LinkedIn: What is Interest Targeting?

Exciting new update from LinkedIn which enables marketers to effectively reach potential buyers with messaging that resonates with their professional interests. Read more about this in LinkedIn’s release notes below:

The importance for B2B marketers is to find effective solutions for identifying and engaging with professional audiences that are most relevant to their businesses. In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, it’s crucial for companies to stay ahead of the game, and LinkedIn is here to help.

This powerful tool allows for the translation of the vast amount of content, conversations, and engaging moments shared on LinkedIn into precise targeting that can help drive business growth.

What Interest Targeting Can Do for Your Brand

Align relevant ads and content to potential buyers’ business needs or professional interests. 

Using interest targeting on LinkedIn can be a powerful tool in shaping your brand perception among professional audiences. By aligning your brand with the topics that matter most to your potential buyers, you can create a deeper connection with them and build trust. With interest targeting, you can reach the people who are most likely to be interested in your product or service and who are actively engaged in topics related to your business. For example, if your messaging highlights how your business has successfully solved a problem for a large banking client, targeting interests such as finance and economy can help you reach professionals who are most likely to be interested in your offering.

Deepen your influence with the buyer committee within your target accounts. 

LinkedIn’s account targeting feature has become an essential tool for many of our customers’ Account-Based Marketing campaigns. By combining account targeting with interest targeting, businesses can reach a highly targeted audience of potential buyers who have already shown an interest, or are likely to show an interest, in content that is relevant to their business. This powerful combination allows for precision targeting that can help increase the effectiveness and ROI of marketing campaigns.

What’s new with interest targeting?

With a 48% increase in interactions on LinkedIn Pages year over year, it’s clear that brands and members are leveraging LinkedIn to showcase their products and services and engage with buying committees. LinkedIn recognises the importance of reaching your B2B audience with tailored content while their interest is still fresh, which is LinkedIn expanded their interest targeting offerings to include 20+ new service interest attributes and 120+ new product interest attributes. With over 400+ professional interest categories across business technology, financial management services, cybersecurity software, and more, you now have more control over fine-tuning your campaign targeting to reach your desired audience with ease.

In this article, we will take a closer look at how interest targeting works and how you can use it to achieve your marketing goals on LinkedIn.

General Interests

LinkedIn’s interest targeting allows you to target users based on their general interests, which includes a broad range of categories such as science and environment, technology, and health. However, for even greater precision, you can drill down to specific interests within these broader categories. This allows you to target users who have expressed an interest in very specific topics, enabling you to tailor your messaging and content to their interests with greater precision. By doing so, you can increase the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and ultimately drive more business growth.

Product Interests

Imagine being able to deliver ads directly to people who are actively searching for information about your product. This is exactly what LinkedIn’s product targeting category allows you to do. By targeting buying committee members based on the products they are searching for and asking questions about on the LinkedIn platform, you can reach potential customers who are already showing a strong interest in your product. With 18 categories to choose from, each with subcategories that focus on specific software products, such as data visualization, revenue management, and sales analytics software, you can narrow your targeting to reach the most relevant audience for your business.

Service Interests

Since Service Interests launched to all members in 2021, page visits to Services Pages have grown by an impressive 120%, demonstrating that members are increasingly interested in learning more about the services offered by businesses like yours. By leveraging these activities and the data available on the LinkedIn Economic Graph, you can create more tailored campaigns and reach members who are specifically interested in the services you provide. The initial set of ~20 categories includes a wide range of services such as real estate, environmental consulting, and application software development, enabling you to reach a highly targeted audience and drive more business growth.

Ready to start using interest targeting for your campaigns? It’s easy – all you need to do is select the right interest categories. If you’re not sure which topics to choose, start by checking out what’s trending on your organization’s LinkedIn page or blog. If a topic is performing well in those channels, it’s likely a good fit for interest targeting.

Need help with setting up your LinkedIn account? We can help!

Looking to take your LinkedIn advertising to the next level? Barrk Marketing can help you leverage the power of interest targeting to reach your ideal B2B audience with tailored content. Don’t have a LinkedIn account set up yet? No problem, we can help you with that too! Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you grow your business on LinkedIn.

(source: https://www.linkedin.com/business/marketing/blog/linkedin-ads/introducing-interest-targeting)