Imagine you are setting up a LinkedIn campaign for a company selling industrial pumps. You want to reach everyone involved in the purchasing decision, not just the engineers specifying the equipment. LinkedIn now has an AI-powered feature designed to identify entire buying groups. Sounds like exactly what you need. Until you look at the available product categories. There is Manufacturing Software, Engineering Software and Supply Chain Management Software. But nothing for industrial pumps. The factory might be the same. The purchase decision is not.
LinkedIn’s Buyer Group Targeting is an interesting development for B2B advertising. It addresses a problem we have been dealing with for years: reaching the people who influence purchasing decisions but are difficult to identify through traditional targeting.
The question is how well the model understands what different companies are actually buying.
Moving beyond the obvious buyers
Traditionally, we build LinkedIn audiences by combining company lists with job functions, seniority and sometimes individual job titles. We make an educated guess about what functions might be involved in purchasing what our clients sell.
That works reasonably well for identifying the technical buying groups that we have most dialogues with. But a B2B purchase rarely depends on these people alone. Engineering might specify the solution while operations, procurement, finance and senior management influence whether the investment goes ahead.
I have written about this before in reaching hidden buyers with targeted B2B ads. The challenge is that these people are not always visible to sales, and their responsibilities vary considerably between organizations.
LinkedIn’s Buyer Group Targeting approaches this differently. Instead of choosing individual job functions, advertisers select a product category. LinkedIn then uses AI and professional signals to identify people likely to be involved in purchasing decisions for that category.
We can also combine this with our own company lists, which makes it particularly interesting for ABM. We define the accounts, while LinkedIn helps identify relevant people within them.
For the right product, this could be a useful improvement over trying to predict every relevant job title ourselves.
The problem is what LinkedIn thinks you sell
LinkedIn currently offers 56 product categories, focused on software and digital solutions. CRM Software, Manufacturing Software, Engineering Software and Quality Management Software are some examples.
If you sell CRM systems, this makes sense. LinkedIn can build an audience around people likely to influence the purchase of CRM software, including functions you might otherwise have overlooked.
But consider a manufacturer selling pumps, processing machinery or marine equipment.
You could choose Manufacturing Software because it sounds reasonably close to your industry. The target companies might even be exactly right. But the people involved in selecting production software are not the same people responsible for buying industrial equipment.
A production manager might influence both decisions. Procurement and finance might be involved in both. But the technical specialists, operational requirements and people driving the investment can be completely different.
This is where automated targeting becomes difficult to evaluate. LinkedIn might identify additional roles that look relevant in the demographic report. But if the model starts from the wrong product category, reaching more people does not necessarily mean reaching more of the actual buying group.
An audience can look right on paper while being built around the wrong purchasing decision.
And selecting the wrong category does not become more accurate just because AI is doing the work.
So how do we reach the buying group instead?
For industrial B2B, I would start with the companies and the actual buying process rather than trying to fit the product into one of LinkedIn’s categories.
Upload a list of target accounts and identify the functions likely to influence the purchase. For industrial equipment, that might include engineering and maintenance on the technical side, operations and quality on the implementation side, and procurement, finance and senior management on the approval side.
The important part is not to restrict the audience to the people who normally speak to sales. We also want to reach the colleagues who might question the investment, compare suppliers or influence the final recommendation.
LinkedIn already allows us to combine company targeting with job functions and seniority. Depending on the audience size, we can either reach these functions together or divide them into broader groups. With a limited number of industrial companies, narrowing too much can quickly make a campaign difficult to deliver.
But getting the audience right is only half the job.
The technical buyer might be interested in specifications and performance. Someone responsible for approving the investment may care more about reliability, implementation risks or long-term support. Customer references, documented results and evidence of successful installations help address those concerns.
That does not mean creating a different message for every job function. The buying group needs a shared understanding of why the supplier is a good choice. We explore this further in our Sfinx Buyability report, which looks at how building confidence across the entire buying group makes a supplier easier to choose.
We can then use LinkedIn’s demographic reporting to understand which companies and functions the campaigns are reaching, and combine that with website visitor data and feedback from sales. This gives us a way to evaluate whether our targeting is reaching beyond the obvious buyers and adjust it as we learn more.
For companies selling software or digital industrial solutions, I would still test Buyer Group Targeting when a relevant category exists. Comparing it with a manually built audience could tell us whether LinkedIn identifies useful roles we would otherwise have missed.
For manufacturers of physical industrial equipment, I would rather work from our understanding of the customer and the purchasing process than force the product into an unrelated software category.
LinkedIn is getting better at finding people we might miss. For industrial B2B, the part it still needs to learn is what those people are actually buying.
If you want to discuss how to reach the right people in complex industrial B2B markets, just reach out to:
Joakim Ebstein
Head of Digital Marketing
+46 725 555 984
joakim.ebstein@sfinxagency.se
