By Julie Friedman Bacchini

LinkedIn advertising has taken a big leap forward in recent months, adding features that bring it more inline with the largest advertising players – Google AdWords and Facebook.

Advertising on LinkedIn works the same way it does on other platforms, advertisers set up campaigns, choose their targeting methods, create ads and then pay only when someone clicks on their ad.

LinkedIn does have some advantages that other platforms do not, particularly if you want to market to business people. LinkedIn has the most complete information about a person’s professional role, including company, job title and location.

For this reason, if you want to market to directors of construction materials manufacturers on the east coast for example, LinkedIn might be a great way to target only those people.

Among the recent features added is something called Matched Audiences. If you advertise on AdWords or Facebook, this concept will probably be familiar. With Matched Audiences, you can upload your customer lists and use those emails to create an audience.

Matching rates are extremely high on LinkedIn versus other platforms largely because people often have both a personal and professional email associated with their account, either of which can constitute a match.

With a Matched Audience created the advertising possibilities are endless. You could use this audience as a customer communication channel to get information about your product or service to customers when they are on LinkedIn.

You can also use a Matched Audience as an exclusion for other campaigns so you are not wasting money on new customer acquisition ads for existing customers!

Another new feature is called Account Targeting. With Account Targeting, you can upload a list of up to 300,000 company names and then target ads only to those companies.

You might be thinking – couldn’t I always target ads by company? Yes, you could. But, this makes it SO much easier by allowing for uploading of CSV files for target companies and removes the 100 company limit campaigns previously had.

Think about the possibilities. If you have 200+ companies that you’d absolutely love to work with, LinkedIn just made it a whole lot easier to target those organizations specifically.

Both of these features have a minimum audience size of 300. List management capabilities are currently rudimentary, but hopefully that will improve.

With LinkedIn’s acquisition by Microsoft last year, it would be smart to familiarize yourself with their offerings, both for what you can do on LinkedIn and for what may come if they ever integrate LinkedIn data with the Bing Ads Network!

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Julie Friedman Bacchini is the president of Neptune Moon LLC, a full-service internet marketing and web design firm. She and her blog are regularly included in many top search marketing influencer lists. Julie has presented on topics such as web site experience, local search visibility and paid search both locally and at national industry conferences, including SMX East and PPC Hero. You can find Julie on Twitter @NeptuneMoon or reach her via email at info@neptunemoon.com or telephone at 484-341-8181.