LinkedIn Buyer Group Targeting

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Summary

B2B buying has never been more complex—decision cycles are longer, shortlists are shrinking, and deals often stall due to indecision. In this episode, I sit down with LinkedIn’s Jen and Jackie to unpack how Buyer Group Targeting can help marketers reach the full buying committee—not just the end user—and drive better results. We cover LinkedIn’s unique data, real-world success stories, and practical tips for layering this new targeting into your campaigns. If you’re ready to boost conversions, improve cost efficiency, and win over the entire buying group, you won’t want to miss this conversation.

Transcript

For the full show transcript, see the show notes page here: Episode 165

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
LinkedIn's new buyer group targeting. Should you use it? How does LinkedIn know who to target? All that and more on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show.

(00:01):
Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox.
Hey, hey, hey there, LinkedIn Ads fanatics. As he said, I'm AJ Wilcox. I'm the host of the weekly podcast, the LinkedIn Ads Show. I'm thrilled to welcome you to the show for advanced B2B marketers who want to continue their evolution of mastering LinkedIn ads and of course, achieving true pro status. Today, we're talking to the product team at LinkedIn, responsible for the new buyer group targeting. I got to ask all of my advanced questions about how it works, what fuels it and all that. I walked away really excited about this new feature, and I think you will be too.
The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2LINKED.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts.
That's right. We're the ad agency, 100% dedicated to LinkedIn ads. And we have been since 2014. You know, back before it was cool, we build a custom strategy for every account we work with. You get to work directly with me and my local team. You won't get a cookie cutter approach or any sort of standard account template from us. Plus with the strategies that we've developed and our mastery of the platform, we always save our clients way more than we charge. So it's kind of like getting the best in the biz for free. If you'd like to explore partnering with us for your LinkedIn ads, schedule your free discovery call with me today at B2LINKED.COM/discovery. First in the news, a really big announcement that LinkedIn is going to be sunsetting their Click to Message ads. Inside of Campaign Manager, if you click anywhere near the Click to Message ads, you'll get this banner that pops up that says, "Click to Message ads are being continued." Beginning late August of 2025, you will no longer be able to create or edit Click to Message ads. Existing ads will gradually decrease in delivery from August through October. And then by late October, Click to Message ads will stop serving completely. Please leverage sponsored messaging or traditional single image ads accordingly. So that's kind of sad because we have had some pretty good success with Click to Message ads. And what I was really hoping is that this whole flow of in Click to Message ads, how you create the conversation once, and then you can associate it to single image ads, I was hoping that this would roll out to conversation ads where you create your conversations all in one place, and then you can apply it to anywhere where you get to create one of these ads, rather than having to create them all from scratch, really annoyingly. So if you're a big user of Click to Message ads, you've got a couple months to kind of wind them down. Or if you really want to test them before they go out, now's the time to create one. All right, I'm doing something new. I've got a lot of swag shirts that I've been given at conferences and stuff. I thought it'd be fun to wear a new one for each episode of the podcast. So right now, I'll put myself here in frame. This is a Microsoft clarity shirt that says customer driven. And also somewhere I have a blue beanie that says Microsoft clarity. But what's really cool about it is right here towards the bottom of the beanie, it has the HTML tag closing head. And I thought that's really funny, like me geeky as an HTML nerd, just knowing that this is where head ends is pretty funny. If you don't already know, Microsoft clarity is a free analytics tool for your website. I highly recommend it because it's free and it's awesome. And it tracks all of your actual usage of your site, including giving you the ability to watch recordings of individual users who are on your site. All right, so if anyone wants to send me your company's swag, and I can talk about you on the show, feel free to DM me on LinkedIn. We had an awesome review this week. Mark Van Horik, who runs marketing guys out of the Netherlands, he posted this on his LinkedIn profile. He said why the LinkedIn ads show want to stay ahead of LinkedIn advertising trends. AJ Wilcox's podcast is my go to resource for practical LinkedIn ads advice. He goes on the list a few of his favorite episodes, like the roadmap episode, our data backed bidding strategies episode, that's our most famous one, most highly engaged one for good reason. And he also left this pro tip for Dutch marketers, because he's in the Netherlands. He said while AJ's budget recommendations mainly reflect the US market, his strategic insights work perfectly for Dutch campaigns, just adjust the budget expectations for our market. And I think that's super valuable. Of course, like 80% of the spend we run is going to be in US dollars, and it's going to be focused on North America. But the same strategies work everywhere else, usually just at lower bids and lower budgets. He shared some of the recent value bombs he's gotten out of it. And then talked about how every episode has actionable tips that you can apply. So thank you, Mark so much. I don't want to read the whole post because that would take a little while. But it's so kind of you to post and share so grateful that you've gotten so much value out of the show. All right, anyone out there who has a question, a review or feedback for the show, you can message me privately on LinkedIn, my DMS are free and they're open. You can also email us at [e-mail]. If you attach a link to a voice recording from you, then I can play you right here on the show. Or you can just send texts. That's fine too. I'd love to be able to shout you out. But of course, if you want me to obscure your details, not tell you who it's from, I'm happy to do that as well. I want to feature you. All right, with that being said, let's hit it.
