this activity and that’s
going to change where they’re at in the buying journey. Because we use real-time dynamic
targeting, when an account moves to a new journey stage, that is automatically going to
be reflected in LinkedIn, so the content they’ll be getting based on their journey stage will
be relevant to where they’re at.”
Hannah Jordan

Use LinkedIn Marketing
Partners to leverage
advanced targeting
capabilities
Account & Customer Targeting
Target your marketing directly to specific companies (Account Targeting) or individuals
(Customer Targeting) that you define. LinkedIn enables you to customize your
communication to align with the needs and behaviors of your ideal buyers.
Bringing your brand’s proprietary audience data into the LinkedIn ecosystem amplifies
the power of LinkedIn’s audience targeting. Discover deeper insights, craft a more
robust ICP and target a higher caliber of audience.

“We can send out ads or messaging by vertical.
But we can also really target those we want to
start conversations with - by specific region or
job title. All of this helps us get the right message
to the right person at the right time.”
AutoStore capitalized on their unique
customer data and LinkedIn’s
targeting capabilities by integrating
their HubSpot CRM with LinkedIn
Campaign Manager.This ensured
they were able to fine-tune their
audience list for target profiles, and
helped AutoStore realize an 80%
increase in lead generation.
Suzanne Delap
Marketing Automation Manager,
AutoStore
+80%
+60%
+55%
increase in lead generation
of total new contacts
increase in form submissions

LinkedIn Marketing Partners can help you further amplify your audience and company
targeting.These integrations will enable you to leverage LinkedIn’s rich data insights to
reach your ICPs, automate and optimize your B2B audience and company targeting, and
seamlessly sync your offline and online data to achieve a unified view of your target audience.
Key benefits from our marketing partners:
Partners that make it possible:
• Comprehensive data repositories that
elevate your insights.
• Leverage intent signals to improve your
targeting.
• Use of first-party and third-party data
to build highly targeted audiences on
LinkedIn.
• Match personal emails to business
emails, increasing match rates by as
much as 7.5x on LinkedIn.
• Better targeting and improved media
efficiency with first-party exclusion
targeting, reaching the right audiences
and excluding the wrong ones.
• Insights into how LinkedIn ads contribute
to offline activities with offline conversion
tracking, allowing for a comprehensive
understanding of campaign impact.

Watch the video for additional
insights on audience targeting
from Crystal King
Watch Video
“LinkedIn’s first party data is particularly useful for B2B audience
targeting because it provides valuable insights into user
demographics, industry information, professional positions and
more. HubSpot’s solution helps users make the most of this data
by seamlessly integrating it with their own customer data and
marketing efforts.”
Key Benefits:
Automatically update your
LinkedIn audience segments
based on real-time CRM data,
including contact attributes and
engagement history.
Leverage the ad conversions
events feature to optimize your
LinkedIn campaigns based on the
lifecycle stages of your customers.
Crystal King
Social Media Professor at HubSpot
Spotlight on
The seamless connection between HubSpot
and LinkedIn allows you to refine your targeting
based on detailed CRM insights and provides a
comprehensive view of your advertising’s impact
through advanced reporting and tracking features
within HubSpot.
The integration of HubSpot’s rich customer data with
LinkedIn’s extensive first-party data ensures that your
campaigns are as relevant as possible. Leverage
LinkedIn’s demographic, industrial and professional
data alongside your own CRM insights to create
highly targeted, personalized campaigns that speak
directly to the needs and stages of your audience’s
buying journey.

Retargeting With Partner Solutions
Retargeting solutions available through LinkedIn Marketing Partners allow you to reconnect
with people who have previously interacted with your brand, whether by visiting your website,
engaging with your content on LinkedIn, or attending your events.This strategy helps you to
continuously engage your audience with tailored and relevant messages.
• Access granular insights into how potential customers interact
with products and services similar to your own.
• Utilize insights for more efficient allocation of ad spend by
focusing on users who have demonstrated clear interest or intent.
• Tailor your content and ads to the specific interests and
behaviors of your prospects.

from Saima Rashid
Watch Video
“The fact that you can now combine 6sense data with people
that have already visited your website and create remarketing
campaigns that expand and target a whole account on
LinkedIn – it’s a great way to multi-thread, it’s a great way to get
in front of the right audience.”
Key Benefits:
6ense customers who were using
6sense segments plus the LinkedIn
integration on the campaign side
saw a 33% increase in leads
generated per campaign.
These same customers also
saw a 13% lower cost per lead
thanks to the LinkedIn and 6sense
integration.
Saima Rashid
Senior Vice President Marketing and
Revenue Analytics at 6sense
Spotlight on
Integrating 6sense with LinkedIn transforms your
retargeting capabilities, allowing you to focus on
accounts within your ICP. Leveraging this powerful
partnership allows you to refine your LinkedIn
campaigns with predictive and technographic
data, concentrating your marketing efforts and
budget on accounts that show genuine interest in
your products.
Combining 6sense insights with LinkedIn’s
targeting capabilities enables you to develop
sophisticated retargeting campaigns that
encompass entire accounts, improving your
multithreading efforts and ensuring engagement
with the most relevant audiences.

