LinkedIn B2B targeting

LinkedIn's targeting is its moat. Job title, company size, industry, seniority, skills, past employers, schools, all self-reported by professionals. No other platform has targeting this precise for B2B.

Targeting attributes

• Job Title: exact titles (fewer matches) or title categories (wider)
• Job Function: broader, "Sales", "Marketing", "Engineering"
• Seniority: Entry, Senior, Manager, Director, VP, C-suite, Owner
• Company Size: by employee count
• Industry: from LinkedIn's taxonomy
• Years of Experience
• Company Name: named account lists (ABM)
• Skills: what people list on their profile
• Groups: LinkedIn groups members

Targeting recipes

Typical SaaS ICP

• Job Function: Marketing OR Sales
• Seniority: Director+
• Company Size: 201-1000
• Industry: Software + Internet + SaaS

Account-Based (ABM)

• Upload named account list
• Layer on role/seniority filters

Broad awareness

• Job Function only
• Larger geography

Audience size targets

• Under 20K: too narrow, high CPM, won't scale
• 20K-300K: sweet spot for most B2B
• 300K+: broader, lower CPM but less targeted

Audience Expansion

LinkedIn's lookalike-like feature. Tells the algorithm to find similar people. Works, but sometimes drifts outside your ICP. Test both on and off.

Matched Audiences

• Upload contact list (emails)
• Upload company list
• Website retargeting (via Insight Tag)

Exclusions

• Exclude current customers
• Exclude unqualified roles (interns, not buyers)
• Exclude own employees

Common LinkedIn targeting mistakes

• Targeting "decision makers" without role specifics (too vague)
• Only targeting job title (misses people with variant titles)
• Over-stacking filters (audience too small to deliver)
• Ignoring Company Size (tiny companies have different buyers)

What to do with this

• Stack job titles + seniority + company size + industry, missing any one of the four dilutes targeting past the point of usefulness
• Include variant job titles ("Head of X" + "VP of X" + "Director of X"), single-title targeting misses 30-50% of your actual buyers
• Cap audience size between 50K and 500K, below that under-delivers, above that wastes on irrelevant impressions
• Layer job function + seniority as a catchall in parallel to exact titles, catches prospects whose titles don't match your title list
• Re-audit ICP targeting quarterly, company size and role patterns shift, last quarter's segment may have drifted out of ICP