Segmenting a LinkedIn ad campaign for B2B lead generation

This is Part 2 of our 6-part series on how to set up and manage a LinkedIn lead generation ad campaign. Since Saratoga B2B is a LinkedIn lead generation agency, we wanted to share the work we do on the backend for our clients. In this series, we’re focusing on Sponsored Content ads in LinkedIn. In this segment, you’ll learn how to segment an audience for your Sponsored Content campaign.

Recap: In Part 1 of this tutorial, we set up a LinkedIn campaign named “Fortune 500,” within the “Software engineers” campaign group.

Now we’re going to create the audience for this campaign, which will be software engineers at Fortune 500 firms based in California. This target audience is being set up to service a hypothetical sales team that covers California.

Step 1: Click back to the initial Campaign Manager index page and click on the account we created previously, “IT firm account #1.” 

Step 2: Click on the campaign group “Software engineers” we created previously.

Step 3: Hover over the Fortune 500 campaign created earlier.

and click on the “Manage” button.  

Step 4: First, specify the geolocation of the base of users you want to target. In this example, we’re selecting “United States.” 

Step 5: Select “North America,” then select “United States.” Then select “California.”

Step 6: Now we’ll select the “software engineers” target audience. On the same page as the “California” selection, click on “Job Experience,” then “Job Titles.” Then begin typing in “software engineers” and a selection of job titles will appear. Check “Software Engineer” and this title should appear in the “Include job titles current” area.

Step 7: We’ll also deselect “Enable Audience Expansion,” which is LinkedIn functionality that attempts to find similar type LinkedIn members to your core audience. Because we’re specific in who we want to target – software engineers in California who work at Fortune 500 firms – we don’t need to use this function.

Step 8: Now we’ll select the type of ad we want to use for this campaign. In this case, we’re choosing a “single image ad,” which we’ll assume is an ad your graphic designer has previously created for you.

Note: For Sponsored Content ads, you also could choose “Carousel image ad” or “Video ad.” If we were creating an InMail ad campaign, we would select the “Message ad” option.

Step 9: In the “Placement” panel, we’ll also deselect the “Enable the LinkedIn Audience Network,” which would run your ads on websites and applications that are not part of LinkedIn itself.

Optional Observation: Without filtering for Fortune 500 companies, which we’ll do in the next tutorial section, LinkedIn is estimating there are approximately 250,000 software engineers in California who are LinkedIn members. If you wanted to target the entire group, this is where you would stop your filtering and begin determining your budget, which we’ll also cover in the next LinkedIn Ad campaign section.