Powerful Ways to Reach Local Customers Using LinkedIn Customers in your local market can be your staunchest supporters and evangelists. Here's how you can find them and engage them starting today.

For your business, "local" might mean your neighborhood. Or perhaps your city. Depending on your market and industry, local to you could even mean an entire region.

However you define local as a business, you can't ignore your local market when it comes to digital marketing. The customers in your local market can oftentimes be your staunchest supporters and evangelists.

When you go online to engage with local customers, arguably the best place to do it is on LinkedIn. Every month, there are more than a billion interactions happening on LinkedIn Pages. To tap into that network of local professionals and businesses, you'll want to utilize tried-and-true strategies.

Utilize location based targeting.

The last thing you want to do as a marketer is to shout into a crowd and simply hope the right person hears you. That's why LinkedIn created targeting features for organic Page posts and ads as well, allowing your business to find and engage with the right people.

To target locally, the first filter to utilize is Location. From there, targeting filters include Company, Experience, Education, and Interests & Identity. You can drill down even more specifically within each filter. In Experience, for instance, you can target job titles, job functions, job seniority, or years of experience.

Combining location with industry and company size filters you could, for example, target your content to reach mid-size manufacturing firms in Minneapolis. You can even filter using Groups, skills, job title, or fields of study to reach communities with specific interests.

To help make sure you cast a wide-enough net without narrowing your parameters too far, LinkedIn recommends limiting your Page updates or promotions to two or three of the most relevant targeting options.

Stay top-of-mind.

It's great when you can reach a customer with the perfect messaging at just the right time to drive revenue. With LinkedIn, you can activate your message on both the LinkedIn feed and on our network of publishers.

But there are various reasons why those potential customers—including local customers—don't fully engage. When they don't, it's your job to follow up and stay top-of-mind.

That's where LinkedIn's Matched Audiences comes in. Available for LinkedIn advertising products like Sponsored Content, Sponsored InMail, and other ad formats, Matched Audiences gives business owners and marketers three different ways to reach local customers:

Website retargeting. This lets you re-engage LinkedIn members who visit your website. Simply place a LinkedIn Insight Tag on your site then use LinkedIn's Campaign Manager to determine which audience you'd like to target. Perhaps it's people who visited a specific product page or those who've visited your About Us page or blog. You can track and retarget for multiple pages on your site at once.

Contact targeting. This allows you to upload as many as 300,000 email marketing contacts and once LinkedIn has matched at least 300 of them as LinkedIn members, you can create specific audiences among them (say, based on location) and create targeted messaging for them.

Reach employees of your target accounts. This one is intended for businesses that are utilizing LinkedIn's account-based marketing programs focused on reaching target accounts. These are companies, including local companies, that your sales team has identified as valuable sales targets. With Matched Audiences, marketers can work with their sales teams to target specific employees that work at your target accounts.

Whether utilizing targeting filters or some of the options available with Matched Audiences, marketers can hone in on local customers with surprising precision, reaching your target audiences throughout the customer life cycle—from awareness to lead generation to customer retention and beyond.

Click here to learn more about how LinkedIn can help your business find and engage with local customers fast.