Reaching an audience online is one thing. Reaching the right audience online, however, is actually what counts. Social media platforms offer all sorts of opportunities to achieve this and each platform has its particular demographic appeal. LinkedIn, being the number one platform for B2B engagement, is now providing marketers with a rich seam of information previously unseen. It’s good stuff…
Website visitor demographics… and we don’t just mean location
Profiling website users is the only way to ensure you’re reaching the right audience each time you post online. And LinkedIn has recently made that much easier.
If you think about the depth of information LinkedIn holds about its half a billion users, it comes as no surprise that they’re now looking to share some of this data in an anonymous but meaningful way. Up until now, when someone visited your LinkedIn profile or recent LinkedIn post the platform already knew their job title, industry, status, who they worked for, how large that organisation was, and where they were located… to mention but a few snippets of data. LinkedIn is now, however, enabling their users to harvest this detail from their company website visitors too. And that’s rich pickings for a marketer.
Some of these statistics are already available on Google Analytics, of course, but it’s the combination of information bites that makes such a difference here, and how that knowledge is being applied. Previously, it wasn’t hard to gauge the location of a website visitor, for example. But knowing the location, interests, industry, and seniority of a combination of visitors to your website… now that’s a different ball game.
How can Website Demographics help you?
As LinkedIn has described, it’s “A new way to understand what audiences are engaging with your marketing efforts…” This will enable you to, “… customise content to your strongest prospects.”
In a nutshell it will:
- Enable you to get demographic information about the LinkedIn visitors coming to your website.
- Enable you to understand what type of audience you are currently attracting.
- Enable you to customise your content to reach your strongest prospects.
If you like the idea of your marketing efforts reaching those most likely to become qualified leads and customers, then Website Demographics is for you.
The application will provide you with the ability to:
- Sort data – by industry, company size, job title, location etc.
- Compare audiences – so you can better understand who best to target, and how.
- Build discrete audiences – so you can match different content to different audiences.
How detailed will the information be?
LinkedIn now provides members with a unique tracking code that they can add to their website. This code then tracks visitors and anonymously tallies their data if they have a LinkedIn profile.
This means the answer to the question above is: Usefully detailed. The insights analysed are broken down into the following way:
- Job Title
- Industry
- Seniority
- Job function
- Company
- Company size
- Location
- Country
There are some limitations, of course, but it is early days. For starters, data will only begin to appear regarding a web page when at least 300 visitors have made it there from LinkedIn. It’s also only measuring page views, as opposed to unique visitors. But if people are visiting and reading a page… they’re visiting and reading a page; and now you’ll know their demographic. The data is also presented in percentages, not absolute numbers. But, as ever, we’d say it’s about viewing trends over time rather than anything else.
If you’re keen to keep up with the latest LinkedIn analytics tools and enjoy the benefits they can bring to your marketing efforts then please do give us a ring. We’d welcome the opportunity to discuss things further.
