Narrow the audience, but not as far as you think

Narrow the audience, but not as far as you think

Everyone arrives at LinkedIn excited by the targeting and immediately overuses it. They stack job title, plus seniority, plus function, plus company size, plus industry, plus skills, until the estimated audience reads twelve thousand people. It feels precise. It is actually a trap, because an audience that small starves the algorithm and inflates your costs.

LinkedIn needs room to optimise. When your audience is too narrow, the platform cannot find the cheaper, better-performing pockets within it, so you pay top price to hit the same few thousand people over and over. Frequency climbs, fatigue sets in fast, and your cost per result drifts up week after week. The sweet spot for most campaigns sits between fifty thousand and four hundred thousand people, wide enough to optimise, tight enough to stay relevant.

The skill is choosing which one or two targeting dimensions actually define your buyer, and resisting the urge to add a third and fourth. For most B2B offers, job function plus seniority does more work than a long list of exact job titles. Titles are inconsistent across companies, so targeting them by name quietly excludes the right people who happen to call themselves something else. Function plus seniority catches the role regardless of the label.

Company size is usually your second-best lever, because it correlates with budget, buying process, and whether your product even fits. A tool built for enterprise should not be shown to two-person startups, and a self-serve product should not chase the Fortune 500. Layer size onto function and seniority and you have a clean, large-enough audience for most cases, without the over-stacking that kills delivery.

Test broad against narrow rather than assuming. Run one campaign at your instinct's narrow definition and one a level wider, and let the cost per qualified lead tell you which the algorithm prefers. More often than not the wider audience wins on cost while still converting, because LinkedIn was given the room to do its job. Precision is a means to relevance, not a virtue in itself.

INTERVIEW EWOUD: Which targeting dimensions do you reach for first on LinkedIn, and which over-used ones do you deliberately avoid? Any rule of thumb on audience size before you will launch? INTERVIEW EWOUD: Tell the story of a campaign where loosening the targeting actually lowered the cost per lead. What was the before and after?