As marketers, we are always searching for new ways to expand and reach our target audience and LinkedIn’s new ad features, could help us do just that. After launching their new Interest Tagging Feature for ads in January, LinkedIn has now added a further three new ad targeting tools that are designed to increase the scale of your marketing efforts and improve return on investment.

Earlier this month, LinkedIn introduced, ‘audience templates’, ‘lookalike audiences’ and a new Microsoft Bing search data expansion to improve on their existing interest targeting feature. Here’s a break-down of how each new feature works:

Lookalike Audiences

LinkedIn’s new lookalike audiences, compares the qualities and interest of your ideal customer against their huge amount of member and company data, which is comprised of over 610 million member profiles. It allows you to more easily engage with new professionals with similar backgrounds and interests to your current clients, customers, and website visitors. As these members are already on LinkedIn, you’ll also know they already share the same professional mindset to involve and engage in your brand.

To use the Lookalike Audiences tool, create a Matched Audience in LinkedIn Campaign Manager.

From there, LinkedIn can compare that audience list against other similar member profiles that you can target to expand your reach.

Audience Templates

Marketers will know that creating an audience can be a daunting and time-consuming process. Audience templates have been specially tailored for those newer to advertising on LinkedIn, or existing advertisers wanting to improve their engagement with their target audience. Audience templates give you a wide selection of over 20 (and growing), predefined B2B audiences to tailor your settings to, making marketing efforts much more streamline and efficient. The templates include things such as, job titles, audience traits, groups, skills, etc. all of which you can activate with a single click. This allows you to more effectively interact with your ideal professional audience, and most importantly, without spending hours in the process.

Microsoft Bing Search Data Expansion

Interest Targeting, the feature LinkedIn released back in January, allowed marketers on LinkedIn to target ads based upon professional interests. The data LinkedIn used to do this was powered by the content users’ engaged with on the platform. However, last month, LinkedIn expanded it to incorporate search engine results from Microsoft’s Bing. This invaluable addition for marketers will allow them to assess not only their audience’s interests on their LinkedIn profile, but also what they are actively searching for on Bing. Giving marketer’s insight into what their audience is really interested in, concerned about or seeking a solution for.

All of these new additions present a huge amount of opportunities for B2B marketers. The update greatly expands LinkedIn’s functionality enabling marketers to more easily reach a larger audience of experienced professionals with LinkedIn Ads.

If you haven’t already, next time you’re on LinkedIn, have a look at some of the features above, and perhaps consider implementing some if you want to further optimise your marketing strategy on the platform.

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