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LinkedIn Targeting for Events: How to Reach the Right Audience at the Right Scale
- Caylee Donaldson
- 6 days ago
- 11 min read
You can have the sharpest messaging and the slickest creative on the planet – if it’s showing up in front of the wrong people, it’s just expensive wallpaper.
For event marketers, LinkedIn targeting is where campaigns are quietly won or lost. Go too broad and you burn budget on people who will never attend, sponsor or exhibit. Go too narrow and you end up with an audience of a few thousand people, limited delivery, and eye-watering CPCs.
The sweet spot sits in the middle: clear, intentional targeting that:
Puts your event in front of the right delegates, sponsors and speakers
Uses LinkedIn’s professional data without strangling reach
Builds audiences big enough to scale, but specific enough to convert
In this blog, we’ll walk through how to use LinkedIn targeting for events so you can confidently build audiences that actually click, register and fill your commercial funnels – instead of guessing in Campaign Manager and hoping for the best.
Skip to a section:
Audience recipes for event delegates (with examples)
Audience recipes for sponsors and exhibitors (and more examples)
3 practical steps to improve your LinkedIn targeting for events
The building blocks of LinkedIn targeting
Before you start layering on clever tricks, it helps to get really clear on the basics. Most high-performing event campaigns are built from the same core ingredients – the difference is simply how intentionally they’re combined.
The key levers you’ll use again and again are:
Location – always your starting point. Where do you actually want people to travel from: UK only, DACH, North America, global?
Job function – broad buckets like Operations, IT, Finance, Marketing, Engineering. This is usually where you anchor your audience.
Seniority – Manager, Director, VP, CXO. Helpful for filtering out junior roles if you’re targeting budget holders or strategic decision-makers.
Job title – the more precise layer: “Head of Maintenance”, “CISO”, “VP Refining”, “Operations Director”, “Plant Manager”. Great for tightening things up once your core is in place.
Industry – the sector view: Oil & Energy, Food & Beverage Manufacturing, Utilities, Pharma, Financial Services, etc. Crucial if your event is vertical-specific.
Company size – particularly useful for sponsorship and exhibitor campaigns where deal sizes and packages differ for SMEs vs large enterprises.
Skills & interests – things like “industrial automation”, “NIS2”, “OT security”, “data governance”. Ideal for sharpening relevance around niche topics.
Groups – niche professional communities your audience has opted into. These can be powerful signals for very specialist events.
The trap a lot of teams fall into is building huge job title lists and hoping that’s enough. LinkedIn’s own guidance leans the other way: start with broader attributes like job function + seniority (and, where relevant, industry), then use titles, skills, interests or groups to refine.
In other words: let LinkedIn’s professional data do the heavy lifting, and use the more granular options to shape your audience – not suffocate it.
Audience recipes for event delegates
For delegate acquisition, the goal isn’t “everyone who might vaguely care about this topic”. You’re trying to reach practitioners and decision-makers in the right functions and industries – the people who can justify the time out of the office and actually act on what they learn.
Think of your targeting as a recipe: a solid base, plus a couple of ingredients to flavour it for your event.
Example 1: Manufacturing Data Summit (IT/OT audience)
Here you’re interested in people who sit at the intersection of technology, operations and data inside manufacturing and industrial businesses.
Core audience:
Location: United Kingdom
Job function: Information Technology OR Engineering OR Operations
Seniority: Manager, Director, VP, CXO
Industry: Food & Beverages, Automotive, Machinery, Chemicals, Pharmaceuticals
Optional refinements:
Skills: “Industry 4.0”, “SCADA”, “OT security”, “data governance”, “predictive maintenance”
Job titles to test: “Head of OT Security”, “Plant Manager”, “Operations Director”, “Data Architect”, “Manufacturing IT Manager”
Start with the function + seniority + industry combo, then layer skills and a short title list if the audience is still comfortably sized. Job-title-only targeting here will usually be too narrow.
Example 2: Energy Trading & Risk Summit
Now the sweet spot is trading, risk and commercial decision-makers in energy and utilities.
