AJ Wilcox Explains LinkedIn B2B Targeting and Formats

LinkedIn excels in B2B targeting, offering unique ways to target professionals at scale. It allows targeting based on job title, department, seniority, skills, LinkedIn groups, company size, industry, geography, and company name. LinkedIn has been capable of account-based marketing, targeting specific companies by name, since its inception.

LinkedIn also offers list upload features for targeting and exclusion, accommodating up to 300,000 company names. It achieves high match rates even without needing email addresses if you have someone’s first name, last name, job title, and company name. LinkedIn provides retargeting capabilities, including those who have visited your company page, interacted with your ads, watched your video ads, or triggered a lead generation form.

AJ Wilcox of B2Linked discusses LinkedIn’s B2B targeting capabilities, ad creation strategies, and his preferred ad formats on the CoachYu show. 

When creating ads, Wilcox advises keeping things short and simple. Video ads should be less than a minute, and text content should be short and skimmable. Ads should be written at a simple reading level, and imagery should follow the billboard rule, using seven words or less.

Wilcox’s favorite ad formats on LinkedIn are single-image sponsored content, video ads, and text ads. Single-image sponsored content appears in the newsfeed and offers a balance in cost. Video ads also appear in the newsfeed and provide variety in payment options. Text ads, despite their low click-through rates, are the cheapest ad format on LinkedIn, serving many free impressions and costing only two to $5 per click on average.