Posted By
Jamie Beckland on 05/17/2010
LinkedIn recently started offering an ad platform similar to Facebook’s. For B2B marketers, it’s an incredible online advertising tool with which to serve highly targeted ads to your prospects. You can hone in on decision makers in your target organizations using a number of filters, including company size, job function, industry, seniority, and geography.
Despite not getting a lot of press coverage, relative to Facebook, LinkedIn is a workhorse, and the go-to place for professionals to maintain their online resume. It receives 15M unique visitors per month and has a total user base of over 66M people. About half of user visits are from within the U.S.
The interesting thing is that users must log in to see many profile details and potential connections with other users. So, in the normal course of researching potential business partners (or, let’s face it, a little Internet stalking), there’s a built-in incentive to log into the system.
So, on login, LinkedIn ad units can reach out to your specific prospects. Ad units link off-site, just like you would expect. But you also declare who is sponsoring the ad (you can assign sponsorship to yourself as an individual, or your business’ LinkedIn profile). That means you have accurate data about exactly who you are targeting—and they know who you are before they even click.
The online targeting capabilities are impressive. There are dozens of job functions, industries, and geographic regions—way more than these screenshots show. 
While you’re limited to three targeting criteria, the power of this targeting should be obvious. Interested in the C-suite for medical organizations over 1,000 people? LinkedIn has the data—and with a high degree of reliability.
Of course, this is just one tactic that must be part of a larger outreach strategy. Our media services and emerging media teams work on developing content and outreach that balances the larger goal with innovation tactics like LinkedIn ads.
If you’re looking for ways to make an initial connection with prospects, LinkedIn’s ad platform is definitely worth testing out.
Tags: Display Advertising, Social Networks
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