During the course of our experience managing LinkedIn Campaigns, we've discovered some best practices that we feel our community can benefit from.
By following these guidelines, you'll be empowered to hyper-target the decision-makers within your target industry - thereby reducing unnecessary noise and running optimized campaigns with valuable results.
Crafting Searches
Everything begins and ends with the SalesNavigator Search URL. That's why it's important to have patience and do the necessary review of your Search Results before running each campaign.
Tip #1: Use Filters which Clearly Segment your Target Audiences
We've found that the filters which work the best are:
Title
Company Size
Geography
Industry
Note that the number of filters per search URL is suggested to be 10 filters maximum.
Tip #2: Don't Base your Search on the Keywords Box
We've noticed that some clients base their entire Search on the Main Search Field located at the top-left corner of Basic LinkedIn or Sales Navigator search pages.
In this example, we'll be looking at searching for the Director of DevOps. Seems simple enough. At this point some clients do this:
The tragic flaw is that the Keywords Box searches the entire LinkedIn profile. Therefore, even people that have the words collaborated with Director of Devops - from a position 10 years ago - will still appear within these search results.
This doesn't mean not to use the Keywords filter at all. This filter can be used in conjunction with the more targeted filters.
Tip #3: Check the results, are the prospects and companies relevant?
Once you've defined your audience, visit pages 10 and 15 of your search results in order to verify that the audience is still relevant even on the later pages of results.
If you have a very fine-grained audience that you're dying to target, feel free to check out our article on Advanced Boolean Searching.
Tip #4: Don't Create a Campaign Targeting Over 2,500 Search Results
There's a little-known LinkedIn restriction - no matter what your Search URL is, LinkedIn won't allow you to access more than 2,500 people per Search URL. Meaning, that even if your search provides 40,000 results, LinkedIn will only allow you to view the first 2,500. Therefore, when creating a Growth-X campaign, we recommend a Search URL with no more than 2.5K search results.
Aside from the limitation on LinkedIn's end, we believe that if you create a campaign with 5 million results, you're simply not being specific enough.
Tip #5: Use Double-Quotes
If you want LinkedIn to target people that have the exact words "Electrical Engineer" in their title - and in that order, with no words in between, then use double-quotes. This is true for every filter.
As another example, if you're searching for a company called "Fine Furs", don't type the words Fine Furs without quotation marks. Otherwise, you'll get companies that have the words "Fine" and "Furs" anywhere in the company name.
If you need assistance along the way, please feel free to message us within the app or send an email to help@growth-x.com.
Happy Growing!
The Growth-X Team