Beginner’s guide : Targeting your ICP on LinkedIn

We all know there are a lot of advertising platforms out there but how do you know which one to focus on?

LinkedIn is an excellent platform for B2B and B2C marketers targeting decision makers and business owners.

With LinkedIn ads, you can reach over 800 million users, most of which are business professionals, making them ideal for B2B advertising.

So, how do you target them?

It’s easy to just jump in, start your campaign, click a few buttons and publish your ad.

However, a lot of people skip one of the most important parts before running their ads — defining their target audience.

It’s easy to overlook this because you can always narrow your targeting while creating your campaign.

Will your ad fail if you don’t define your audience?

Most likely not, you’ll still get impressions and clicks, but…you’re throwing away a LOT of money by advertising to the wrong prospects. You can cut your costs by targeting the right people.

Here’s a checklist of what you need to ask yourself:

1. Where are they based?
2. Are there specific job titles you want to target?
3. What job functions do you want to focus on?
4. What is their company size?
5. How many employees does the company have?
6. What industries are you targeting?
7. What’s your prospects interests?
8. What skills would they have?
9. What groups/community would they be in?
10. What’s their job seniority?

By answering these ten questions, you can significantly narrow your audience and focus solely on your ICP. Defining your ICP and using it as your target audience in advertising is a no-brainer.

To achieve the best results, your initial target audience size should be at least 250K-1M. A large audience will waste a lot of your budget on unnecessary impressions and clicks, while a small audience may limit your reach. Be in the sweet spot.

It’s important to gather this data early in the process to help LinkedIn’s algorithm understand your audience — you can always edit this audience as necessary over time.