[START OF INTERVIEW]
AJ
All right, so in a collaboration I did with LinkedIn to share a new report about buyer groups, Jackie Morris from the LinkedIn product team commented, and she let me know that she's on the product team for this new buyer group targeting. I had so many questions and I wanted to let you LinkedIn ads fanatics in on our conversation. You'll also remember our other guest from episode 124 about the audience insights tool. We have Jennifer Moy from the LinkedIn product team back as well. Jen is a longtime product leader at LinkedIn. She's been there over 11 years and I've been talking with her about her products for lots of years behind the scenes. And then Jackie Morris, she's new to the podcast. She's been on LinkedIn's product team in New York for about three years. You're going to love this conversation. All right, Jen, Jackie, so excited to have you here on the podcast to be talking about buyer groups targeting. First of all, would you want to give a little bit of an introduction to yourselves?
Jen
Sure, I can go first. Hey everyone, I'm Jen Moy. I am the product marketing lead for all things audiences and targeting. So what I really focus on is working on like the go to market strategy and bringing all the wonderful audience and targeting products to life.
Jackie
And I'm Jackie. I'm at LinkedIn as a product manager leading our buyer group audiences. And I started to work on our premium video ads. So really excited to chat about buyer groups today.
AJ
Wonderful. Well, thank you both for joining. Really excited to talk about something so awesome. You know, my experience with buyer group targeting is that we as marketers, most of the time we target the people who we know are going to become a lead. They're going to engage with the ads and fill out some form somewhere. But then we know it goes on to the sales team. And then it's so easy for someone in the buyer group to nix a deal, to just shut it right down, which is so infuriating because the marketer really has no control over this, or at least seemingly doesn't. So we as marketers over time, I think many of us have started to figure out, Hey, if we target people who are in the buyer's committee, we get them familiar with the product to where when it crosses their desk, they don't slam it down. They go, Oh yeah, I've heard of this company before. They're legit. Let's go ahead and move forward with the deal. I think everyone wins, but marketers don't always think of it as something that's in their wheelhouse to be able to do. So that's been my experience with buyer group targeting. I'd love to hear from you too. How is LinkedIn thinking about this? Where does that actually come from?
Jen
Yeah, that's a really good, I think, point in question, AJ. And it really comes down to understanding, I think some of the complexities and challenges, right? That marketers are facing today. It's not a new secret or something that we just uncovered, but we know that B2B marketing has always been complex, but as of late, it's got even harder, right? So when we look at buying cycles, they're much longer. Decision-making can involve anywhere from six to 15, maybe even 22 people. So it's not really about convincing one particular individual or maybe one particular group. It's really rallying individual groups within a company and getting them to form a consensus on a decision or a product. So we've actually done a lot of research into this because I think it's really important for us to understand, right? So that we can help provide a solution. And so we've partnered with Momentum, which is a third-party research company. And we looked into this further. So things that we've learned is not only are the buying groups growing, right? And involving more decision-makers as well as key stakeholders. It's also looking at the makeup of the buying group. So for example, let's use a SaaS buying group as an example. And when we think about it, typically the role of IT or the function of IT is involved in like you are business as usual targeting. And that still makes sense. But what we learned is that this is only like a third of who your buyer group is. We found that the spectrum is much more vast, that the other two thirds can be made up of finance, procurement, operations. And those are the ones that are really like, you know, asking the tough questions. They're also making the decision on whether this is going to move forward or not. So if you don't have one individual or even one group that's part of this process, then that can really hinder things. The other thing that we learned is the short list of providers that B2B buyers are now looking at and considering is shrinking. So three years prior, we were looking at about an average of six vendors on the short list. And now it's down to 3.5. And then lastly, one of the biggest challenges that we uncovered is indecision. So there's a research study done is actually a book called The Jolt Effect. And this was done by Ted McKenna and Matthew Dixon, where they studied the dynamics of what happens when a deal succeeds or fails. And what they found is that 40 to 60 percent of deals are not lost to competition, but rather lost to indecision because that buying group can't align. So there are circumstances where brands may not always win because they're better, but because they're more familiar, they're more safe, it makes it much easier for this group to agree on. So when we look at it in summary, we've identified some three key challenges that marketers face. And the first is looking at a larger, more diverse buying group, engaging a wide range of decision makers, key stakeholders that must come together. Also that short consideration list, so making sure that you have brand awareness early and often so that you're familiar, so that you're also seen as a less risky purchase. And the other is more complex decisions. So when we think about that buying group, when we think about all the players that are involved, there's more decisions, there's more people in the room that need to come together. So marketers are also facing that indecision can also kill their deals.