“By using these targeting options, we’re now
able to ensure a very high percentage of paid
social leads are eligible for their programs of
interest. With the wider targeting options, we
can be sure that the right message will reach
the right prospect – without wasting ad budgets
or sales resources.”
Nexford University discovered
that integrating LinkedIn Ads with
their HubSpot CRM was key in
identifying and engaging with the
most suitable prospects for Nexford’s
programs. This approach allowed for
enhanced targeting, ensuring a high
percentage of the leads generated
were actually eligible and interested
in the programs offered.
Joe McGoldrick
Head of Performance Marketing,
Nexford University
+400%
+112%
+130%
lead to customer rate
increase in enrollments
increase in leads

Dynamic Targeting
With Dynamic Targeting, LinkedIn partners use machine learning and user behavior to
automatically refine and enhance your targeting approach.This method adjusts who sees
your ads in real-time, based on how well your campaigns are performing and how people are
engaging, ensuring that your messages reach the most appropriate and responsive audience.
• Keep your LinkedIn targeting lists
automatically updated with the latest
account and contact data.
• Utilize behavioral data and machine
learning insights to refine your LinkedIn
ad campaigns, focusing on prospects
who show the highest buying intent and
engagement levels.
• Create more personalized and relevant
ad campaigns by matching your ICPs with
LinkedIn’s broad professional network.
• Identify and reach out to key decision-
makers within your target accounts
directly on LinkedIn

from Hannah Jordan
Watch Video
“One of the biggest challenges in B2B today is how much
things are constantly changing. Every time I log into LinkedIn,
someone’s got a new job, they’re moving companies, or
another company has just received a round of funding. How
we overcome that at Demandbase is through an orchestration
solution that feeds our dynamic lists over to LinkedIn. So those
audiences are current and constantly updating in real time,
using the latest data to target that audience.”
Key Benefits:
Stay ahead with real-time
targeting that reflects the latest
job changes, company updates
and account interest levels.
Maximize your marketing budget
by dynamically updating your
target lists to focus on new
contacts and relevant accounts,
avoiding wasted impressions.
Hannah Jordan
Spotlight on
With professionals constantly switching roles and
companies evolving, static data quickly becomes
obsolete. Demandbase overcomes this by continuously
updating audience lists in real time, ensuring your LinkedIn
campaigns are always targeting the most relevant
accounts and individuals.
This integration allows you to sync detailed engagement
data from various sources, like CRM or marketing
automation systems, with LinkedIn, so you can reach highly
engaged prospects with personalized content at the
optimal stage of their buying journey.
Demandbase’s customization capabilities let you tailor
journey stages to reflect real-time actions of your accounts.
Whether it’s awareness or engagement, your campaigns
adjust in real time, delivering relevant content to nudge
prospects further along their buying journey. By leveraging
Demandbase’s ability to dynamically update your target
lists on LinkedIn, you can focus your budget more efficiently.

Intent and Interest Targeting
Intent and Interest Targeting enables you to focus on LinkedIn users who have shown
clear interest in specific topics, products or services through their online behaviors and
interactions. When you combine LinkedIn’s deep interest insights with a marketing partner’s
intent data, you can target users with known interests, significantly enhancing the likelihood
that they will engage with your content and convert.
• Comprehensive intent data helps you
identify which businesses are actively
researching topics relevant to your
products or services.
• Combine external intent data with
LinkedIn targeting options to target
companies showing a high level of
interest in your solutions.
• Minimize wasted ad spend by focusing
your LinkedIn campaigns on users and
companies with demonstrated interest.
• AI algorithms continuously refine your
LinkedIn targeting so your ads are
always aligned with the most current
and relevant audience insights.
• Use intent signals and historical data to
enhance your LinkedIn ad campaigns.

