Understand how to size your audience

[Reyed Mia (Apprentice, DIU)]

Understand how to size your audience

You'll likely setup different sponsored InMail campaigns depending on your campaign goals and the target audience you want to reach. As part of your targeting setup, you'll also need to find a sweet spot for your ideal audience size. You don't want to be too broad, but you also don't want to be too narrow so your message doesn't get any traction. In the right hand corner you'll see a message to "Define your target audience". As you choose from the different targeting options available your audience size is going to change and you're going to see that reflected on the right hand side. We're going to see that number decrease as we add different targeting layers.

Let's start by adding in California in the location field. You can see that your estimated target audience for targeting California is about 13,000,000 members. If I wanted to expand that reach further, I can add in New York and I can see the estimated target audience change to 21,000,000. Now if I wanted to refine my audience a bit further, by Field of Study, I click into Field of Study, and for example, if I wanted to reach International marketing students, so type in International Marketing, and select it from the drop-down options.

As you can see now, when I select International Marketing, my estimated target audience size is very small, only 8,000 LinkedIn members. In order to expand that reach, I'm just going to search for Marketing, and set up a Marketing Field of Study. That will expand my target audience reach to about 355,000. That puts me right at the sweet spot and I recommend that your audience size is between 100,000 and 300,000 members. This also depends on the region you're in and the objective of your campaign.

Sometimes it does make sense to go more granular. If you're scaling beyond 350,000 members, I really would recommend considering breaking up your campaign, so you have a more focused targeting, which will give you better visibility into which demographics are performing better and which creatives are working better against that demographic. To establish this targeting, you'll select an area you want to see as the targeting filter. Now let's scroll to the bottom of the screen. Here you'll see a checkbox to help your campaign reach new audiences. This is also know as audience expansion and this will help automatically expand your audience to include members with similar characteristics such as groups, companies, skills, as well as other targeting capabilities.

Instead of having to identify a list of hundreds of companies, you can only select a few and then help audience expansion do the rest of the work for you. Now if you want direct control over your campaign and the target audiences that you've selected, I highly recommend that you un-check this box. Now that your message is created and your targeting is entered, make sure you size your campaign to scale so that it can reach your target audience.

https://www.linkedin.com/learning/linkedin-sponsored-inmail/understand-how-to-size-your-audience