By Bob Finlayson and Paul Brunato

Few advertising channels provide the level of targeting around job function, education and industry that LinkedIn does. This is why it is used by many B2B marketers. 

Once created, we put these tools to work to ensure the right messages are reaching the right prospects and customers at the right time in their buying journey. This is where the art and science of marketing meet. 

Step One: Customer Persona Data + LinkedIn Attributes = Precise Targeting

Leverage the insights in your customer personas across the LinkedIn targeting attributes. We recommend creating a separate campaign for each persona and building the audience by matrixing the individual persona attributes with the criteria available through LinkedIn’s audience builder. 

Most of the attributes are straight forward, such as demographics, industry and company size. But for B2B purchases, which often involve a buying committee and various centers of influence on the purchase decision, there will likely be multiple personas with which to contend. This means accurately aligning your personas with LinkedIn’s attributes around job function, title and seniority. 

A typical persona set for an enterprise buyer will include an executive influencer, a middle-management buyer and a practitioner influencer. These individuals are all likely participants on the buying committee. Carefully designing your LinkedIn ad audience around each persona will allow you to implement each ad campaign in alignment with the customer journey for your personas.

For example, a technology company selling software wants to target the technology executive at their customer prospects. So they target prospects with the title of CTO, CIO, CISO or VP of Information Technology. Combining this “job title” data with basic demographics (age/gender) and company data (industry/size) ensures you are reaching prospects that represent your executive influencer persona. At Bold, we dive even deeper when creating personas. We identify their interests, pain points and motivations. The LinkedIn “interests” attribute can sometimes be leveraged using these insights. This process is then repeated for each of your target personas. 

Well-developed target personas make Step One relatively straightforward. 

Step Two: Customer Journey Map + Stage-Related Messaging = Engagement

Once you’ve built your persona-based target audiences, you are ready to create your advertising campaigns based on each of the stages of their buying journey. This requires the creation of a customer journey map. This can be done in a variety of ways. At Bold – as explained in our article about customer journey maps[LINK] – we combine insights from the customer personas with our digital audience panels to develop insights into the mindset of the persona at each stage of their journey. 

For example, at the “Motivation” stage of the journey, the persona may be aware of the issue or pain point that your product addresses, but they may not be aware that solutions like yours even exist. While at the “Purchase” stage, the persona may be trying to understand the ROI of various potential solutions, including yours. The strategy and creative behind advertisements for these different stages should speak to the concern, issue or pain point the persona is experiencing at that stage in their journey. 

Since you don’t necessarily know where each of your target personas are in their buying journey at any given time, the advertising campaign must rotate among the stage-related messages so you engage each of your prospects and customers wherever they happen to be in their journey. 

Bring It All Together To Build More Effective LinkedIn Advertising Campaigns

Now you are ready to build out your persona and stage-based LinkedIn advertising campaigns. 

We recommend a matrix so you can manage all of your campaigns. Each persona and stage combination constitutes a campaign. As always, you will develop a strategy for each campaign, but in this model, each stage will have a different strategy based on the mindset of the persona at that stage. This will maximize engagement. Stemming from the strategy will be the artwork, content, your Call to Action, and any associated link. As with any advertisement of this type, A/B testing is typically recommended. Variations in images, content and CTAs will help you measure success and optimize results.  

Of course, not all stages and personas need to be activated at the same time, and the demand generation team will likely focus on the first three stages of the journey, while the account-based marketing team will focus on the later three stages. 

Using data about your target audiences to create customer personas – with insights about each persona’s mindset at each stage of the customer journey – will make your LinkedIn advertising campaigns more engaging. The result will be better ROI for your advertising investment. 

More than 100 years ago, department store magnate and marketing innovator John Wanamaker said: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.” That was a time when advertising creatives would get in a room and come up with clever ideas – sometimes with good data, but often with just a few insights to drive the outputs – and a focus more on what the brand wanted to say vs. what the target audience cared about. (See Superbowl ads, even today.) That was the old way. 

Today, with channels such as LinkedIn and the savvy implementation of data – using customer personas and insights from a well-developed customer journey map – we can ensure a much better ROI on B2B advertising expenditures.  

For a free consultation on how to improve the ROI on your LinkedIn advertising campaigns, contact Bob Finlayson or Paul Brunato.

Note: Originally published on LinkedIn.