AJ
That's fantastic.
Jackie
It's so interesting, too, what you were saying, AJ, about getting that feedback from sales, right? So when we were starting to look a few years ago and we get lots of feedback from marketers, right? And they're talking about the low quality leads their sales team is talking about, or chasing after data, whether they get that data, it's super manual, it's super fragmented, and then applying that data at scale, it becomes a really hard job to be able to execute it. So across B2B marketers, we are really seeing some of this feedback come in. And this research made a lot of sense. I think when you hear about buyer groups, it's very intuitive. We've all been a part of a buyer group before. Maybe there's been a lot of decision making, maybe your family is like a buyer group when they're discussing decisions. And a lot of this is invisible to marketers, they aren't able to access that data. So we really felt like LinkedIn had this differentiated data set on our own ecosystem, where we could start to offer this to customers and help them improve the quality of the data, or get started, right? Boost their signals that they have. So there's a starting point, whether they're entering a new category, just starting up, or they just want to supplement what their current knowledge is around their ICPs. We've really felt like we had something to offer there. And that's where we got started. And we started with a targeting solution, because that's where everything starts, right? Are you targeting the right people?
AJ
Perfect. You know, we've been manually targeting the buyers committee for some time now. And I can tell you from an advertiser perspective, it's really difficult for things like, hey, we're going to create one campaign targeting all of the companies that are in a deal stage, but have not yet closed. So that's like a really simple, straightforward way to do it. So we do like this ABM list, and then we start putting on the roles. And it's like, Oh, there's someone from finance. There's someone from procurement, someone from it. We have the senior executives, maybe at a smaller company, the CEOs involved. And so you start adding all of these job functions and all of these seniorities. And now you're reaching a ton of people that like, they're not part of the buyer's committee. Their colleagues are someone above them or someone below them. And so when you're talking about this new type of targeting where you're leveraging LinkedIn's data, I'm paying full attention. This is fantastic.

(00:22):
Jackie
Yeah. And you know, what's super interesting, AJ, what you're saying is I think we, we kind of know the roles and titles that might be in the buyer group, but we actually don't know their behaviors, right? Where a lot of those are invisible to us. And that's really where we come in with our LinkedIn buyer groups. And we started to categorize these behaviors based on what we see in our ecosystem to give you a little bit more insight on who's in the buyer group. Of course, if it's a company of five people, you kind of know who might be in the buyer group. It's the CEO, it's the founder. But we find with really large companies or even medium sized companies, it's not every finance person, it's not every procurement person. And so right sizing the buyer group is actually very hard. And we have a fairly good idea of who works together at LinkedIn. And we can kind of do this dynamically. There's a lot of variance in size of buyer groups, who's working together, the types of companies based on different regions. And that's where we can kind of boost that with behavioral signals to add into your knowledge that you're also getting through your sales feedback, through other channels, through other data that you might have access to that we don't.
AJ
All right, so I love what you're saying here. This makes perfect sense. Tell me about LinkedIn solution, this buyer group targeting, how does it work? I mean, give me the whole rundown.
Jackie
Yeah, so super inspired by the research that Jen was sharing. This has been around for some time. And I think building the buyer group and creating your ICP really is something that marketers need to be doing and is an effort that takes a lot of expertise. We invested in a multi step process. And we thought about this research that's available and kind of use that to motivate our buyer group model. And we leverage the data signals that we have. So we start with that categorization, think of the operations manager that's engaging on project management software, they might be talking to a salesperson or a marketing person on LinkedIn, that person actually might be different than the ops manager that's engaging on CRM at that same company. So we felt like it was really important to be aware of the product. What are they engaging in? Can we categorize this? So we actually go and categorize by 56 different products. These are largely in software as a service and tech today, because that's where we see a lot of signal. And we categorize is this a click or an engagement or a sales engagement. And then we look at the high quality buyer examples. So like I mentioned, we specifically look at very low funnel engagement, repeated engagement, long windows with sellers, and see if any of these, what are the collective behaviors and engagements that come from these qualified leads or opportunities and the people actually show up deep into the funnel. Because those are people, unlike maybe some clickers who are just interested in the product, these are really good buyers, and we can assume that they are actually high quality decision makers. And then from there, we look at their differentiated traits. So we sit on top of LinkedIn data, people tell us when they change jobs, they tell us what companies they're a part of. And so we analyze the unique traits and signals, including their professional identity, and even their first degree connections to build that network. It's like a molecule of the different engagements and behaviors to find more people, even if they haven't yet engaged with that software seller, who looks like them across our 1 billion users, and we train the model. So this model refreshes every single day, we identify those similar professionals. And so even as buying evolves, and we know it's evolving, and new categories are getting invented, and AI is transforming everything, the model evolves. So we're constantly evolving and refreshing the models based on up to date data. And that's really where the edge is, is it's based on not just the profiles that really make sense. And we tune that based on the research and what we know to be true about professionals. But it's also based on the behaviors that we're seeing in the ecosystem.