Core audience:
Location: Europe
Job function: Finance, Business Development, Operations
Seniority: Manager, Director, VP, CXO
Industry: Oil & Energy, Utilities, Renewables & Environment, Financial Services
Optional refinements:
Skills: “energy trading”, “risk management”, “market analysis”, “hedging”
Job titles to test: “Head of Trading”, “Risk Manager”, “Portfolio Manager”, “Energy Analyst”
This combination focuses spend on people who are likely to influence trading strategies or risk decisions – not just anyone working vaguely “in energy”.
Example 3: RegTech / Compliance Conference
Here, you’re trying to attract compliance, legal and risk professionals inside financial institutions and fintechs.
Core audience:
Location: United Kingdom OR Europe
Job function: Legal, Compliance, Risk, Finance
Seniority: Manager, Director, VP, CXO
Industry: Financial Services, Banking, Capital Markets, Fintech
Optional refinements:
Skills: “regulatory compliance”, “AML”, “KYC”, “MiFID II”, “regtech”
Job titles to test: “Head of Compliance”, “MLRO”, “Chief Risk Officer”, “Regulatory Affairs Manager”
This gives you a strong base of people who are both responsible for compliance and likely to care about the topics on your agenda.
Example 4: Healthtech & Innovation Forum
For a healthtech event, you might be targeting both digital leaders inside hospitals and innovation leaders in life sciences and tech.
Core audience:
Location: Europe OR North America
Job function: Information Technology, Operations, Product Management, Research
Seniority: Manager, Director, VP, CXO
Industry: Hospital & Health Care, Biotechnology, Medical Devices
Optional refinements:
Skills: “digital health”, “EHR”, “clinical innovation”, “telemedicine”, “AI in healthcare”
Job titles to test: “Chief Digital Officer”, “Clinical Informatics Lead”, “Head of Innovation”, “Product Director – Health”
The pattern across all of these:
Start with location + job function + seniority as your base.
Add industry if your event is clearly vertical (manufacturing, energy, finance, healthcare).
Use skills, interests and a short title list to sharpen relevance – not as the whole strategy.
You can run pure job title-based audiences (for very specific campaigns), but keep a close eye on audience size. Once you’re down to a few thousand people, delivery will slow, costs will climb and it becomes hard to scale – no matter how good your creative is.
Audience recipes for sponsors and exhibitors
Sponsor and exhibitor campaigns are a little different to delegate campaigns. You’re not trying to reach “everyone in the market” – you’re trying to reach commercial decision-makers at vendors and solution providers who:
Sell into the audience your event attracts
Have budget and appetite for sponsorship, stands or meeting packages
In practice, that usually means a mix of sales, marketing, partnerships and commercial leaders inside a fairly tight set of industries.
Example 1: OT security vendors for an energy event
Here, you’re trying to reach companies who sell OT / ICS security solutions into industrial organisations.
Core audience:
Location: Europe
Job function: Business Development, Sales, Marketing
Seniority: Manager, Director, VP, CXO
Industry: Computer & Network Security, Information Technology & Services
Optional refinements:
Company size: 11–5000 employees (if that’s where your ideal sponsors typically sit)
Skills: “cybersecurity”, “OT security”, “ICS”, “NIS2”, “critical infrastructure”
This gives you a large but relevant pool of potential sponsor leads – the people who are paid to generate pipeline and visibility in exactly the market your event serves.
Example 2: Automation and robotics exhibitors for a manufacturing show
Core audience:
Location: United Kingdom OR DACH
Job function: Business Development, Sales, Marketing, Partnerships
Seniority: Manager, Director, VP, CXO
Industry: Industrial Automation, Machinery, Mechanical or Industrial Engineering
Optional refinements:
Company size: 11–1000 employees (if you skew towards specialist vendors rather than global giants)
Skills: “robotics”, “industrial automation”, “factory automation”, “OEM”
Example 3: SaaS sponsors for a fintech or regtech conference
Core audience:
Location: Europe OR North America
Job function: Marketing, Business Development, Sales, Partnerships
Seniority: Manager, Director, VP, CXO
Industry: Computer Software, Financial Services, Information Technology & Services, Fintech
Optional refinements:
Company size: 11–500 employees (typical SaaS scale-ups)
Skills: “B2B SaaS”, “regtech”, “fintech”, “compliance software”
The pattern is the same in each case:
Start with location + commercial functions (sales/marketing/BD/partnerships) + seniority
Layer on industries that match your ideal sponsor profile
Refine with company size and skills if the audience is still broad
You’re not trying to reach end users here – you’re deliberately zeroing in on the people whose job is to decide where to spend marketing and event budget.
