Stuart Crow’s Post

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Growth Director | Marketing Lead | B2B Content and Digital Marketing

LinkedIn is retiring group membership targeting in Europe (EEA not UK for now). It used to be a great method for reaching niche B2B audiences with specific interests – based on self-identification. But groups just became a spam-fest with real economic buyers understandably reluctant to join and contribute. The state of play for psychographic targeting on LinkedIn now looks something like this: 1. Self-identification [Skills] 2. Behavioural [Interests and traits] This relies on the accuracy of LinkedIn to profile audiences based on behaviours and content consumption patterns. LinkedIn is very careful not to define these as ready-to-buy/ in-market audiences. They describe it as enabling the ability to ‘reach members based on their direct or inferred interest.’ This is interest targeting at the broad category level: ↘ General interests Examples: Workplace conflict resolution | Risk management ↘ Product interests Examples: Cybersecurity software | ABM software ↘ Service interests Examples: Project management services | Translation services If you need more detailed categories, you can actually extract deeper data from Sales Navigator. It’s an onerous workflow but workable. To date, behavioural interest targeting has generated mixed results – but the potency of this targeting functionality can only improve as the platform evolves. 3. 3rd party sourced interests This technique involves uploading custom audiences pre-loaded with known interests sourced elsewhere. Examples: ➡ Interest in you Known interest in you through reverse IP look-ups on your company website visits (via LeadForensics, Albacross, Leadfeeder, Matomo etc.) Or company demographic look-ups in the LinkedIn ad platform. ➡ Interest in your specific category and competitors Feeding your company TAM list through Bombora, LeadSift etc. This will provide very specific categories and reveal interest in specific vendors. Very useful for identifying prospects showing interest in your closest competitors. Summary As one targeting door shuts with group membership, many others are opening. It’s worth keeping an eye on the space this year to see what new interest-targeting capabilities will emerge.

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