If you are a B2B marketer, it is crucial for you to precisely reach first-rate audiences to create great leads. B2B marketers have relied on LinkedIn ads to reach their targets. LinkedIn ads offer effective ways to bring your marketing goals to life. Whether your focus is on demand generation or brand awareness, LinkedIn offers B2B marketing solutions that suit your needs.
With the goal of targeting the right audience and giving you high-quality leads, LinkedIn has come up with an exciting new product that you will surely find useful for your B2B marketing campaigns. It is called Lookalike Audiences. This amazing product will simply look for an audience that resembles your current leads, clients, traffic, etc. so that your company can reach new potential leads.
What are Lookalike Audiences?
Lookalike Audiences is a powerful tool. It is a means of getting new potential customers who are likely to be interested in what you have to offer. These audiences are similar to your existing customers because of certain aspects such as job description, education, industry, etc.
Facebook already uses the Lookalike Audience feature. After an analysis of millions of dollars in ad spends, the result showed that Lookalikes made up about 60% of overall spend in Facebook advertising campaigns. Many companies prefer it over other targeting strategies to find out which audiences will drive the best performance.
Now the Lookalike Audience feature is available on the world’s largest professional networking site. Powered by LinkedIn’s accurate member-generated data, Lookalike algorithms will let you find new audiences for your ad campaigns. This is a very effective way to reach new prospective leads that have similarities with your existing customers. It will take any audience – a remarketing list or an email list – and it will find other people that are very similar to that audience list. It is a feature best used to target new audiences who are at the top of your sales funnel. Lookalike Audiences on LinkedIn is an accurate source of high-quality leads. Out of its 500 million members, there are an identified 61 million senior-level influencers and 40 million decision makers on LinkedIn. It is also the most used social media platform of Fortune 500 companies.
What are the benefits of Lookalike Audiences?
- It will help you find new high-quality leads.
- It allows you to create the matched audience segment, which gives you more control.
- It will help you reach potential leads that are similar to your best customers.
- It will maximize your ROI because of specific targeting.
- It will help you scale your campaign quickly and easily.
How do you use Lookalike Audiences?
You have the option of including or even excluding the targeting of Lookalikes. If you choose to include Lookalikes, you can use a total of 17 targeting facets that LinkedIn has provided in order to refine your Lookalike audience. These targeting facets include location, company name, industry, job title, job function, company size, and many others. The importance of targeting the right Lookalikes cannot be overemphasized.
First, you need to identify your matched audience segment or source audience. At the very heart of all Lookalike audience is a source of audience from which the Lookalike audience is built. You can identify which matched audience segment you would like to create Lookalikes on. To further refine your audience, you can use targeting facets such as seniority, industry, job functions, or other demographics of your choice. Seniority choices include Manager, Director, VP, CXO, Partner, and others. You will also be asked to identify the location that you want to target. Location can be as broad as a continent, a geographical or economic region, or as specific as a city or town. It is also highly recommended that your source audience is made up of your best customers for better results. After identifying, LinkedIn will create your lookalike audience with its Audience Expansion feature. Your Campaign Manager account will generate a list of Lookalike Matched Audience Segment which will populate automatically in your audience list.
On your Uploaded List audiences tab, you can find lookalikes based on account or contact lists. On our Website audiences tab, you will find Lookalikes based on retargeting segments.
Once your campaign is launched and LinkedIn finds at least 300 Lookalike matches, your campaign can start delivering. With additional Lookalike matches, more tailor-fit messages will reach more qualified professionals. With Lookalike as part of your ad campaign, you will have a better response rate. Additionally, your Display Ads will reach more premium professionals with Lookalike Audiences. You will be able to reach more prospects and make each interaction with them more relevant and more personal. Since there are countless variations available in Lookalike Audiences, you can spend time testing various audience segments to see which performs best.
You are able to measure the ROI of your ad campaigns with Lookalike matches using the real-time reporting feature in Campaign Manager. If you want to track your website conversions from an ad posted on LinkedIn, use the conversion tracking feature. If you want to optimize your campaigns, you can use the built-in analytics. Since proving ROI is an important part of a successful B2B marketing strategy, LinkedIn Marketing Solutions have made it easier for marketers to track results. With the right results from LinkedIn’s conversion tracking feature, marketers are now more equipped to optimize their content. The insights gained from the conversion tracking will help them make strategic decisions about their campaigns.
Adopting LinkedIn Ads’ Lookalike Audience feature early on will definitely give your company a leg up. It is highly recommended that a plurality of your ad budget should go towards Lookalike audiences. Using Lookalike Audiences on LinkedIn, you can bolster and scale your ad campaigns to reach a vast number of highly-qualified leads. Compared to other social media platforms, you are able to target your leads at a more precise level and engage valuable prospects who otherwise could have remained out of reach.
