Reaching decision-makers on LinkedIn takes more than targeting

Jamal Dayes, Director, Digital, explains why familiarity is the key to reaching hard-to-access decision-makers on LinkedIn.

Reaching senior decision-makers on LinkedIn sounds straightforward. Identify the right job titles, set a budget, publish some ads, and wait for the inquiries to come in. But that approach misjudges the value of the platform.

For hard-to-reach audiences, LinkedIn is often more valuable for building familiarity than generating immediate leads. The audience may be small, and many will never click an ad or complete a form. But repeated exposure to relevant content can help establish your organization as a credible choice when a need arises.

That changes how you should approach targeting, content, and measurement.

Start with the right people

LinkedIn allows advertisers to target audiences by job title, seniority, industry, geography, company, and professional interests. But effective targeting often starts with information you already have.

Your customer relationship management (CRM) system contains useful audiences, from existing clients and warm prospects to event attendees and people who have engaged with your content. These lists can be uploaded into LinkedIn Campaign Manager to create Matched Audiences. You can also target specific companies and refine those audiences by seniority, function, or job title. This is particularly useful for account-based marketing, where the aim is to reach a defined group of firms and the people who influence decisions within them, rather than a broad audience.

But targeting the right firms doesn’t necessarily mean targeting only the most senior people. The person who ultimately approves a decision is not always the only one who influences it. A campaign aimed at a chief investment officer, managing director, or head of private wealth may also need to reach analysts, advisers, relationship managers, and other colleagues involved in the decision.

They may not sign the agreement, but they could recommend a provider, circulate an article, raise a question internally, or help shape the shortlist. This is why campaigns should not become too narrowly focused on job titles. Consider the wider professional network around the decision. Different audiences may need different messages, but all should reinforce the same core positioning.

Build familiarity over time

A senior decision-maker may encounter your content several times before visiting your website or making an inquiry. They may read an article without completing a form, or discuss it with a colleague. This is particularly true in sectors such as financial services, infrastructure, and professional services, where decisions are often high-value, considered, and relationship-led. Conversion still matters, but it may come much later.

Reach tells you how many people saw your campaign. Frequency tells you how often. For a small, targeted audience, repeated exposure to relevant content can be more valuable than maximizing reach. But frequency needs to be managed carefully. Too much repetition, particularly of the same creative, risks brand fatigue.

Targeting and frequency are only useful if the content gives people something worth remembering. Rather than asking, “How do we get this audience to click?”, ask, “What do we want them to remember about us?”.

A campaign should establish a clear association between your organization and a particular issue, capability, or point of view. That might be expertise in an investment theme, a distinctive approach to risk, or useful insight into a changing business issue.

If someone remembers your name but cannot explain why you are relevant, the campaign has only done half its job.

Measure growing recognition

If the purpose of the campaign is to build familiarity, measuring it primarily through clicks and inquiries can give you a misleading picture of whether it is working.

Start with the audience itself. Are the right people seeing the campaign with enough frequency to become familiar without becoming repetitive? Look for repeat website visits and engagement with more than one piece of content. And, importantly, ask whether sales and client teams are noticing any change in the conversations they are having.

No single metric tells the full story. A click isn’t necessarily a sign of intent, just as the absence of an immediate inquiry doesn’t mean the campaign has failed. Conversion metrics still matter, but they should be viewed as part of a longer journey. As familiarity grows, you can look for stronger signals: content downloads, event registrations, inquiries, meetings, and ultimately opportunities. The difference is that these are part of a progression rather than the only test of success.

That progression should also shape what you ask people to do. Someone encountering your organization for the first time may be more willing to read an article than speak to sales. The call to action can become stronger as the relationship develops.

This requires patience, but not passivity. Test different messages and formats, watch how the audience responds, and use feedback from sales to refine the campaign over time.

Aim for share of mind

Hard-to-access decision-makers are rarely won through a single impression, click, or form fill. The value of LinkedIn lies in building recognition with the right audience over time, so that when a relevant need arises, your organization is already known, understood, and has a reason to be considered.

If you’d like to explore how LinkedIn can help build familiarity with your target audiences, get in touch.