It’s hardly a surprise that account-based marketing has become a key tool in the arsenal of many a B2B marketer. After all, it’s one way to ensure your advertising dollars are being spent on reaching the audience most likely to be interested in your product or service – and no social network has more accounts representing that audience than LinkedIn.
So perhaps the only surprising element of LinkedIn Account Targeting, a new account-based marketing service the company launched today, is how long it took LinkedIn Corp. LAD to introduce it.
At the moment Account Targeting, which allows marketers to aim their campaigns at a priority list of company accounts, is only available to customers who purchase LinkedIn’s Sponsored InMail and/or Sponsored Updates services through an account representative, though the company plans to expand the service to self-serve clients in the future.
“Our goal is to give [B2B marketers] a platform that accurately targets influencers and empowers them to deliver relevant content that translates into meaningful results,” LinkedIn senior product manager Lindsey Edwards wrote in a blog post announcing the service.
To use Account Targeting, customers merely need to submit a list (or multiple lists) of accounts they would like to approach through LinkedIn, which the service then cross-references against the company pages – of which there are more than 8 million – in LinkedIn’s database. The service also allows marketers to further define their audience by targeting such profile information as job titles or seniority.
While LinkedIn’s existing marketing services already included several ad-targeting options, its Company Targeting feature could be less than ideal, consisting of a manual process that limits users to lists of 100 companies, Russell Glass, the head of products for LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, told TechCrunch’s Anthony Ha in an interview.
Moreover, Audience Targeting is only one part of a multi-faceted approach LinkedIn is taking to building a more effective sponsored content platform, with the company planning to release audience matching tools next, Glass said in the interview.
To learn more about Account Targeting, check out LinkedIn’s business solutions website, or click here to fill out a contact form.