PPCRadical LinkedIn B2B #PPC: Targeting Competitor’s Employees

Radical LinkedIn B2B #PPC: Targeting Competitor's Employees

A step-by-step LinkedIn PPC targeting tutorial to finger competitors' employees in a tight grid of job titles, geographic location, and places of employment.

For quite some time, LinkedIn Direct Ads were the butt of PPC marketers’ jokes, sporting terrible ROI, high CPC, and abysmal CTR.

As predicted, LinkedIn, pre-IPO, rolled out features that many had been waiting on for quite some time: the ability to target users by specific companies and extremely highly focused job titles matriculated with granular industries.

There will be many uses of this targeting matrix for B2B, the most obvious of which is HR (human resources) for the purpose of recruiting.

This post is a step-by-step LinkedIn PPC targeting tutorial to finger competitors’ employees in a tight grid of job titles, geographic location, and places of employment.

LinkedIn has followed Facebook’s lead by giving advertisers more intimate access to its business-centric user base. As of this writing, there are 43,160,796 LinkedIn members just in the United States, fertile territory for B2B marketers.

Getting Started

Log in to your LinkedIn account and head over to LinkedIn Ads, which are newly renamed, “Direct Ads.” The ability to target such specific job titles and places of employment is new, radical, and what we’ve been waiting for.

Go through the basics. Name your campaign, choose the destination URL, create the first ad and as many variations as you like.

There’s the standard duplicate function so it isn’t necessary to start from scratch each time. We’re looking for web developers so I’ll mock up an ad seeking WordPress Ninjas who dabble in Ruby on Rails.

LinkedIn Ad Campaign

Targeting

Now choose a location. The geolocation grid is a little disappointing because states aren’t cut up into small enough chunks.

In Minnesota the only DMA we can isolate is the Minneapolis St. Paul area. Not to worry. Targeting the whole state is fine in this case.

LinkedIn PPC Targeting

Now comes the real fun. Though the Ajax box isn’t nearly as smart as the “Interest” tools in Facebook Ads, it’s cool enough. A little experimentation along with LinkedIn’s suggested job titles yields a wonderful spectrum of job titles.

LinkedIn PPC Suggested Job Titles

LinkedIn PPC Select Job Titles

More Competitive Targeting

Let’s get more competitive here. A Google search for [Minneapolis, Minnesota Web Development” gives us a bunch of cool ideas.

Think about it. The more a company optimizes their for discoverability in Google, the more vulnerable they are to this competitive tactic!

Google SERP Minneapolis, Minnesota Web Development

After pulling out the firms revealed in the first few pages of Google SERPs, I type in a few I know like The Nerdery, formally Sierra Bravo. Then intuition kicks in and I aim clearly at big brands that surely have programmers, like “Best Buy” and agencies like, “Carmichael Lynch,” “Periscope,” and “Risdall Marketing Group.”

Their developers are fresh meat for my ads. I hope the developers at these companies are well paid and happy!

LinkedIn PPC Company and Job Title

LinkedIn Groups

Another targeting option in the new LinkedIn Ads platform is LinkedIn Groups, which we believe can be very powerful. Get creative and remember that the geotargeting will apply.

LinkedIn Groups

OK, That’s It!

Save your ad and move along to the next campaign. Although this campaign will move slowly as a result of the relatively small sampling of LinkedIn users, exactly the right demographics are targeted.

If you bid high enough, your competitors’ employees will literally see this ad the next time they visit LinkedIn. All the same caveats apply to any other type of PPC, including multivariate message, picture, and landing page testing.

Happy hunting in all your B2B PPC LinkedIn Targeting endeavors.

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