AJ
That's awesome. It's totally unique data to LinkedIn, no one else could create this kind of profile. I'm super excited about it.
Jackie
Yeah. And I think that's exactly right. That's the unique data that we're sitting on top of the first degree connections we added in the past year, because we knew that there's all of this invisible influence, right? There's people that actually talk outside of LinkedIn, but they work together. And that's where you build this network. And we've been tuning this so that you could extend your reach into these new roles, but not engage every single ops manager at a company, right? You want to engage the network or that molecule.
AJ
Yeah. You can tell that two different ops managers actually work in the same team. They're not having the same title at the same company, but world's apart.
Jackie
Yeah. That's what we're trying to do.
AJ
Yeah. Love it. All right. So that's a peek behind the hood of the technical, I think, how you actually build that data set. Out of curiosity, how do we as advertisers start implementing this into the campaigns that we're running?
Jackie
Yeah, that's a great question because that's the next one, right? It's like, great. We have buyer groups, but I also have all my other audiences. And so we really think about buyer groups as your net new reach engine. What we found across our early adopters was that compared to their traditional role in title targeting, 70 to 80% of our buyer group are new. So it's really interesting, right? There's 70 to 80% net new roles, 20 to 30% you already have. So buyer groups help you uncover buyers you didn't know you're missing. They might not be in your CRM, but they're engaging with that category. So they might not even know about your brand. It's a great way to grow, especially if you have oversaturated audiences or you're entering a new category, or you suspect that you're missing those key roles. We offer audience insights so you can look at them. And it becomes this way to supplement your ICP, right? Marketers are experts in their business. We've designed buyer groups to enhance their reach and visibility so that you can start to test and look at, okay, if I start targeting the buyer group, how does that impact my performance? Can that urge more people to move down the funnel? Does that open up my funnel? And layered on top of B2B measurement, true B2B measurement where you're looking across the funnel and optimization, that really feeds all of these learnings back into the systems. And we've seen some amazing results.
AJ
Ooh. All right. So we're able to expand, reach more people who are in our ICP. If you're in a situation where you have additional budget to deploy, I think this is a godsend. This is awesome. What about those who maybe they're at a set lower budget, they're already spending what it is they want. I think if I go to them and say, we can expand your audience to another four fifths of people, I think the natural question is going to be, does that require more budget to do? Or is this something that you can kind of weave into your current strategy, current budget? Like what sort of recommendations do you have there?
Jen

(00:43):
That's a really good question. And it always comes down to budget, right? We don't always have all the budget that we want in the world. And I think that when you approach this, it can be layered on to your existing targeting and campaign strategy. So when we look at how you can leverage buyer groups targeting, it can be layered on with an ABM list. So if you have an account list that you want to focus on that either your sales team has identified, or you've deemed as high value accounts, and want to ensure relevance, like that's something where you can actually layer on buyer groups targeting with some of your existing account level campaigns. The other thing that you can do is you can also use LinkedIn's company hub, right to understand maybe where some of these high value accounts are coming from to also refine your list. So if you do have any existing campaigns, layering on some of that insights and also layering on buyer groups with it can also refine how you are reaching that key buying group. The other cool thing that we've also recently introduced with buyer groups is our audience insights tool. So also looking into once I have this audience created, you know, understanding what are the different segments, how can I refine my approach? Does this really capture my ICP? Well, is another tool that you can use. And this can all be used on existing campaigns that you have now. And I think that starting off with that would be a really good test. It's always test and prove right. And then once you're able to prove the value of your buyer group, that's when maybe it makes sense to explore like how can I expand it doesn't make sense to also look into how we can invest more budget into our overall marketing strategy.
AJ
Oh, beautiful. I think this is absolutely ideal. Start with a smaller list, like an ABM list, where it doesn't blow your budget out of the water. But you can start with these small tests. And then you kind of spurred on for me with audience insights. I mean, one big question that I think advertisers are going to have is how can I actually evaluate and tell if what I'm doing is successful? So I start targeting the whole buyer committee. And then I sit back and look at my metrics. What are the signals I'm going to see to let me know that like, yes, you're doing it right.
