More efficient ads?
Learn about LinkedIn industries

It is now possible to focus a LinkedIn campaign on more industries
than ever. Learn how to make your strategy more efficient.
How companies pick their LinkedIn industry
LinkedIn is a social media platform specifically for companies and
professionals. This focus makes LinkedIn the perfect platform for companies
in the Business to Business (B2B) industry to find potential clients and
partners. Since March 2022 companies on LinkedIn are categorized into
industries, which makes it easier to create an effective and high-conversion
B2B funnel. Not all products are useful for all companies on LinkedIn, but
with the new industries, it becomes a lot easier to get your product to the
right person. Learn how LinkedIn industries work in this article.
What LinkedIn industries are available?
There are currently 24 industries that a company can be categorized into.
These main industries are also divided into 148 subcategories. For example,
the education industry is divided into Education Management, E-Learning,
Higher Education, Primary/Secondary Education and Research. The full
LinkedIn industries list can be found in LinkedIn Campaign Manager.

Before March 2022 it was already possible for companies to pick their
industry manually. At that time,
there was only a limited number of
industries available. Industries on
profiles are not automatically
updated and
therefore
it
is
possible for a company to use an
old category. For this reason,
some companies might
fall
outside of your sales funnel.
Source: photo from Pixabay.com by 3D Animation Production
Company ttps://pixabay.com/illustrations/linkedin-social-network-icons-
3504141/ 28-06-2018

How are companies categorized in LinkedIn industries?
Ads on LinkedIn are shown to profiles according to their employer,
demography and firmography. For example, a business manager who works
for a healthcare company will likely be shown ads for related companies and
products. However, there is a turn side to this strategy. Sometimes, users do
not terminate a job on their profile properly and might therefore be shown
ads that are not interesting for them. Luckily, this can easily be fixed by
selecting the most recent job function on their profile in LinkedIn manager.

For ad management, the industry on their profile is not the most important
criteria to target a user. Users are selected based on the industry of their
employer firstly, along with their demography and firmography. Basically
there are three things you can do. You can focus your ads on specific
industries, you can focus on specific LinkedIn users that are or were active
in a certain industry or exclude the industry altogether.
How are LinkedIn industries helpful?
If you launch a campaign on LinkedIn, you can now choose to include or
exclude certain industries. It is unlikely that your product or service is
applicable to all industries and therefore you can target your target group
more efficiently. However, since some companies still use old categories it
is possible that some interesting potential clients will fall outside of the
chosen category and will not see your ads.

It is also possible for some professionals and companies to fall into multiple
industries. A software engineer in the healthcare industry might fall in the
Software & IT Services industry but also in the Hardware & Networking or in
the Healthcare industries. Since the user of the profile manually picks the
industry, not all of them might be included in their profile. For this reason it is
good to not only focus your marketing efforts on LinkedIn industries, but also
on demography and other factors.

LinkedIn is the only platform so far that focuses mainly on the employers and
industries of people. Therefore, LinkedIn is a good platform for B2B
marketing and sales. The recent updates in the available industries make it
even easier to create targeted marketing strategies which are most likely to
lead to high conversion.