LinkedIn’s new targeting feature for advertisers will allow businesses and marketers to use their own data and target demographics to reach audiences in more effective ways.

LinkedIn Account Targeting is a new feature that just launched with the aim of improving the way marketers target their campaigns on LinkedIn – specifically through streamlining where Sponsored InMail and Sponsored Updates are seen.

Using the LinkedIn Account Targeting service, marketers have the ability to present a list of companies they aim to reach, which LinkedIn cross-references with its own 8 million businesses in its network. This helps to add to the effectiveness of the campaigns by reaching a more specific user profile based on criteria such as job title and location.

Prior to this ad-format update, creating a targeted group in LinkedIn was more of a manual process, and advertisers were also limited to a list of only 100 companies.

According to Russell Glass, Head of Products at LinkedIn, this is much lower than the goal of most B2B companies, which typically look to target anywhere between 2,000 and 5,000 accounts. “It will allow us to iterate and innovate much more quickly as we add more types of data to our Audience Match Capabilities. It will also allow customers to target — or exclude — companies if they want to do specific account-based marketing to their customer bases.”

LinkedIn has already started to roll this new feature out, and in the future they will introduce advertiser to other sets of data allowing marketers be smarter and more successful with their time and money spent on LinkedIn.

Article Written By: Erica Perry