Jen
Yeah, like you share actually some really fantastic results that we saw with some of our early buyer group adopters. So first and foremost, early adopters saw up to a 20% increase in sales conversions. So when we think of sales conversions, we were looking at qualified leads, opportunities, when compared to their business as usual campaign targeting, which was usually like traditional roles and title based targeting on LinkedIn, right? The other fantastic result that we saw was the cost efficiency in incorporating buyer groups into their overall strategy. So for early adopters, they saw up to improvement of 25% in cost efficiency. And so this really indicates that we're finding more of those influential buyers, right within an account. And as a marketer, it's really ensuring that you're reaching the right buying group as a massive revenue driver. And when we think about what you can actually use to help measure along the way, I mean, there's really, I think an approach where you think about the pre mid and post launch, we do have tools right within campaign manager, that really helps you understand what is my baseline that I've seen before, right? Like looking at some of my business as usual campaigns, making some historical notes of like benchmark performances that you've seen. And then when you start to incorporate buyer groups and the targeting strategy, comparing those benchmark metrics with what you're seeing in your buyer group campaign. And then we have, you know, great tools like revenue attribution, that you can integrate to also follow along as your campaign is delivering. And then even post campaign, when you're looking at measurement, it's also a great way to understand, you know, how your buyer group campaign is really making that influence and impact. The other thing too, is, you know, this is really gonna, I think, depend on the client level, but working with your sales team to get feedback and then looking at some of that deep funnel data, right? So I feel like CRMs are our Bible. And if that's something that's accessible to you, that's what we really recommend on really understanding, I think from beginning to end the true impact that buyer group has. And keep in mind, right, this is a very complex sales cycle. So are you going to see instant results in two days? Most likely not, you know, that's the harsh truth, but we want to like recommend at least a 30 day minimum up to your full sales cycle to really understand how buyer groups is making impact.
Jackie
Yeah. And that's where we really think, you know, this fits really well with marketers that get that feedback rates in some way, because we're really about improving the quality of the buyer group and helping you improve that. And you see that through the results and the bottom of the funnel impact. So that's where we really recommend having some insight into it. Immediately, some early signals are also in demographic reporting. But of course, not everybody in the buyer group is filling out lead gen forms, not everybody's clicking, right? So it's always kind of thinking holistically. And even those signals of feedback, whether they're coming directly from sales, or you have access to the full CRM, if you're trying to improve that and improve the quality, that's where buyer groups really comes into play and kind of monitoring that over the long term. As you mentioned, AJ, it's not about completely wholesale replacing your audiences. So it's testing with a small group, seeing what the results look like. But as Jen said, this is becoming a revenue driver for advertisers. One thing that we were really surprised about is the cost efficiency. Because we're expanding the people that you might be targeting from our roles and titles basis. It actually helps from a cost efficiency standpoint, meaning that we're getting those influential buyers, as Jen said, we're driving more influence with each person that you're targeting. So that was a really cool insight from our beta over the last year. And across many customers, as we're seeing a lot more efficiency when you target more people, which feels almost counterintuitive, and then combined with the conversion rates, this can be truly like a game changer. But it's about kind of seeing that and then incrementally making the changes where you feel like you could boost your ICP. And then sometimes with some strategies, super effective without buyer groups, right? And there's very specific requirements around leads and other needs from the audience that you can get with our powerful targeting on LinkedIn. So this can be really complimentary and work together well.
AJ
I can definitely echo your recommendation here of don't just run this for 30 days and say, like, we're done with this. This is targeting that when you start running it, your sales team might not even have feedback for you about it. Like, you're just lubricating the whole sales process. And sales is just going to like, they're going to know, oh, more people closed this month, or this quarter. But I think as marketers, if you're watching things like your close rate, or your time to close those kinds of metrics, like, use those maybe your before and after our deals closing faster, are we closing more of them because now people feel comfortable during, you know, the whole evaluation process, don't just run it for 30 days and call it quits, like, you're not going to have that data to tell you.
Jackie
Yeah, we've seen some amazing results as well. So we talked a little bit about the net new members in a buyer group at a company. But some advertisers are using it for prospecting at the company level. So they have their target companies, they have their ABM list, right? And if you are able to go beyond that ABM list, it can help identify potentially in market or could be in market soon buyer groups at companies and has been able to identify completely net new accounts with pretty large deal sizes. So that's been really amazing in terms of getting ahead of your competitors. That's like then leapfrogging with some of the signals. So that's another tactic and pro tip that we've seen. It's not only just for retargeting, you could do some prospecting with buyer groups.
AJ
Oh, I like it. Do you have any other hacks or cool ideas of ways that you've seen advertisers roll this out in the beta?
Jackie
Well, we love companies report and there's a lot more coming in there. That's that company's planning hub, but that also shows your company engagement data. And that's where you can look at things from an ABM level. So we've combined a lot of company attributes that we have, company sizes, things like that, with your engagement data. So both paid and organic on LinkedIn. So you can start to really look at what does this funnel look like, download those reports, create really good ABM lists, and refine those for each stage of the funnel. One more that I'll mention is we built a recommender for buyer groups. Like I said earlier, there are 56 categories. And if you're scrolling through all 56, I love it. We love those categories. Please look at all of them. But at the top of campaign creation, if you plug in what you're marketing, it's this new place that you can enter the product that you're marketing and the product URL. We'll give you a recommendation for the buyer group category if we have one that matches. So that kind of shortcuts the whole process. You can certainly look at our full catalog, but that's one place to just get started. And then go look at the insights, right? Look at your ICP audience insights, and look at some of the roles and titles, and then look at the buyer group that we suggested to you. That's a great way to compare, am I getting that new reach? And where can I target this capability and start to learn a little bit more if this works for me?
