LinkedIn advertising is unique because it lets you target professionals. This is especially useful in two scenarios - you're either looking to hire and want to reach certain folks, or you're a B2B company that wants to sell to professionals that might find your product or service useful in their work.

The targeting options LinkedIn offers include skills, groups, seniority, job title, job function, and more. Each of these options let you narrow down your targeting to a highly relevant audience for your ads.

New to LinkedIn advertising and want a bit of a head start?

Try searching for groups related to your business. Within a group, select the "more" tab and you'll find group statistics:

Group statistics

Group statistics reveal a lot about the group's members and will give you a base to effectively target your new campaign. You'll learn the general make up of the group including: the distribution of seniority levels, location, and job function. Use this information, along with the activity level of the group (discussions, comments, job posts, etc.) to determine if your targeting a group that's both active and relevant to your product or service. Also, use this information to test different targeting combinations. For instance: target location and job function for one week, and job title and industry in another.

Beyond the summary of overall group data, group statistics help you learn about the group's demographics , the growth of the group, and whether the group has had much recent activity.

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Hope this quick tip helps you target your LinkedIn advertising more effectively. If you know of any good tricks to help a new or experienced advertiser get more out of their LinkedIn campaigns, please share in the comments!

Thanks for reading!

Here are some related links worth checking out:

http://blog.linkedin.com/2011/11/10/groups-analytics/
http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/23454/The-Ultimate-Cheat-Sheet-for-Mastering-LinkedIn.aspx (There are lots of good tips in this post - scroll down near the bottom for the tips related to using LinkedIn for business/marketing)