In the billing centre you can also add any coupons you receive from Linkedin. 

How to get coupons from Linkedin?

This is a bit cheeky, but if you reach out to a Linkedin ads rep and ask for a coupon they should give you a 0-100 dollar coupon. I have had coupons up to 1000 dollars but I do not know anyone else who got this. 

In this section, we will go over all the different targeting options given to us by Linkedin and then later I will go over-targeting strategy and the way I would recommend targeting.

The first thing to note is that Linkedin has separated the targeting into two buckets. The first is called ‘Audiences’ and this is where you retarget audiences, target your company or people lists, and where you choose lookalikes.

The second is ‘Audience Attributes’. This is where you could target your audience with firmographic and demographic options. 

Audiences

• List Upload: this is where you will be able to choose from a list of contacts or companies you have uploaded to Linkedin. The company lists is a great option if you are doing an Account-Based Marketing (ABM) strategy, as you can target a list of accounts and layer that on with job title, function or seniority.

 Check out my article on ABM and Linkedin advertising here. 

• Lookalike: This is where you can create a lookalike audience or where you previously created lookalikes can be chosen to target. 

• Retargeting: This is where you can retarget numerous different things such as:

• • • Company page – this is anyone who visited or clicked on a call to action on your company page.
    • Events – this is anyone who engaged with your Linkedin events. 
    • Lead Gen Form – this is anyone who opened and submitted or just submitted a lead gen form. 
    • Video – here we can retarget anyone who has watched a certain percentage of a video we have running from 25-97%. 
    • Website – this is where you can retarget anyone who has visited your website. You first need to instal the Linkedin insight tag. 

• Third-Party: This is where you can integrate your third-party data provider and use this as a targeting source. 

Audience Attributes

This is where we will go to target new audiences through demographic and firmographic options. 

• Company – this option gives us an array of firmographic options which is unique to Linkedin. 

• • • Company Category – this is where companies have been put into groups or buckets based on some kind of list or segment. For example ‘Fortune 500’ or ‘London Stock Exchange. 
    • Company Connections – this allows you to target the 1st connections of employees from selected companies. This is only available for companies that have over 500 employees. 
    • Company Growth Rate – this is to target companies that are growing at a certain rate. Some of the options for example are ‘10-20% company growth’. Growth here means new employees and not in revenue (I believe). 
    • Company Industries – this is where you can select the industry you want to target specifically. 
    • Company Names – this is where you can type in the names of specific companies you want to target. If you have a large list of companies it may be easier to upload a list as mentioned in the above ‘Audiences’ section.
    • Company Size – this is where you can select the company size in terms of how many employees it has. Number of employees often reflect revenue, but this changes depending on the industry. 

• Demographics – this option allows us to target by age and gender. 

• • • Age – as we do not give our age to Linkedin it assumes the age based on your job title. I would not recommend this as a targeting type most of the time. 
    • Gender – we do not state our gender to Linkedin, so it is assuming this based on whether our name is more female or male. Obviously, this can be inaccurate. 

• Education – This is an interesting option as we can target people based on what degree they have, what school they attended or the general field of study. 

• • • Degrees
    • Field of study
    • Member school

• Job Experience – one of the most useful options, here we can target based on job title, skill, department and experience. 

• • Job function – this is like departments such as the HR department or IT. 
  • Job Seniority – this is the option to choose if you want to filter by whether they are managers, directors, owners, VP etc. 
  • Job Title – the most used option by all Linkedin advertisers. This is where we can target by the job title (obviously). 

Please note, Linkedin only recognises roughly 40% of job titles as the job title field is a free form field. This means if you only target by job title you are missing out on 60% of your target audience (please see targeting strategy below). 

• Member Skills – this is a great option in certain situations. This is where we target by skills people state they have on Linkedin. 
• Years of experience – this is where we can target people by the number of years they have worked from 1 – 12 years. 

• Interests and traits – this is where you will be able to target by interested groups and traits. 

• • Member Interests – this is where we can target based on the interest the prospect has. 
  • Member Groups – This is a really great option as Linkedin groups are clunky so anyone who is in a LinkedIn group is possibly both passionate about the topic of the group and also uses LinkedIn more than the average person. 
  • Member Traits – this is where we can target certain traits such as ‘ex-pat’ or ‘Job Seekers’ or Frequent traveller’. 

Linkedin ads targeting strategy

Although there seem to be many different variations for targeting I would recommend the following 5:

1. 1. Job title + Industry – this is the targeting type everyone goes for first, and I would use this as a benchmark and just one of the ways I target. Although targeting by job title will be the most accurate, it is also potentially not the most affordable. Linkedin has a free form field to type in your job title, so it only recognises roughly 40% of the job titles members have. This means the other 60% you are missing out on are underserved and cheaper to target if we use one of the other targeting types mentioned below. So use the Job title targeting type as a benchmark, but a/b test it with the other types. 
   2. Groups + Seniority – Linkedin groups are relatively clunky and not very user friendly. As a result, many people who are part of a Linkedin group are very passionate about the topic which the group is about. It also indicates these users spend more time on the platform. I find targeting by a list of Linkedin groups can perform better than job titles. Do not miss this. 

• Skill + Seniority – skills can be an incredible way to target your prospects. In fact sometimes, but not always, it can even be the best. If you want to target me for example, my job title of ‘Linkedin ads specialist’ does not actually exist but you could target me with the skill ‘Linkedin ads’ effectively. I recommend going for long-tail skills. So not just ‘marketing’ for example which everyone feels they have, but something more specific like conversion rate optimisation. 

• Job Function + Seniority – by job function Linkedin means department. If you layer on a department with a seniority layer, this could be a great way to target the people you are missing out on with just the job title option.

1. Company list targeting – this is an incredible way to get hyper-specific with who you target. With this, you can upload a list of between 300 – 300,000 companies into LinkedIn (around 3-10k is recommended) and layer it on with function or job title. This is amazing if you are running an ABM strategy. We can target a list of accounts that sales have determined as high value with content. 

PLEASE NOTE: Untick the check box labels ‘Enable Audience Expansion’. We do not really want to give LinkedIn too much control over who we want to reach as one of the key benefits of Linkedin is that we can be so specific with who we target, and therefore we should maintain that control.