Jen
Yeah. And double tapping on the product category recommendation, I think it's also a great way to discover new audiences where you're like, "Oh, I thought maybe this could be a good fit." And you're using our intelligence tool to help you understand what is recommended. So it's also a great way, I think, to discover some new segments that you may not have considered before, but could also try out. So love our recommendation tool.
AJ
Fantastic. All right. So for us as marketers, when we go to roll this out, do you have any recommendations for how we go and start using this? And also feel free to let us know, this is where you actually find it within Campaign Manager, educate us, those who haven't used it before.
Jen
That's a great question. So this is available to all advertisers globally. That means that anyone with native access to Campaign Manager can access buyer groups targeting within the classic campaign flow. So getting started is really easy. Once you navigate into Campaign Manager, you'll see the audience setup flow. Under who is your target audience, you'll see the option to add buyer groups. So when you select this option, there actually is two ways that you can approach your buyer groups. So one is what Jackie mentioned by using the product category recommendation tool, which is what we recommend. And it's our intelligent tool that then takes your product URL and recommends the top five most relevant segments. The other is what Jackie also mentioned is you can also self-select using the drop down view. Once you've made the selection and you go in and customize, you can save and launch your buyer groups, audience, and campaign as you would any type of audience when you're starting a campaign. So that's how you would actually go in and access and activate it. I think one important thing to note is that when it comes to best practices, you know your business the best. Right? We have a pretty solid idea of who your ICP is and what we can recommend as far as your audience. But if there are certain things that are really important to your business, things like company size or very strict like lead scoring, lead quality, those are all things that you also can customize with your buyer groups. We do recommend keeping in mind, right, to have a more expansive look at who we're recommending as your buyer group and then fine tune later. But some of the best practices that we can share is before launching, again, really leveraging that intelligence product category recommendation tool. We also say limit, you know, any audience exclusion. So understand that you do want to do some layering but don't go crazy and overdo it when you are set up your campaign. And make sure to include any first party list or engagement. So if you have like a customer list, right, or if you're running like a Legion form or lead objective campaign, those are lists that you want to make sure to exclude. And then after your campaign launch, what you want to do is keep a pulse on campaign performance, right? So you can use your campaign reporting. You can also look at your professional demographics reporting to really understand who you're reaching. And even though we do recommend over layering and doing too many exclusions, I think this is where it's a good opportunity to look at performance, looking at your also professional demographics and saying, hey, is this still reaching the ideal like ICP that I want to go after? And that's where you can make some, you know, adjustments there. And then again, we have a lot of great reports. So within campaign manager, we have our company hubs reporting. And this really gives you a nice view at the account level, how is my efforts tracking? And what does it look like, maybe from an engagement level or other key metrics that your team is really keen on. And you can understand like the pipeline quality by looking at this. And then if you have other integrations, such as capy, rar, that's like great. Yes, that chef's kiss. I think that's a really great way to understand, right? Like overall, am I getting in the direction and seeing the outcomes as well as the audience that I was hoping to see? I think another really important thing for us to bring up is, you know, we talk about more of the targeting and I think the marketing side of things, but this is also great opportunity for you to become best buds with your sales partners, right? And maybe within like the first 30 days, they don't have a lot of feedback. I think having more of that long-term relationship and channel of understanding, hey, like what are you seeing on your end? Do you have any feedback on lead quality or how are the conversations or the deal sizes going is going to be really important and that kind of leads to like, you know, the marketing sales alignment that we also like love to see too.

(01:04):
AJ
Oh, yeah.
Jackie
One thing that we really encourage and with buyer groups as part of this is, it allows you to up level these conversations to the company level. So I know we talk about lead quality and leads and specific people and you get a really narrow kind of look at who should be targeted and sometimes there can be oversaturation with that audience. I think where buyer groups has really been able to help some of our advertisers is, can we start looking at what the right accounts are and then let buyer groups do the work of finding the right members? Of course, we can, you know, massage that at the edges, but we have really big categories, right? Like marketing software and marketing software as marketers we know is broad. So thinking about, okay, what are the companies that buy my software and having that kind of conversation with your sales team is really nice because then leave the really smart kind of like ICP work to the marketer adjustments based on the data coming in. But at that account level, are we getting those accounts more through the funnel? Are they moving faster through the funnel? Are we actually seeing better conversations that are getting stopped less and stuck less lower in the funnel? So that's really where I think that alignment can happen at that company level. And we're investing pretty deeply into more company insights to help with that. So
AJ
I've got a really stupid question for you, I think it's going to show my ignorance here.
