What would it mean for your business if you could reach more of the right people and start generating more B2B leads on LinkedIn? More decision-makers, more executives, whether they are IT professionals, small business owners, or C-level executives. That’s what a LinkedIn look-a-like audience can help you accomplish, reach more of the right people.
Grow Your Business With a LinkedIn Lookalike Audience
LinkedIn is already the world’s largest professional network, as well as the top platform for lead generation. Marketers know how important it is to generate great leads. Among the many reasons to use LinkedIn for B2B marketing, lookalike audiences excel at building upon your selected audience, finding users who share similar characteristics, growing your audience up to 15 times the original size. See how you can use LinkedIn lookalike audiences to find people who are similar to your ideal customer.
Advantages of a LinkedIn Lookalike Audience
Do you want to reach a high-converting audience? Lookalike audiences are a powerful LinkedIn targeting tool for B2B marketers, creating an audience that closely resembles your current leads, clients, or traffic so that you can reach new potential leads. Because this audience is similar to your existing customers, they are likely to be interested in what you have to offer.
Targeting is often a complex process for marketers. On the one hand, you don’t want to narrow your focus too much and miss out on opportunities, but on the other hand, you don’t want to waste resources trying to market to the wrong audience. Lookalike audiences have proven highly effective on other platforms, like Facebook’s Lookalike Audiences, proving that they can detect relevant, similar traits, and the process for LinkedIn is similar.
Marketers can upload an email list or a list of people who have visited their website. Then LinkedIn’s system matches those details against the profiles and company attributes in its database to create a new audience of users who share similar characteristics. One key difference for lookalike audiences on LinkedIn is the ability for user segments to be based on job titles and position information, helping your business attract the right decision-makers.
What is a lookalike audience?
LinkedIn’s lookalike audiences help marketers find people with similar characteristics to their target audience. Lookalike audiences are identified through a matched audience segment, and the results are all active LinkedIn users.
Creating a LinkedIn Lookalike Audience
The key to lookalike audience success is starting with a quality matched, also known as source, audience. This list is your own curated audience and is the first step to creating a lookalike audience. This source list could be the email list from your CRM, a contact list, or a list of website visitors. The source list you choose to provide will probably depend on your advertising goals.
Do your marketing goals include lead generation or scaling? Are you looking for target accounts or businesses that are similar to the ones you already do business with? You may choose to use a customer list as your source audience. When LinkedIn uses that list to create a lookalike audience, they will be searching for users that have similarities to your current customers. The algorithm can find companies that are similar in industry, size, and similar employees.
Perhaps your LinkedIn advertising strategy is to build brand awareness or drive traffic. You might consider looking at your key URLs and building a source audience from users visiting those URLs. From that source audience, your lookalike audience is likely to be aligned with those users, and you would be able to drive this new audience to your website.
One requirement to keep in mind when building a lookalike audience is that your matched or source audience must include at least 300 members. Once you have added your lookalike audience to an ad campaign, you will have the ability to select additional targeting options, like job function and industry, to help you further refine your target audience. Because it can be helpful to have an idea of how your lookalike audience will perform before you launch your campaign, you can use the forecast panel within Campaign Manager to see a preview of performance, estimated spend, and potential audience reach.
At Vende Digital growing your business is our business. We are a B2B digital agency focused on connecting you to your next customer. Ready for fresh ideas and actionable insights? Contact us to schedule a complimentary digital marketing analysis.
Key Takeaways
- LinkedIn lookalike audiences help marketers find people with similar characteristics to their target audience.
- LinkedIn lookalike audiences are a powerful tool for B2B marketers
- The key to a lookalike audience’s success is starting with a quality source audience.
- LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network, as well as the top platform for lead generation.