How big should your LinkedIn audiences be?
This is where a lot of event campaigns quietly go wrong. The brief says “highly targeted”, someone keeps adding filters… and suddenly you’re serving ads to a tiny handful of people at £15 a click.
You want specific, not microscopic.
As a rough rule of thumb:
Sponsored Content campaigns Aim for 50,000+ members in your audience, especially in B2B. Bigger is fine as long as the targeting is relevant – it gives LinkedIn room to find the people most likely to click.
Message / Conversation Ads These can work with smaller audiences (15–20k+), but they still benefit from scale. If you’re only targeting a few thousand people, you’ll exhaust them quickly.
Where things start to creak:
You stack location + industry + job function + long job title list + skills + groups + years of experience
Your audience drops to a few thousand members
Delivery slows, you struggle to exit the learning phase, and costs climb – no matter how good your creative is.
A better approach:
Start broad enough to give the algorithm room to optimise
e.g. Location + job function + seniority (+ industry, if needed)
Watch the data
Use performance and Demographics reports to see which titles, functions and industries are actually engaging.
Narrow with intent, not panic
Trim out obviously irrelevant segments
Add a small title list or a couple of skills if the audience is still huge
Think of it like this: your job is to define the right room of people… then let LinkedIn work out which ones are most likely to click, rather than trying to hand-pick every single job title upfront.
Use Matched Audiences for higher-intent segments
Once you’ve got your cold targeting in a good place, the real efficiency gains often come from Matched Audiences – LinkedIn’s way of letting you go back to people who already know you, or who you already know.
They’re particularly useful for events because you can:
Retarget website visitors using the Insight Tag
Upload contact lists (past delegates, newsletter subscribers, prospects)
Upload company lists (your sponsor / exhibitor wishlists for ABM-style campaigns)
You’re no longer shouting into the void – you’re talking to people who’ve already raised a hand in some way.
Examples for event campaigns
1. Retargeting “almost” delegates
Build audiences around people who:
Visited your agenda, pricing or registration pages
Started, but didn’t complete, a registration form
Then show them:
“Top 5 sessions you can’t miss at [Event Name]” → agenda page
“Early-bird ends Friday – secure your pass” → registration page
These users have already shown intent. A gentle nudge can be all it takes.
2. Delegate rebook campaigns
Upload contact lists for:
Last year’s attendees
People who registered but didn’t attend
High-value segments (VIPs, speakers, advisory board, etc.)
Then run campaigns such as:
“Back for [Year]: what’s new at [Event Name]”
“Exclusive rate for returning delegates”
Because these people already understand the event, your job is to remind and update, not educate from scratch.
3. Sponsor & exhibitor ABM
Upload a company list of your top 100–200 target sponsors or exhibitors, then target:
Job functions: Marketing, Sales, Business Development, Partnerships
Seniority: Manager, Director, VP, CXO
Run ads like:
“Want to meet 300+ OT security buyers in one place?” → sponsor overview page
“See how vendors generated pipeline at [Event Name] last year” → post-show report / media pack
Here, you’re using LinkedIn to put very specific, commercial messages in front of the people who decide where event and marketing budget goes.
The common thread?
Matched Audiences tend to click more, convert more and cost you less per lead because they’re not starting cold – they’ve visited your site, attended before, or already sit on a carefully curated target list.
Cold targeting fills the top of the funnel. Matched Audiences help you turn that interest into registrations, rebooks and signed sponsor contracts.
Avoid the over-targeting trap
“Let’s make it really targeted” is usually where things start to go wrong.
A few classic mistakes I see in event campaigns:
1. Stacking every filter you can find
The logic goes: “If we add more filters, we’ll only reach the perfect people.” In reality, you end up with:
Job titles
and groups
and skills
and seniority
and company size
and three other things someone suggested in a meeting
Result? An audience of 3,000 people, barely any delivery, and clicks that cost a small fortune.