Jackie
No stupid questions.
AJ
Okay, cool. All right. So when you're building this out, is it building the buyer group targeting based off of the targeting that you've already created or can it operate on its own?
Jackie
No. So we built them as standalone segments. That is something that we've heard about. So that's not a stupid question at all. There is a form of your buyer group that you're building. And I love, that's when we first started talking AJAs, like you were building buyer groups, which is an awesome strategy. Continue to leverage that strategy, right? We know about different roles in the buyer group, and then start to test our buyer groups. And we're going to start to evolve how we can further customize. But today with buyer groups, you can layer in your buyer lists or external lists, you can adjust the final audience. Where we don't allow for customization right now is just adding full titles. And that kind of like blows out the buyer group. But ultimately, at the end of the day, it's like, what is the right mix that drives the performance? That's the bottom line, right? That really gets the results and is proving that you're targeting the right people. So that's where the full circle moment of, okay, are we seeing more accounts move through the pipeline? Are we seeing better quality? So you can have your custom buyer groups, you can have your LinkedIn driven buyer groups with your layering on and your adjustments.
AJ
I love you can keep it totally separate from your existing targeting, because this becomes a really clean A-B test of before I was targeting the buyers group, these were the campaigns and as I was running. Now, these are separate campaigns that I can measure against each other. And really makes us I think smarter marketers that we can compare that. So thank you for allowing us to run them a standalone. This is a question we didn't discuss ahead of time. So feel free to shoot me down if you're like, I don't have any sort of ideas. But one question that's going to pop up here, we know what kind of content gets our end user, our buyer interested and engaged. That's I think what we do as marketers really well. But one question I know I'm going to get from clients here is, all right, if I start going after the buyer's committee, like someone from the C-suites there, someone from finance, who like they're not the buyer, what sort of content can I create that they're going to be interested in? Do you have any recommendations for like what kind of content we might think of showing to them? What sort of offers maybe get their attention? Or even if there are no offers, maybe it's just enough to just get your brand name in front of them.
Jackie
I think that's key. Yeah, by the stage of the funnel is making sure the buyer group understands the value proposition early on and then some of the objection handling later on, especially as you get deeper in the funnel. And we've definitely thought about evolving this where you can individually optimize the content towards each member in the buyer group. But what we found right now is that there's so much improvement with targeting that whole buyer group, even with the same message at that funnel stage and ensuring that they're on the right page, right? They're on the same page with each other around what are the value propositions around your product. So this is definitely an area that is still under exploration. I think you're completely right in terms of offers content, there's a lot more we can do here and help marketers out and kind of showing what works truly with content. But getting that audience right, it's like that is the first step, right? Is making sure we're talking to the right people about the right product category. And then kind of like driving more of that relevance is something I'm really excited about continuing to do.
Jen
Yeah, and I think that's also a great question, Ije, that ties back to the initial complexity and challenges that we outlined where, you know, I shared a stat about the shortlist, right? And the shortlist is just getting a lot shorter. And so to Jackie's point about making sure that we're reaching the right buyer group, I think that that's the key part there, right? Is ensuring that your brand is included in that shortlist. And what we've also found in talking to, you know, different participants, as well as research has shown that there's also just different agreements within companies between marketing and sales, right? So there are times too where marketers will have maybe a pretty good gauge the overall engagement at company level. And this is something that our company Hubs reporting actually reports on in shows. And so at that point too, and this is where alignment can come in as a really key factor here, is letting your sales team know because at that point, they may have already started piecing together some of the key players, some of the content or talking points that they know are going to be really vital to getting, you know, that whole conversation and that deal started. And that's where maybe that handoff can take place too. And then at the same time, we still recommend right targeting the buyer group with some of that supplemental content information to make sure that you're top of mind and that you're really, you know, relevant.
AJ
Oh, that's awesome. My takeaways here are make sure that those in the buyer's group, they know about your value prop and you're getting an early start on some of that objection handling. I think they're enough to get marketers thinking about what sort of content they can put out. So beautiful. I love it. Any other thoughts? Maybe anything that we haven't discussed about buyer group targeting that you'd love for the LinkedIn ad fanatics out there to know about?
Jen

(01:25):
I think I'm just really excited to see what's ahead for buyer groups in general. I think this is a concept and a challenge that we've known for quite some time now. So, you know, we're really excited to be introducing this solution. And I think seeing an evolve and seeing how it works well for those marketers out there. And, you know, it's just really exciting to also tangibly see the impact that we've been making on reaching the buyer groups, right? On being able to improve like your overall sales conversions when it comes down to the quality as well as the number of opportunities. And I think the other exciting thing is it's like, you know, how can we make it easier for you and how can we give you signals or things that you just don't have access to, right? And you don't want to spend hours like putting together. And so I think that that's, you know, where I'm really excited about and seeing where the future holds.
