In today’s competitive paid media landscape, success is no longer associated with the biggest budget or the flashiest creative, but belongs to the brand with the best audience design.
Here is why audience design is the ultimate driver for B2B paid media success and best practices on how to build an audience that drives marketing success.
Why "good enough" targeting is leading to wasted ad spend
Many B2B marketers fall into the trap of designing an audience that is just “good enough", and hoping that the algorithm will find the right people. But in today’s competitive landscape, using that approach will end up costing you high sums of money in wasted ad spend.
A large part of companies’ wasted ad spend is the consequence of poor data quality, which can be directly attributed to inadequate targeting on paid media platforms. According to Forrester’s study, 37% of digital ad spend was wasted due to imprecise targeting.
So knowing who you are talking to is the first step when developing a paid media strategy.
Knowing your target audience
In general, when developing a paid media strategy, encompassing messaging, creative design, and delivery of ads, you have to consider who you want to reach. In general, if your ads speak to everyone, they speak to no one.
So, the first step is knowing your target persona, who your key decision-makers are, and the purpose of your ads.
Best practices of LinkedIn Audience Design
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Target one persona per campaign: Avoid putting all buyer personas into one campaign, such as different countries, unrelated industries, or other factors that don’t belong together. This prevents personalizing content for different stakeholder groups.
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Avoid hyper-targeting: On the contrary, avoid targeting too much, as it will limit your scale and hurt campaign delivery. Start broader, refine later. Better to start wide and trim than to over-refine and miss reach.
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Don’t ignore exclusions: Eliminate existing customers, competitors, or irrelevant decision-making groups like interns and students (when applicable). High-performance marketing isn't just about who you include, but also heavily dictated by who you exclude. Waste in B2B ad accounts almost always stems from poor audience hygiene.
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Don’t make too frequent edits: Avoid daily changes to your targeting. Let your campaigns run for at least 14 days to allow the algorithm to gather enough data.
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Match budget to audience: Too large of an audience + too little budget leads to reaching everyone a little, and nobody enough.
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Test audiences cleanly: Duplicate a campaign and change one variable (titles vs skills) to isolate impact, if budget allows. Changing too many variables leads to unanswered questions.
Aligning Marketing and Sales: Quantity vs. quality
When you invest in high-quality audience design, the benefits ripple downstream towards sales. The age-old friction between marketing and sales usually boils down to lead quality. Marketing celebrates a low Cost Per Lead (CPL) from a broad campaign, while Sales complains that the leads are unqualified or out-of-market.
Audience design acts as the bridge. By aligning your targeting parameters directly with your Sales team’s Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), most leads generated are inherently qualified. The CPL might slightly increase, but by focusing on higher lead quality instead of quantity, your Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) will plummet.
Final Thoughts: The never-ending task of audience design
The biggest takeaway for B2B companies is that audience design is not a one-time task. It is rather an ongoing process which requires continuous testing, updating, and optimization. When you master the architecture of your audience, your creative hits harder, your budget goes further, and your growth becomes entirely predictable.
