How to Find Your Target Audience for Lead Generation on LinkedIn

Written by: Outreachly - Tuesday 19th July 2022

Table of contents:

What is a Target Audience?
Why is the Segmentation of LinkedIn’s Target Audience So Important for Lead Generation?
How Does Good Lead Generation Depend on the Proper Target Audience?
How to Find Your LinkedIn Target Audience
How Outreachly can Help with Finding Your Target Audience on LinkedIn for Lead Generation
Final Thoughts

It’s no longer enough to advertise your products and services on your favorite social media platform. Present-day marketing has become more complex than that!

Lead generation is the modernist approach of attracting customers and introducing them to your business. It involves a variety of different activities to bring in new customers so that your sales funnel isn’t overflowing with potential customers but instead has plenty of buying customers.

However, make no mistake; finding new customers isn’t an easy feat!

Lead generation is a major challenge for over 37% of key business decision-makers
Over 24% of professionals struggle to find sufficient sales leads
38% of B2B marketers experience challenges in managing and tracking leads
60% of B2B marketers lose time and resources on lead generation challenges.

On the bright side, having the right information about your customers can help address some of the issues regarding your lead generation strategy. In this post, we will cover how to find your target audience on LinkedIn and how it will help you create more successful marketing strategies.

What is a Target Audience?

A target audience is a group of people identified by their interests and characteristics. Understanding your LinkedIn target audience helps you develop marketing strategies that will be effective in reaching out to these people. A marketer needs to know who they are trying to sell their product to and how they can reach them effectively.

To achieve this, you need to have all the information about your target audience at your fingertips. Expert marketers refer to this information as audience characteristics or factors that define a person’s interests, habits, hobbies, lifestyle, and other details that make them unique.

Some characteristics that aid in the definition of target audience include:

Age
Gender
Location
Income
Behavior
Activities and interests
The common pain point or struggles your LinkedIn target audience regularly experiences.

Whether you are launching a new product or bringing an existing one to a new market, it’s important to know who will be interested in it – so you can channel your marketing efforts toward them.

Why is the Segmentation of LinkedIn’s Target Audience So Important for Lead Generation?

Segmenting your LinkedIn target audience enables you to target people most likely to respond to your campaigns. It’s time-intensive, tricky work, but the benefits are clear: creating a segmented audience on LinkedIn increases your visibility among target users and helps drive more leads at a lower cost per lead.

What exactly is audience segmentation, you ask? Segmenting your audience means creating smaller groups of people based on certain user characteristics and interests. Segmentation of target audience is about dividing a larger target audience into smaller groups based on shared interests, behaviors, or needs. These groups are known as segments.

There are several reasons why you would want to segment your market or audience. For example:

To create more tailored marketing messages, products, and experiences
To increase the effectiveness of your marketing campaign
To develop new products and services that appeal to specific segments
To understand the behavior of different segments so that you can better serve them in the future.

Segmentation of target audience is not always easy. It requires time and effort to identify the relevant subgroups within your larger target market. However, once you have identified these subgroups, you can begin to plan how you will communicate with them specifically – rather than sending general messages that apply to everyone in your target market.

How Does Good Lead Generation Depend on the Proper Target Audience?

Competition grows stiffer by the day. Every marketer is scrambling to find target audience by creating awareness about their brand, creating and distributing content, and other ways to penetrate the market.

However, finding new leads can be challenging. Often, businesses will target a broad audience, hoping that they’ll find someone interested in their product or service. This type of marketing strategy doesn’t always work. Instead, it is important to identify your ideal customer and focus on them instead of everyone.

Ask these questions:

Who are your ideal customers?
What challenges do they face?
How do you reach out to them?
How do you make your brand known to them?
How do you get them interested enough that they agree to buy something?

Conducting market research is essential when it comes to lead generation because it helps you understand your target audience and their buying habits. With a clear understanding of who will buy your product or services, it’s easy to develop a winning strategic plan for future lead generation efforts.

How to Find Your LinkedIn Target Audience

LinkedIn is one of the most powerful social networks for professionals. It’s also one of the most restrictive: because the site requires you to first connect with people you know personally before you can reach out to them with offers and opportunities.

If you’re new to LinkedIn, getting started can feel a bit like banging your head against a wall. The platform is unique in that it’s geared toward professionals in different industries.

The same goes for its user profile structure: LinkedIn offers limited visibility into your prospect’s interests and experience as a way to make users build more personal and professional relationships with their target audience. This might make things feel more challenging at first, but once you get past these initial barriers it becomes an invaluable resource for networking and lead generation.