Jackie
I agree with that. I, you know, we release buyer groups to everybody. But before that, we went through a whole phase where we really asked ourselves, does this work, right? Signals, we all see it in real life. But if I messaged a procurement or legal person or all these other roles, would it actually work? And so we asked ourselves that question, honestly, and I was really excited to see more than 20% conversion rate improvements across a lot of customers. And that was really amazing because while in theory, buyer groups works, right, we all kind of understand you should be targeting these people. But then you need all of this data, or you need to do all of this work, there are all of these dependencies before you can get started. And that's what a lot of other solutions have, they might help the workflow, but do they really get you beyond your own CRM or your own view of the world? It's kind of like driving looking in the rear view mirror, like you'll never kind of expand beyond your own leads. So we asked ourselves that question, honestly, because we are ready, you know, to kind of like think through, well, you know, what if this is just kind of a nice to have, but we've really found that it's a huge business driver and has become a part of an evergreen strategy for a lot of really sophisticated marketers. So it's awesome to see. That's always your best kind of dream as a product builder or marketer to see things work well and see how the feedback is coming in and how we can evolve it.
AJ
All right. So Jackie and then Jen, I want everyone who's a LinkedIn ads fanatic, I want them to understand the products and features that they use every day are built by humans. I want them to kind of get to know you. So one simple question I've got for you is, can you tell us what you're most excited about personally in your life right now? And what you're most excited about professionally, and it can be dealing with your own products or anything else.
Jackie
Yeah. Oh, so I live in New York and I have not been here for, it feels like a single weekend. People are getting married, people have babies, I'm visiting and I love to my friends. I love this. I love seeing everybody, but I just want to be by the beach. I want to be by the beach one weekend and I will be thinking of buyer groups out in the sand and how to improve buyer groups. But I'm so excited. I'm doing the opposite of what many people do is they take off more in August and I'm sticking around. I'm really excited for a full month in New York. And then professionally, I guess I should say I'm not only thinking about buyer groups, but I, like everybody has been inundated with AI news and AI is going to transform this and that and I love it. But I'm really excited what we can do with content. I mean, ultimately, I've been working with marketers and advertisers my whole product career and this is just the fun stuff, right? Like what can we do to create awesome, resonant moments with our customers and potential customers and how can we better match that content, which is the most human part of all of it. So I'm really excited about that. I think AI generated content, yes, of course, but there will always be this like high end premium content and how we can just continue to make that better. I'm really excited to stay close to that.
AJ
Awesome. And Jackie, how do you want the fanatics to interact with you here?
Jackie
Well, I love feedback. Follow me, send me, message me on LinkedIn if you have any feedback on buyer groups. I'd love to hear from people testing it, how they're integrating it into their strategies. It's early, right? Like the industry is moving towards buyer groups for sure, but it's going to be a crawl walk run. It will get integrated and then kind of iterating on that. So LinkedIn, that's our platform.
AJ
All right, Jen, same questions to you. Tell us what you're most excited about personally, professionally, and how do you want the fanatics to follow you, reach out, get to know you.
Jen
Yeah. So on the personal side of things, I don't have the best green thumb, but I am testing it out by planting my first citrus tree. It is a lemon tree and I will be getting my first harvest. So we'll see how it tastes and if I could use it as part of my recipes. And then a little bit further out is stranger things. The season finale, the teaser was just released. I'm a huge fan. You feel like you're growing up with the show and just to see how it ends. I'm like on the edge of my seat waiting for it to come out. It's not going to be until the end of this year, but I think it'll be a great way to close out 2025. And then professionally. So I think, not to toot our own reporting horn, but I am really excited about a lot of the company level insights and actionability that we've either rolled out or will be rolling out. I think that we've made a lot of exciting headway into this space where we have company hubs, filters, ability to sort. And then we also are incorporating like company and opportunity level data in our revenue attribution report. So I think that really helps, you know, to enhance campaign targeting, campaign measurement, and ultimately help, you know, everyone drive pipeline growth in ROI. So excited about what's to come. And then as far as like, you know, let's be friends. So if you have feedback, I am always open to feedback. Our products are by no means ever perfect. So if there's any ideas, feedback or results that you'd love to share, connect with me on LinkedIn, always open to having conversations and you can reach out to me that way.
AJ
And I can certainly verify all three of us, we've had conversations over DMS. When you see me write about something on LinkedIn and you say, Oh, like, tell us more about this. We want this feedback. So everyone, they are super open to it. They want to hear your experiences, always eager to make the tools better. So with that being said, thank you so much for both of you joining us enlightening us on buyer group targeting. We'll have everyone come and follow you connect with you. And thank you so much for sharing all this gold.
Jackie
Thanks so much, AJ. This was fun.
Jen
Yeah, thank you.

(01:46):
[End of Interview]
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[END]