LinkedIn is a popular platform for wealth and asset managers. Many depend on it to find new clients, connect with them, and stay engaged with people they currently do business with.

LinkedIn is also unique because its targeting capabilities are supported by extensive professional and other demographic information that far exceeds any other social media channel. If you want to engage with certain types of investors or financial professionals, you will likely find them on LinkedIn.

• Do you want to do financial planning for doctors in your area? You can very easily connect with medical professionals on LinkedIn.
• Would you like to promote your mutual fund to financial advisors? You can definitely target them on the platform.

Bonus: LinkedIn is a natural home for financial-services-related material. It’s a popular publishing and content distribution tool.

Ready to get started? This article explains how to use LinkedIn ads targeting to connect with the advisors, financial professionals, and investors you want to do business with.

 Getting Started on LinkedIn

Before you explore targeting options on LinkedIn, you must select the objective of your campaign. Be as specific as possible to ensure LinkedIn serves your ads to the users who are most likely to respond to them as you intend.

Your options are:

• Build brand awareness
• Deliver visitors to your website
• Engage with a post
• View a video
• Generate leads
• Take an action on your website
• Apply for a job.

Selecting the right objective will get you in front of the right people and help LinkedIn to achieve your promotional goals.

Next, you must choose the ad type you want to present. The three options are:

• Sponsored content ads. This type of ad is ideal if you want to generate leads. They encourage people to engage with a brand early in their buying journey. It allows people to interact with material that educates them about your offerings. The ultimate goal is to convert them into leads by getting them to provide contact information, make an appointment, or take another defined action.
• Sponsored Inmail ads. This option, limited to LinkedIn Premium users, lets you connect with people in their LinkedIn inbox. You can personalize your ad to meet user expectations. The ad appears in their inbox when logged into LinkedIn, making it more likely they will view it.
• Text ads are ideal for businesses with lower marketing budgets. They are a solid option if the campaign’s purpose is driving traffic to your site or a landing page.

Once you complete this step, you can begin targeting the people you want to reach on LinkedIn.

Targeting Your Audience on LinkedIn

Here are some of the many ways you can use LinkedIn targeting to find prospective investors or financial professionals.

Demographic targeting

This type of targeting is essential for certain types of campaigns. Start building your audience by selecting the attributes of the people you want to reach. The two demographic options available through LinkedIn are Member Age and Member Gender. The age segments are:

• 18 to 24
• 25 to 34
• 35 to 54
• 55+.

The age category on LinkedIn is significant for financial firms seeking older, more affluent investors.

If age and sex are not factors in your campaign, you can ignore this targeting option.

It is essential to be aware that:

• Member Age is an estimate of how old someone is based on their profile information, not specific information users provide to LinkedIn.
• Member Gender is inferred based on profile information.

Company targeting

The availability of company targeting on LinkedIn is unique among social media platforms. It is especially valuable for asset managers targeting financial professionals at certain firms to promote their solutions. (It can also be helpful for companies wanting to attract employees working for competitors.)

Company-related targeting options on LinkedIn include:

• Company Connections. This option allows you to reach first-degree connections of the employees at selected companies. The assumption is that close connections are people who do similar work in related industries. It is typically only effective for businesses that have more than 500 employees.
• Company Followers. This option lets you target your company page’s current followers. It can be a great way to encourage them to do more business with your firm or stay top-of-mind with prospects following you.
• Company Name. This allows you to reach people working at specific firms.
• Company Industry. This will help you connect with the people in a specific industry. Asset managers may find value in seeking people in different financial service sectors, while wealth managers may want to reach high-net-worth professionals in fields like law or medicine.
• Company Size. LinkedIn allows you to target companies of different sizes. The brackets go from 1 to 10 employees, 11 to 50, and eventually up to 10,000+. You can also target self-employed people and freelancers. This targeting could be valuable for asset managers who want to focus their marketing budgets on wealth managers of a reasonable scale who could be more likely to sell a relatively large amount of their solutions to clients. Be aware that this type of targeting only works if a company has selected the employee number bracket on its LinkedIn page.

Jobs targeting

This form of targeting allows you to specifically reach people based on their roles in an organization. Here are the options:

• Job Function. You can target people by the category of work they do based on member groupings.
• Job Seniority. This allows you to reach people based on their level within an organization. This form of targeting is valuable if you want to reach senior investment decision-makers and avoid spending money on people who don’t have the power to make those decisions.
• Job Title. You can reach people on LinkedIn based on their job title. This is the most direct way to target people related to what they do for a living, for instance, financial advisor, president, or chief executive officer. By coupling job title targeting with company name, you can likely reach any financial professional you want to do business with.
• Member Skills. If you want to target people based on a broad skill set, such as finance, law, or IT, LinkedIn’s algorithm will serve up users based on their listed and endorsed skills.
• Years of Experience. This targeting option allows you to identify LinkedIn users based on their years of experience within their industry. Extensive experience can be a proxy for wealth, retirement planning needs, or the ability to make business decisions.

