Dive Brief:
- LinkedIn’s Audience Match brings third-party targeting of custom audiences to campaigns within the social media platform.
- Audience Match allows marketers to upload data on businesses they want to target and that data is cross-referenced with LinkedIn’s to create custom audiences for ad campaigns.
- Marc Poirier, CEO and co-founder of Acquisio, told Marketing Dive, “(Audience Match) will allow for some real powerful segmenting of marketing messages. If you do want to target C-Level executives at a specific company, you can create a campaign around that messaging and make sure it gets in front of the very people you want to target.”
Dive Insight:
Describing the new tool, Russ Glass, head of products at LinkedIn Marketing Solutions told Marketing Land that Audience Match is LinkedIn’s entry into the custom audiences world with account targeting as the first capability being rolled out for the platform.
“What LinkedIn has done with their new Account Targeting seems a very useful improvement, as it allows marketing segmentation based on criteria other than what is provided by LinkedIn themselves,” Brian Giese, CEO of True Influence, told Marketing Dive. “This means that for the first time, external targeting and triggering platforms can be used to improve the performance of campaigns inside of LinkedIn.”
Giese added, “It also means that LinkedIn can now be included in integrated marketing campaigns. For example, our customers currently receive lists of companies that are showing increased interest in a given product category as well as contact information for sending email campaigns. Thanks to Account Targeting, our users can now upload these company lists and launch targeted campaigns inside of LinkedIn for an integrated approach.”
Poirier also pointed out that the automated aspect of Audience Match allows anyone to launch targeted campaigns on LinkedIn at scale.
