LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network with over 722 million members. With so many professionals on the platform, it presents a massive opportunity for brands to reach their target audience. This is where HubSpot audience comes in. HubSpot audience allows you to create targeted audiences on LinkedIn to market to.
HubSpot audience integrates with LinkedIn’s marketing platform, enabling you to identify and target your ideal customers based on criteria like job title, company, industry, interests, groups, and more. You can then use these audiences for ad targeting or content personalization.
In this article, we’ll walk through how to use HubSpot audience on LinkedIn step-by-step to reach your ideal customers and prospects.
Benefits of Using HubSpot Audience on LinkedIn
Here are some of the key benefits of using HubSpot audience for LinkedIn marketing:
- Target your ads and content to your ideal customer personas based on demographic, firmographic, and interest data.
- Remarket to people who have already engaged with your brand by building audiences of website visitors.
- Create lookalike audiences to find new prospects that resemble your existing customers.
- Track audience performance and optimize targeting over time.
- Unify your audience data in one platform instead of managing multiple audience lists.
- Seamlessly activate audiences across LinkedIn, your website, emails, and ads.
By leveraging HubSpot audience, you can ensure your LinkedIn efforts are focused on reaching the right people at the right stage of the buyer’s journey. Next, let’s look at how to get started with HubSpot audience.
Getting Started with HubSpot Audience
To use HubSpot audience on LinkedIn, you’ll first need:
- A HubSpot Marketing account
- The LinkedIn Integration connected in HubSpot
- Audience data like aContacts list, form submissions, or website traffic
Here are the steps to get set up:
- Sign up for a HubSpot Marketing Hub account if you don’t already have one. They offer a free version.
- In your HubSpot portal, go to Integrations and connect your LinkedIn account. Follow the prompts to authorize the integration.
- Upload your audience data like contacts or past website visitors to create audiences in HubSpot. You can also build audiences directly based on criteria.
Once your LinkedIn account is connected and you have audience data in HubSpot, you’re ready to start building and activating audiences.
Creating Audiences in HubSpot
HubSpot provides several options for creating targeted audiences for LinkedIn. You can:
- Build audiences manually based on criteria like demographics, interests, company data, and more.
- Create lookalike audiences that find new people who resemble your current customers.
- Use contact lists, forms submissions, or traffic sources to create audiences from your existing data.
- Remarket to visitors who have already been to your website.
Let’s go through each of these key methods for building LinkedIn audiences in HubSpot:
Build Audiences Manually with Criteria
You can build audiences in HubSpot by manually selecting demographic, firmographic, and interest criteria. For example, you could target:
- Job titles like “Director of Marketing”
- Industries like “Technology”
- Companies meeting certain attributes like “500-1000 employees”
- Locations such as “New York City”
- LinkedIn Groups or Pages they follow
- Skills and degrees
You can get very granular with your criteria to hone in on your ideal customers. This works well if you have a clear buyer persona in mind to target.
Create Lookalike Audiences
Lookalike audiences use your existing customer data to find new people who “look like” those in your source audience. To create a lookalike audience:
- Select an existing audience in HubSpot to base it on, like your contacts or website visitors.
- Pick the source properties to model like job title, industry, seniority.
- Choose the match rate, with higher match rates yielding more similar people.
Lookalikes are a quick way to expand your reach to new prospects that resemble those you’re already engaging.
Build Audiences from Your Data
If you have existing audience data, you can easily upload it to HubSpot to create tailored LinkedIn audiences. Data sources may include:
- Contacts – Build an audience from a list of customer contacts.
- Form submissions – People who have filled out forms on your site.
- Owned lists – Import segments from other platforms like CRM lists or email lists.
- Website traffic – Visitors to specific pages or sections of your site.
This makes it easy to target your LinkedIn campaigns to website visitors, email subscribers, leads, or customers from your database.
Remarket to Previous Website Visitors
With remarketing, you can target ads to people who have previously visited your website or specific pages. For example, you could:
- Reach people who visited your pricing page but didn’t sign up.
- Follow up with contacts who registered for an event.
- Promote a discount to those who added items to their cart but didn’t purchase.
This allows you to segment visitors based on their on-site behavior for more relevant messaging.
Now that we’ve covered creating audiences, let’s look at activating them.