Education targeting

This form of targeting is centered on higher education and awards and certifications earned. While not typically valuable for targeting in the financial services industry, it can reinforce other types of LinkedIn targeting.

• Fields of Study. The major or area of study reflected by a LinkedIn user’s degree.
• Member Schools. The school, college, university, or other educational institution where a LinkedIn member earned a degree or certification.
• Degrees. You can target people based on LinkedIn-recognized degrees granted by a university, college, or other learning institution.

Interest targeting

Interests can be a great way to identify people on LinkedIn who may care about financial solutions. Two options are available to you on the platform.

• LinkedIn Member Group targeting. LinkedIn groups allow members to network with like-minded professionals with similar interests. Targeting the right groups could help you reach financial professionals.
• LinkedIn Member Interests targeting. LinkedIn offers a vast array of non-workplace interests people can include on their profiles. Combining interests with other targeting methods can help you hone in on just the right prospects. For instance, financial advisors interested in the environment would likely want to recommend a green investment offering to clients.

Buyer Group targeting

LinkedIn’s Buyer Group targeting is a relatively new feature. It can help you reach decision-makers in defined groups. Here’s a basic overview of how it works.

1. You choose one Buyer Group per campaign.
2. You can then limit people in the group based on seniority, company industry, and company.

This typically results in targeting that includes:

• Senior-level people, with most having 12+ years of experience
• Relevant job functions and industries related to the Buyer Group
• Balanced company sizes.

Buyer Group Targeting works best as an experiment to identify high-performing segments for future campaigns.

Locations targeting

This is the simplest type of LinkedIn targeting to understand. It allows you to target a location as documented on a user’s LinkedIn page or through IP address, which is particularly valuable if you want to reach travelers. (Think connecting with attendees at a financial conference.)

LinkedIn allows you to select the areas you want to focus on, whether country-level, state, city, or zip code. You can also exclude any areas not relevant to your campaign.

Audience Network and expansion targeting

The LinkedIn Audience Network allows you to extend the reach of your campaigns by delivering your ads beyond the LinkedIn feed to members on third-party apps and sites. It also enables you to reach people similar to those you are targeting who may not be members of LinkedIn. Through Audience Network, you could potentially reach millions of additional professionals through multiple other touchpoints by publishing your ad campaigns on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn’s audience expansion targeting feature extends your target audience by reaching other users with similar attributes. The extension is based on the person’s activity on LinkedIn. As with other targeting features on LinkedIn, you can exclude people who are not right for your campaign.

Matched audience targeting

This form of targeting focuses on people who have already engaged with your brand. Think of it as audience retargeting. It can be a powerful way to deepen the impression of your brand with people who have interacted with it.

Predictive audiences

Predictive audiences is an emerging LinkedIn targeting function. It is effective for businesses with a client relationship management (CRM) system. It allows them to upload an email list from the CRM, with LinkedIn matching its details against its own database to find similar people on the platform.

LinkedIn Ads Targeting: Best Practices

Here are two things to particularly focus on to optimize your LinkedIn campaigns.

1. Audience size

The minimum audience size for a LinkedIn campaign is 300 people. That’s what you need at a minimum to launch a marketing effort on the platform. However, LinkedIn recommends a minimum of 300,000 audience members for a sponsored content effort, and between 60,000 and 400,000 for a text ad campaign.

Of course, it depends entirely on the purpose of your campaign and the people you are trying to reach. That said, targeting between 30,000 and 100,000 people is usually effective for most LinkedIn marketing efforts.

2. Location

The first step in creating a LinkedIn campaign is to identify the location of your target audience. This field is the only mandatory part of the targeting process and its important to get it right to avoid waste. Two types of location targeting are:

1. Narrow targeting: specific cities, metropolitan areas, or zip codes.
2. Broad targeting: states or country-wide locations.

Start by choosing your location based on where your company is located or where the people you want to do business with are.

You can also target people in permanent locations, which are users who live or work in a particular place, or recent locations, which are somewhere they have or are visiting.

Again, the right option depends on the purpose of the marketing effort and the people you want to reach.

LinkedIn Targeting for Finance Firms: The Final Word

LinkedIn is among the most powerful social media platforms. Its targeting capabilities mix information provided by its users with insights gained by interactions on the platform and in other places, reflected by information captured by CRM systems.

Use the information in this guide to refine your LinkedIn targeting. Monitor results to improve it over time. Finally, schedule time with the experts at Sondhelm Partners to gain fresh insights into your LinkedIn and other social media marketing efforts.