LinkedIn Advertising: Here’s How Buyer Personas Help

With over 900 million users worldwide, LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional networking platform. It has a vast audience base, especially for B2B businesses, and as such is the #1 platform for B2B marketers today. Approximately 87% of these marketers use the social platform for lead generation, while 97% use it for content marketing.

Naturally, these numbers prove that LinkedIn advertisements have the potential to reach the customers that matter and offer businesses a unique opportunity to engage with their audiences online.

Yet, the effectiveness of a LinkedIn ad wholly depends on how well you understand your target audiences. Do you know what age range and gender your target audience belongs to? What about their professional profiles – job status, seniority levels, company size, performance, and revenue? Knowing the answers to these questions is critical for effective audience targeting.

Buyer personas are archetypes of your target customers that can find these answers and optimize your LinkedIn advertising strategies. In this article, we will look at how these customer profiles can help identify your LinkedIn target audience and enable businesses to optimize their LinkedIn advertising campaigns.

Buyer Persona Definition: What Is It?

Buyer personas or customer personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers based on actual customer data representing the demographic, psychographic, and behavioral attributes of your target audience. Your ideal customers are prospects who would be the perfect fit for your business – your product or service matches their needs and effectively solves their pains and challenges.

Currently, personas are extensively being used in the fields of marketing, sales, and product development to understand consumer needs, jobs to be done (JTBD), buying barriers, and shopping preferences.

Core Components of a Buyer Persona

One can create different types of buyer personas based on their goals and objectives. For example, a person creating personas for M&M’s might focus more on user tastes and shopping behavior, while someone developing a persona for Salesforce would concentrate on the decision-making process and the personal and professional goals of their target market.

Nevertheless, each customer persona displays some common characteristics, such as:

• Demographics: Age, gender, language, education, family status, and location.
• Firmographics: Job title, seniority, industry, company size, location, performance, revenue, ownership, and role in the decision-making process.
• Psychographics: Goals, challenges, lifestyle, values, beliefs, interests, hobbies, and opinions.
• Behavior: Purchasing habits, motivations, occasion, product usage, communication preferences, and marketing channels.
• Customer journey: Where they are in the buyer’s journey – awareness, consideration, conversion, and loyalty.

When combined, all of these persona elements give you a complete picture of your buyers – from awareness to post-purchase experiences – and can potentially influence the direction of your marketing and advertising campaigns.

Building buyer personas with customer data

There are two ways to create buyer personas for marketing: manually and automatically. The former method involves collecting customer information from a variety of sources, analyzing it, and then segmenting it into different buyer personas manually. The latter, on the other hand, uses online persona tools and templates to create personas automatically.

You can use both qualitative and quantitative customer data to create buyer personas.

Qualitative data includes surveys, interviews, user feedback, reviews, ratings, focus groups, and field studies, while quantitative data encompasses website analytics, industry reports, social media insights, and customer relationship management (CRM) data. Once you’ve collected the data, simply segment your buyers based on the common characteristics and traits described above.

For reference, here’s an example of a buyer persona we’ve created manually.

We have Chris, a 45-year-old Operations Executive in Seattle, WA, who works in IT for a mid-sized company. His main goals are reducing churn rates, increasing customer retention, and automating the customer support workflow. Jack is frustrated with manual call logging and inefficient ticket processes and is looking for affordable and convenient customer service automation platforms. He generally engages with marketing through traditional ads, social media, and referrals.

Given his goals and frustrations, a company offering support automation solutions could target Jack via LinkedIn campaigns, highlighting the benefits of automation and how it can reduce customer churn and streamline department operations.

AI persona generator: Persona by Delve AI

As mentioned, you can create buyer personas using manual methods or an AI persona generator — like Delve AI! Our AI-powered persona platform takes in your first-party (web analytics, search console) and second-party (competitor intelligence, social media) and then enriches it with 40+ public sources, including VoC data (surveys, reviews, blogs, forums, news channels), to create data-driven personas for your business, competitors, and social media audiences.

Our AI-generated personas address the problems associated with traditional or manual personas, like time, high costs, and limited usability. They are created in minutes, are highly cost-effective, and provide rich, actionable insights for various marketing activities, such as LinkedIn audience targeting.

You can generate multiple segments (two to eight) for your B2B and B2B businesses. Each persona segment includes a buyer’s profile photo, name, age, gender, location, education, job profile, bio, and a quote summarizing their key objective. Furthermore, the PROFILE section gives insights into their goals, motivations, jobs to be done, pain points, values, interests, buying barriers, and hobbies.

Along with this information, the PERSONA DETAILS card shows you:

• Lifestyle (marital status, house ownership, vehicle type, no. of pets, no. of kids, etc)
• Values, interests, and hobbies
• TV shows and books
• Favorite shopping websites
• News sources, social networks, and brands
• YouTube channels, podcasts, subreddits, and hashtags
• Movies and music, encompassing multiple streaming platforms, genres, and titles
• Content types they prefer, like articles, how-to guides, comparisons, and templates
• Preferences in terms of news, travel, music, movies, and entertainment
• Products, services, and tools they use or want to use/purchase
• Places and events most likely to visit or attend
• Industry-specific insights or keywords related to their specific industry

The USER DISTRIBUTION tab further addresses key questions about your target audience, including their demographics (age, gender, language, job profile), locations (city, region, country), and interests. It offers insights into who they are, how they engage, where they’re located, when they interact with you, and what drives their actions.

Furthermore, you get detailed insights into user behavioral patterns, like their actions, intent, and decision-making process within each audience segment. You can also explore traffic acquisition channels and keywords, including organic and paid sources.