Here are some tips on how you can find target audience that would be interested in your products or services:

By Location

LinkedIn allows you to narrow down your search to accommodate any country you like, which makes it easy to target customers who are most likely to benefit from what you have to offer. If you’re trying to reach people in your own country, you can use this as a starting point for further research on what industries and companies you’d like to approach.

If you’re trying to reach people in another country, you can use this feature to learn more about that nation’s culture and industries.

Did you know?

“It takes 18 dials to connect with a buyer. Only 23.9% of sales emails are opened.”

Gartner Report: Sales Development Technology 2019

Demographics and Other Criteria

Next, you’ll want to think about the demographic information and interests of your ideal LinkedIn target audience:

What are their professions?
What are their educational backgrounds?
Where do they live?
How much do they earn?
What are their industry specialties?
How old are they?
What are their hobbies and interests?
And so on.

This will help you find target audience, no matter where they are based. If you’re trying to reach investors, you might want to focus on people with high-level financial backgrounds. If you’re trying to reach teachers, you might want to focus on people with high-level educational backgrounds.

Utilize an Audience Template

An audience template is an outline of all the main details of an audience. Audience templates store all the information about your target market and can be accessed quickly when you need them.

When creating an ad, campaign, or other marketing strategies, there are often several fields that remain the same across all your audiences. If you find yourself using the same values for the same attributes over and over again, it makes sense to create an audience template and reuse it as often as possible.

Avoid Hyper-Targeting

Many people will try to target their audience as narrowly as possible in a misguided effort to increase their chances of getting a response. In reality, trying to appeal to the smallest segment of your possible audience means that you are going to end up getting fewer responses.

If your message is too niche, it’s more likely to fall on a few listening ears. It’s better to have a slightly more general message that appeals to a wider audience than a hyper-targeted message that only a few people will respond to. Avoid being too niche and hyper-specific, as this will make it harder for your LinkedIn target audience to come to you.

A/B Test Your Audiences

Once you’ve defined your target audience, it’s time to start reaching out to people. Reach out to two different groups of people with two different versions of your pitch. You can then use the results from your audience to help you further refine your pitch.

Increase Your Reach with Custom Targeting Options

If you’ve tried everything above and still feel like you’re having a hard time finding customers who are interested in your products, don’t panic. It’s bound to happen at some point. Thankfully, there are a few other things you can do:

Expand your search to include other industries – If you’ve been searching for people from a particular industry, try expanding your search to include people from other related industries. You might find that your product appeals to people in different related industries as well.
Narrow down your search to particular countries – If you’re trying to reach people in one country and you’ve tried everything else but still can’t find the customers you’re looking for, try narrowing your search to a particular country. You might find that you have more luck targeting people in a particular country than you do with people from all over the world.
Expand your search to include other titles – If you’ve been trying to reach people with specific titles, try expanding your search to include other titles as well. You might find that your product appeals to people with different but closely related titles as well.
Narrow down your search to a particular job function – If you’ve been trying to reach people with broad job specifications, try narrowing your search to particular expertise. Perhaps your product or service appeals more to people with specific skillsets.

Tailor Your Content to Your Audience

Finally, don’t be afraid to create content for your audience. You might want to start by writing an introductory post on LinkedIn that appeals to a more general audience. This could be a post that talks about common challenges your target audience faces.

However, as you start getting traction with your post, you should start tailoring that post to appeal to a more specific audience.

For example, if you’re trying to get designers to hire you to build them a website, you might start by writing an introductory post that talks about the importance of having a website for your business and why designers should have one. After gaining traction with that post, you could then start tailoring it to appeal more to specific designers, say, graphic designers.

How Outreachly can Help with Finding Your Target Audience on LinkedIn for Lead Generation

Outreachly is an AI-powered LinkedIn lead generation tool that helps you connect with your potential customers scattered all over LinkedIn. Our software helps marketers find prospects on LinkedIn by industry, job title, location, company, or any other search or group criteria. Once you’ve found the most suitable leads, you can send automated follow-up messages and take over the conversation on the Outreachly dashboard – or a CRM that you’ve connected.

Join the next demo and learn how it works or try it for free on your own.

We offer guidance and online support to new customers to help you embark on a new LinkedIn lead generation experience.

Final Thoughts

What you’ll notice as you continue to push through the challenges of LinkedIn is that it’s not a bad thing to have to work harder for your connections. LinkedIn is a more exclusive network, meaning that the people you do manage to reach are more likely to be genuinely interested in what you have to offer. You just have to be willing to put in the effort to find them.

So remember, if you’re struggling to find your LinkedIn target audience: Keep trying. You’ll get there eventually.

7 Most Important LinkedIn Lead Generation KPIs

Lead Segmentation on LinkedIn for Qualified Leads

LinkedIn B2B Lead Generation Software 101: How to Win on LinkedIn