Introducing LinkedIn Matched Audiences — What You Need to Know

Introducing LinkedIn Matched Audiences

LinkedIn just made a big announcement for the business world – specifically those of us in marketing and advertising roles. On April 24th, they introduced “LinkedIn Matched Audiences,” which includes “3 new tools to reach audiences that matter most to your business”.

For someone who specializes in social media campaigns, LinkedIn Matched Audiences is really exciting. LinkedIn’s potential as a successful advertising network has always been great. But for some companies, the cost per lead was too big of a pill to swallow. Successfully advertising on LinkedIn requires a long-term commitment to reap all the benefits — like how often your ads are shown and lower CPL. And other social networks, like Facebook, made more advertising improvements faster, making it a preferred choice for many — even surpassing Google Display in advertising dollars spent!

If you’re familiar with Facebook Advertising, these LinkedIn updates introduce very similar capabilities. We only hope the CPL is very similar, too. Here’s what you need to know about the three new tools introduced:

Website Retargeting

This aspect is just what it sounds like. Advertisers can re-engage their website visitors with relevant information on LinkedIn after adding a snippet of code to their website. LinkedIn highlights three main things marketers can do with website retargeting: segment visitors, tailor ad content, and convert more prospects.

This is a functionality we use on Facebook regularly, and it is a great resource for all types of campaigns, especially when the deliverable is a more considerable ask. Targeting an audience who meets the criteria and is already aware of or has expressed interest in the company can make all the difference.

Account Targeting

Account targeting is unique to LinkedIn. With this functionality, marketers can use Account Based Marketing (ABM) to reach the key decision makers of their target accounts. LinkedIn originally released this ability in late 2016, but companies had to use LinkedIn-Assisted, requiring your company to sign an Insertion Order. Now, marketers can do it themselves in the campaign manager with no minimum spend required.

Advertisers can match their target companies against the over 8 million Company Pages on LinkedIn. So even if you haven’t breached that company yet and have no contacts, you can still deliver specific ads to company stakeholders.

To use account targeting, all marketers have to do is:

1. Prepare your account list, including up to 300,000 company names
2. Upload your account list.

Advertisers can still target professionals based on demographics as well.

Contact Targeting

The last new feature released is something we already do on Facebook, but with an added bonus. To use contact targeting, marketers upload (or integrate) lists of contacts from their databases. You can either target your entire database or advertise to specific segments. Once you’ve determined the list you want, simply export it from your CRM and upload the file into LinkedIn’s campaign manager.

The added bonus is LinkedIn integrates with Marketo, Eloqua, and LiveRamp. Meaning, lists from those systems can automatically populate as your database evolves. Despite other available integrations, this functionality is not offered on Facebook. At DemandZEN, we use Hubspot, so we’ll be checking with LinkedIn to see when that integration is coming!

Overall, LinkedIn Matched Audiences is a game-changing announcement for marketers everywhere. Our team is looking forward to following the results and trying it out ourselves. We haven’t launched our first campaign using the new releases yet, but with all the similarities to Facebook, we hope the cost per lead is in the same ballpark too! We’ll keep you posted on our findings.
If you’re interested in taking LinkedIn Advertising for a spin but aren’t sure where to start or how to achieve positive results, let us know. Our team would be happy to help!