80% of B2B marketers says LinkedIn is part of their advertising strategy as four-fifths of its 900 million members drive business decisions, making it a key platform for lead generation. Marketers can create advertising campaigns targeting decision makers ranging from small businesses to global Fortune 500 companies.
LinkedIn’s powerful campaign manager platform allows companies to set targeting criteria based on 20 different attribute categories such as company, work experience, education, demographics, interests and traits.
However, while LinkedIn Campaign Manager is a boon for running B2B ads, there is room for improvement in the ad platform’s industry tag classification and audience targeting mechanisms.
The LinkedIn industry list currently includes 24 major categories and 148 subcategories Applicable industries as a company profile. These categories are currently visible on the company page, but have not yet been updated on Campaign Manager.
While these categories cover a wide range of industries, this article explores why they’re still not enough and how we can overcome the barriers of vague industry labels to optimize ad performance ⬇️
LinkedIn defines industry as the company’s primary industry, the industry in which the company states members are employed. Other industries about the company can be inferred and included in the target.
Individuals cannot choose an industry but are assigned to the industry of the company to which they belong.
Problems arise when there is limited clarity about the industry a particular company belongs to. When selecting the industry option for a LinkedIn company page, the creator or page administrator determines the industry. Since these are subjective, violations can occur, especially when a company may be in two different industries.
For example, a health technology company could fall into the “Health, Wellness & Fitness,” “Hospital & Healthcare,” or “Software Development” categories
Let’s look at a detailed example 🔽
Let’s say you want to show your ad to decision-makers who specialize in fintech. Here are 3 examples of fintech companies and how LinkedIn identifies their industries:
1. RazorpayXPayroll is classified as “IT Services and Consulting” but it is payroll software.
2. PayPal and Payoneer are similar platforms that facilitate international bank transfers, but belong to different industry labels.
As you can see, these 3 companies are actually the same but classified differently on Linkedin. Seems confusing, right?
You may lose ICP companies, or worse, you may spend money on unrelated companies that are not part of your ICP because LinkedIn categorizes them differently than you expect
For example, if you want to target fintech companies and select “Financial Services” in the campaign manager, you’ll end up advertising to banks and investment firms as well.
Alternatively, if you select “Software and Development,” your ads will be shown to all other software companies, regardless of whether they are part of your ICP.
We all know that unqualified leads can take up a lot of your sales and marketing team’s time, costing your company more than it’s worth.
Now the real question is,
Tim Davidson, Vice President of Marketing at B2B Rizz said:
As mentioned above, building a target account list on a third-party platform allows you to display your ads to high-interest companies that actually fall within your ICP without exceeding your paid ad spend.
You can build a list of cold accounts on a repository tool like Apollo or ZoomInfo, or within Factors you can build fine-grained segmentation of hot ICP accounts related to your website, LinkedIn, G2, CRM, etc.
💡You can use Factors account segmentation to identify and build a list of web visitors segmented by source and where they were in their visit customer journey. You can also refine your list by targeting accounts that visit high-intent pages (pricing pages, comparison blogs, G2 reviews, etc.) and tailor your ICP based on demographics, industry, technical graphics, revenue, etc. A list of high-fit, high-intent accounts.
Upload this list when building your audience on LinkedIn to avoid ambiguity and save on ad spend. It also comes in handy when launching retargeting campaigns to potential customers during the solution-understanding stage.
LinkedIn’s native targeting features, while useful, still have some room for optimization, and the LinkedIn team is currently working hard to address this issue. At the same time, you can use a target account list to save time and specifically target your ads to potential customers in your solution market.
Learn how to use Factors.ai for LinkedIn retargeting
guess what? We’re coming up with some exciting stuff that will help you improve your LinkedIn advertising strategy and get the most out of LinkedIn. Stay tuned for more!