2. Treating every persona separately… on day one
Splitting campaigns by persona can be powerful – once you have data.
The problem is when teams start with:
1 campaign for plant managers
1 for heads of maintenance
1 for CISOs
1 for OT architects
1 for consultants
1 for vendors
…all with tiny audiences and not enough spend for the algorithm to learn anything useful.
A better starting point:
2–3 well-defined segments (e.g. “Ops & Maintenance leaders in EMEA”, “Cyber vendors in Europe”, “C-suite in utilities”)
Enough budget behind each to get meaningful data
More granular personas layered in later, based on what you see working
3. Ignoring the data you already have
LinkedIn quietly gives you a goldmine in the Demographics tab of Campaign Manager:
Job titles that are actually clicking
Job functions and industries delivering the best CTR
Seniority levels engaging with your ads
If you never look at it, you end up guessing forever.
Instead:
Use this data to trim what isn’t working
Double down on the roles and industries that are responding
Adjust your audience recipe accordingly
In short:
Start with a clear hypothesis –
“Operations and maintenance leaders in EMEA” “Commercial leaders at cybersecurity vendors”
Build a healthy-sized audience, not a microscopic one.
Let the campaign run long enough to generate data.
Refine your targeting based on what the numbers tell you – not what sounds right on a whiteboard.
Specific is good. So specific that LinkedIn can barely serve your ads? Not so much.
3 practical steps to improve your LinkedIn targeting for events
If all of this feels a bit abstract, here’s a simple way to bring it back to earth. Before you launch your next campaign, run through these three steps.
1. Start with a one-sentence persona
Before you touch Campaign Manager, write down one clear sentence about who you’re trying to reach:
“Senior maintenance and reliability leaders in EMEA food & beverage plants.”“Commercial leaders at cybersecurity vendors selling into critical infrastructure.”“Heads of compliance at mid–large UK banks.”
Then translate that sentence into LinkedIn attributes:
Location
Job function
Seniority
Industry
Skills / interests (if needed)
If you can’t describe the persona in a sentence, the targeting will be fuzzy too.
2. Use 2–3 key filters, not 7–8
When in doubt, simplify.
A solid starting point for most event campaigns is:
Location
Job function
Seniority
From there, you can add:
Industry – if your event is clearly vertical
A couple of skills – if the topic is niche and the audience is still huge
You very rarely need to stack titles + groups + skills + interests + years of experience +… on top. That’s how you end up with a microscopic audience and a very grumpy CPC.
3. Combine Matched Audiences with standard targeting
Your warm data is some of the best targeting you’ll ever have – don’t use it in isolation.
Instead, combine Matched Audiences with standard filters. For example:
Contact list of past attendees AND
Job function: Operations OR IT
Or:
Company list of target sponsors AND
Job function: Marketing, Sales, Business Development
This keeps the audience:
Relevant – you’re only talking to the right roles inside the right companies
Big enough – you’re not limiting yourself to a tiny segment the algorithm can’t learn from
You get the precision of your CRM lists, with the scalability of LinkedIn’s own data.
Wrapping it up (and what to do next)
Good LinkedIn targeting for events isn’t about finding the one “perfect” filter combo and clinging to it forever.
It’s about:
Being crystal clear on who you want in the room (or on the floorplan)
Translating that into a clean, scalable audience structure
Letting campaigns run long enough to gather data
Then refining based on what the numbers tell you – not just what sounds good in a planning meeting
Get that right and:
Your delegate campaigns reach people who can actually say “yes” to attending
Your sponsor campaigns land in front of the people who own the marketing budget
Your CPCs and CPLs start to look a lot more sensible
If you’d like support sense-checking your current targeting, building out LinkedIn audiences, or using your existing data more intelligently across event campaigns, this is exactly the kind of work we do with our clients:
LinkedIn ads set-up and optimisation for delegate and sponsor campaigns
Data and targeting strategy across channels (not just LinkedIn) so your event marketing works as one joined-up funnel
If that sounds helpful, you can drop me a message or head to cdonaldson-marketing.co.uk to book a chat about your next campaign.