Activating Your Audiences on LinkedIn
Once you have audiences built in HubSpot, it’s easy to activate them on LinkedIn for targeting across ads, content, and more.
Here are some of the ways to use your audiences on LinkedIn:
Target LinkedIn Ads
One of the most common uses of HubSpot audiences is ad targeting on LinkedIn. You can create campaigns in LinkedIn Campaign Manager and target the built audiences from HubSpot.
This allows you to promote content, events, offers, and more to your ideal customers instead of just targeting by job title or company as you normally would.
Personalize Content
You can use HubSpot audiences to personalize content when visitors arrive from LinkedIn, creating a more tailored experience.
For example, if a visitor is from your “Social Media Marketers” audience, you could show targeted content about your social media services on your site.
Trigger Emails
HubSpot audiences can be used to trigger tailored email campaigns when a contact visits from LinkedIn.
So if someone from your “Product Qualified Leads” audience lands on your pricing page from LinkedIn, you could automatically enroll them in a nurture campaign with relevant emails.
Identify Key Accounts
By seeing which target companies are represented in your LinkedIn audiences, you can identify key accounts to focus your sales efforts on.
For instance, if you notice a certain company makes up a large share of your “Decision Makers” audience, you’d know it should be a priority sales account.
Personalize On-Site Messaging
You can use on-site messaging or popups that are tailored based on the LinkedIn audience.
For example, if a contact is in your “Web Developers” audience, you could offer a special discount on web design services in an on-site popup.
Prioritize High-Value Audiences
See which of your audiences drive the most value through conversions or engagement. Then focus your LinkedIn targeting on those high-priority segments.
For example, your audience of “VPs of Sales” may be much more likely to convert than “Marketing Coordinators”, telling you where to invest your ad budget.
Track Performance
HubSpot provides robust reporting on your audience performance over time. Monitor metrics like audience size, ad engagement, and site conversions to optimize your targeting.
You can see which audiences are resonating and which may need their targeting refined. Continually improve based on the data.
Best Practices for LinkedIn Audience Targeting
Here are some best practices to get the most out of targeting LinkedIn audiences with HubSpot:
- Build very specific audiences instead of targeting broadly. For example, “Digital Marketers in Tech Companies” instead of just “Marketers”.
- Regularly update your audiences with new data from your LinkedIn ads and website engagement.
- Test different audience match rates to see what yields the best performance.
- Try combining multiple audiences into Smart Lists for more advanced targeting.
- Remarket to audiences who have shown interest but not yet converted.
- Monitor audience performance and double down on your highest value segments.
Following these tips will help you laser focus your LinkedIn efforts to the right people.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does HubSpot audience work for both free and paid LinkedIn accounts?
HubSpot audience can be used to target both free and paid LinkedIn campaigns. However, you’ll have more advanced options with a paid LinkedIn Campaign Manager account, like being able to do retargeting.
Can I create audiences directly in LinkedIn?
Yes, you can create audiences directly in LinkedIn Campaign Manager. However, HubSpot audience makes it easier to unify and manage your audiences across platforms. You also get more advanced matching options.
What level of HubSpot do I need?
The LinkedIn ad integration (and HubSpot audience) is included at all paid tiers, starting with the Starter level. You can even use it on a free Marketing Hub account but with only basic functionality.
How much do LinkedIn ads cost?
LinkedIn advertising rates are based on an auction, similar to Google Ads. Average costs per click range from $2-$8 depending on the target audience, competition, and other factors. Use HubSpot audience to improve relevance and lower your costs.
How often are audiences updated in HubSpot?
HubSpot will automatically sync your LinkedIn audiences daily to include new matching contacts as they engage with your ads or website. You can also manually update audiences as needed.
Conclusion
Targeting the right audiences is crucial to getting results from LinkedIn ad campaigns. By leveraging HubSpot audience, you can zero in on your ideal customers based on detailed criteria and data.
You can then activate these audiences across LinkedIn for a personalized approach that will improve engagement and conversions. Implement the best practices outlined here to maximize your audience targeting efforts.
With LinkedIn’s unmatched scale andHubSpot’s audience management capabilities, you have an incredibly powerful combination for driving measurable business impact.
Start building and activating tailored audiences today to take your LinkedIn marketing results to the next level.