Editor's Note: As 2020 approaches, we're looking back at some of 2019's most popular posts on the LinkedIn Marketing Blog. This one ranked No. 5.

One of the hardest parts of advertising is reaching the right people. With so many ways to define your target audience, it can be difficult deciding how to reach the audience that fits your ideal customer profile or folks who are more likely to be interested in your business.

Today, we’re excited to introduce three new ways to help you easily target more of the right audiences from LinkedIn’s network of 610 million professionals: lookalike audiences, audience templates, and the addition of Microsoft Bing search data to our recently released interest targeting product. These offerings are designed to increase the scale of your marketing efforts and improve ROI.

Grow your business with lookalike audiences

As a marketer, you’re constantly looking for ways to reach new audiences who are similar to your ideal customers. After all, if they’re like those who are already engaging with your company, odds are they’ll be more likely to convert and help grow your business.

LinkedIn’s lookalike audiences combine the traits of your ideal customer with our rich member and company data to help you market to new professional audiences similar to your existing customers, website visitors and target accounts. Since these members are already on LinkedIn, they’re in the right professional mindset to engage and respond to your brand.



What can you do with lookalike audiences? Here are three ways they can help your business:

Reach high-converting audiences: With lookalike audiences, you can discover audiences similar to those who have already demonstrated an interest in your business -- like engaged on your website or given you their contact info.

Get results at scale: Lookalike audiences can help you extend the reach of your campaigns to more qualified prospects. Customers in our pilot were able to improve their campaign reach by 5-10x while still reaching the kind of high-quality audiences that matter most to their organizations.

Engage new target accounts: For B2B advertisers pursuing an account-based strategy, you can use lookalike audiences to target your ads to additional companies you may not have previously considered. These companies match a similar company profile to your ideal customer -- so you can win more deals.

You can get started with lookalike audiences by creating a Matched Audience in Campaign Manager -- for example, a list of target accounts or contacts from your CRM, or an audience that’s visited your website.

Own the conversation with interest targeting from LinkedIn and Microsoft

Recently, we announced interest targeting in Campaign Manager, which allows you to reach members with relevant ads that match their professional interests. Now, we’ve expanded interest targeting by allowing you to target based on a combination of your audience’s professional interests on LinkedIn and the professional topics and content your audience engages with through Microsoft’s Bing search engine, in a way that respects member privacy.

Audience templates make it easy to find the right audience. If you’re new to advertising on LinkedIn or are an existing advertiser looking to reach new audiences, audience templates can help. This gives you a selection of more than 20 predefined B2B audiences (and growing) that help you get started faster.

These templates include audience characteristics, like member skills, job titles, groups, etc, that you can activate with a single click. This helps you effectively reach the professional audiences that matter most to your business -- without spending hours in setup.

Over the past few months we’ve been testing these new features and here’s what our customers had to say:

We use lookalike audiences as one part of our strategy to drive lower funnel conversions. We were able to reach a highly relevant audience that generated more contacts and leads in a way that was profitable for our clients. —Harold Christensen, Digital Account Director, Labelium

We used interest targeting on our Brand Awareness campaigns and we are extremely satisfied with the results so far! — Matt Campbell, Multi-Channel Marketing Specialist, SAS Institute

Lookalike audiences, audience templates, and interest targeting with LinkedIn + Microsoft Bing data will be available to all advertisers over the next two weeks. To learn more about targeting on LinkedIn, please download our e-Book "Reach Your Audience: Targeting on LinkedIn."