“Since making the switch in late October 2023,
our monthly Linkedin ad spend has decreased
by roughly half. This shift was two-fold due to
the economy and the significant decrease of
in-market leads that would normally trickle in
through the channel. The shifts in the buying
journey have really turned LinkedIn lead gen on
its head, so we see this ability to reach our target
account list more efficiently through the LinkedIn
and RollWorks integration as a no-brainer.”
Conquer sought to maximize the impact of
their Salesforce-native sales engagement
platform and adopt a strategic one-to-
few ABM approach for precise targeting.
Synchronizing their account lists with LinkedIn
ads through RollWorks enabled Conquer to
streamline their targeting process, achieve
optimized ad spend and heighten campaign
precision.They also saw a notable reduction in
costs and an increase in engagement metrics.
Conquersawtransformativeimprovements:
JuliaYavin
Director of Strategy at RenderTribe,
Strategic Account Manager for Conquer.io
724.37%
increase in ad impressions
42.91%
rise in click-through rates
83.4%
reduction in the average cost-per-click
87.2%
reduction in cost-per-mille

from Michael Pannone
Watch Video
“Intent data is important because it helps make sure that your
ad dollars are being spent as efficiently as possible.You don’t
want to spend money on people who are not actually in-market
when you can target folks who are. With G2 buyer intent and
the LinkedIn matched audiences integration, you’re seeing the
accounts who are really in market and you can retarget them and
filter for the right decision makers or seniorities in your campaigns.”
Key Benefits:
Utilize G2’s intent signals within LinkedIn
to target users who have shown a
real interest inyourcategoryor are
comparing you to competitors.
Focus your ad spend on prospects
verified by G2 as actively shopping in
your market.
Narrow in on the right audience with
G2’s filters foraccount buying stages,
and LinkedIn’s advanced audience
insights to reach the right individuals.
Michael Pannone
Director of Global Demand Generation at G2
Spotlight on
Integrating G2 Buyer Intent data within LinkedIn
helps you to discern which accounts are exploring
your category, engaging with your product profile
or even considering your competitors on G2.
Using G2’s vast pool of over 90 million buyers with
LinkedIn’s Matched Audiences feature enables
you to retarget those in-market accounts. You
can filter these audiences based on their role
or seniority, ensuring your messages reach the
decision-makers who matter most.

Customer Data Platforms
Integrating Customer Data Platforms with LinkedIn allows you to aggregate and analyze data
from various sources, then create highly detailed and accurate audience segments for more
personalized and effective advertising campaigns. Leveraging this enriched data ensures that
your messages reach the most relevant and engaged segments of your audience.
• Draw on comprehensive customer insights
and behavioral data to identify and
segment your ideal audience on LinkedIn.
• Automatically update and refine your
LinkedIn audience segments based on
real-time data.
• Utilize detailed customer insights to
craft personalized ad messages and
marketing campaigns on LinkedIn.
• Streamline the process of updating and
refining your target audiences in real-time.
• Leverage advanced data analysis tools to
create highly specific audience segments.

Marketing Automation
This technology enables you to collect and analyze customer data, segment your audience
based on specific behaviors and preferences, and then automate the delivery of targeted
ads to these segments on LinkedIn. As a result, you ensure your marketing messages are more
personalized and relevant, making your lead nurturing efforts more impactful than ever.
• Automatically create and update
targeted segments for your LinkedIn ads.
• Automatically tailor the content of
your LinkedIn ads based on the latest
interactions and behaviors.
• Receive automatic updates of your
segments and corresponding LinkedIn
audiences, keeping your campaigns
aligned with the latest customer insights.
• Save time and enhance the accuracy
and relevance of your ad targeting on
LinkedIn.

Put the right solutions
into action
It’s time to harness the full potential of B2B audience targeting on LinkedIn. Reach out
to your account representative – they can provide personalized insights and strategic
recommendations tailored to your specific business needs.
Here are a few things you can do to get a jump-start on the process:
• Conduct an audience audit to evaluate
the effectiveness of your current targeting
strategies.
• Map out your campaigns based on where
each segment of your audience falls within
the buyer’s journey. This will help you identify
any gaps in your approach and adjust your
tactics to better align with your audience’s
needs and stages.
• Explore the LinkedIn Marketing Partner
directory. This resource is invaluable
for finding tools and partners that can
enhance your targeting efforts.
• Don’t forget to utilize LinkedIn Audience
Insights.This powerful tool sheds light on
the demographics, interests and behaviors
of your target audience, enabling you
to tailor your content and ad targeting
strategy for maximum impact.

Ready to take your B2B targeting to the
next level? Enroll in the Marketing Labs
LinkedIn Ads Targeting Course to deepen
your understanding and sharpen your skills.
Enroll today

The Future of B2B Audience Targeting with LinkedIn

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