SAMPLE JOURNEYS looks into the total number of visitors, their sessions, page views, conversions, and the decision-making stage they are in. This allows you to analyze individual user journeys for e-commerce/B2C websites or organization journeys for B2B sites, helping pinpoint drop-off points to improve user experiences. Decision phase labels for each journey step provide clarity on where users are in their decision-making process, whether they are exploring, evaluating, or ready to convert.

The decision phase refers to the stage in a buyer’s journey where they make final choices, leading to conversions and sales. This knowledge is essential for understanding and optimizing different stages of the customer journey.

Combining Buyer Personas with LinkedIn Advertising

You need to use LinkedIn Campaign Manager to create an ad on LinkedIn. To get started, choose an objective (awareness, consideration, or conversion), select audience targeting criteria, pick an ad format, set a budget, and monitor your campaign performance after it is launched.

The tool provides robust targeting options and various advertising formats that can be aligned with your buyer personas.

Audience targeting options

While setting up an advertisement campaign in Campaign Manager, you select different targeting options or audience attributes. Audience attributes offer a detailed profile of companies and individuals, useful for various purposes like networking, marketing, recruitment, and more.

LinkedIn offers over twenty ad targeting options, each providing insights into different aspects of a company and user. Here is a list of these options, along with their descriptions:

• 1. Demographics:

• Member Age: Age of the user.
• Member Gender: Gender identity of the user.

• 2. Education:

• Degrees: Academic qualifications (Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD).
• Fields of Study: Academic disciplines.
• Member Schools: Educational institutions attended.

• 3. Job Experience:

• Job Functions: Specific job functions the user has performed.
• Job Seniorities: Level of seniority or hierarchy in past or current roles.
• Job Titles: Specific job titles held by the user.
• Member Skills: Skills possessed or developed.
• Years of Experience: Total years of professional experience in various roles.

• 4. Interests and Traits:

• Member Groups: Professional or social groups the user belongs to.
• Member Interests: Hobbies or interests.
• Member Traits: Personal traits or characteristics.

• 5. Company Category: Industry or sector (like Technology and Finance).
• 6. Company Connections: Associations with other companies, organizations, or people.
• 7. Company Follower of: The influencer entities (companies or thought leaders) that the company follows or subscribes to.
• 8. Company Growth Rate: The rate at which the company's size or revenue is increasing over a period.
• 9. Company Industries: Industries the company belongs to.
• 10. Company Names: Different names or aliases the company is known as.
• 11. Company Revenue: Financial earnings or income of the company over a period.
• 12. Company Size: Number of employees.

All of these are components that you can readily find in a buyer persona.

For example, suppose your buyer persona is an operations executive like Jack. In that case, you can set your LinkedIn ads to target users with the job title "Operations Executive," working in the IT industry, within companies of 200-500 employees, located in Seattle, WA. Also, LinkedIn’s Audience Expansion feature helps you reach audiences similar to your buyer personas or those matching your defined audience attributes.

Personalized Ad Content

Once you have aligned your audience attributes with your buyer personas, the next step is to create ads that resonate with them.

Use the language and tone that your prospects prefer and incorporate images and videos that instantly capture their attention. Don’t forget to clearly articulate your value proposition and highlight unique product features that solve their pain points. Include a call-to-action (CTA) that encourages them to take action, whether downloading an ebook or signing up for a webinar.

Keep a few things in mind while you’re developing ad content for your LinkedIn audiences:

• To make your ads more engaging, try using dynamic visuals like explainer videos or carousel images. These grab attention and keep your audience interested. Infographics can be a great way to present complex information.
• Make sure your ad content feels personal by tailoring it to the region or culture of your audience. Highlight local challenges or opportunities to show that you understand their specific needs.
• Lastly, check how your ad looks on both mobile and desktop devices. This ensures it resonates well with users, no matter how they’re viewing it.

Create multiple ad versions and conduct A/B tests, tweaking headlines, images, and CTAs when needed to optimize ad performance. Don’t forget to measure different campaign KPIs to check their effectiveness. Key performance indicators include:

• Click-through rate tracks how many users clicked on your ad
• Conversion rate measures the ad's effectiveness in driving the desired action
• Engagement tracks likes, shares, and comments on your ad
• Cost-per-click (CPC) helps manage your advertising budget

Regularly review these factors to identify which audience segment or persona is responding to your campaigns, investing more in those that do and eliminating those that do not.

Advanced LinkedIn Features

Consider leveraging advanced LinkedIn advertising features, like Matched Audiences and LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms, for hyper-specific ad targeting.

Matched Audiences lets you retarget website visitors, upload contact lists, and target LinkedIn account followers so your ads reach people who already know about your company. It improves your ability to reconnect with potential leads and also increases the likelihood of conversions by focusing on audiences with an established awareness of your brand.

LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms, when combined with buyer personas, is another way to capture high-quality leads directly from the platform. These forms are pre-filled with a user’s profile data, reducing the effort required for them to submit their information.

Note: Matched Audiences can be used to create Lookalike Audiences. You can expand your reach by targeting new customers who are similar to your current customers. To measure the success of these strategies, install LinkedIn’s Insight Tag. This tracking tool enables you to monitor website conversions, analyze user activity, and even link offline sales to your campaign.

Wrapping Up

LinkedIn advertising is one of the best social media platforms for marketers to increase brand awareness and conversions. However, it can be hard to reach the right people without proper audience targeting. Buyer personas empower B2B marketers like you to understand consumer needs and customize ads to suit user interests and preferences.

Integrating personas into LinkedIn advertising further helps create highly effective and targeted advertisement strategies. After all, personalized campaigns are bound to receive better results, whether in terms of engagement, conversions, or return on investments (ROI).