Brands
LinkedIn Adds Enhanced Targeting Tools to Help Marketers Reach More of the Right Audiences
India, October 3, 2019: Marketers shared that one of their biggest priorities is to reach more of the right audiences at scale. LinkedIn recently invested a lot in bringing that to life with the introduction of new tools to expand the audience reach for marketers, including lookalike audiences, interest targeting with Bing search insights, and audience templates.
Today, LinkedIn is taking that up a notch by bringing more sophisticated audience, targeting, and reporting features to Campaign Manager. These tools are designed to help marketers who are looking for more powerful reach and insights for their LinkedIn campaigns.
More powerful audience forecasting and intelligence
Planning and forecasting is crucial to the success of any campaign. After all, the more marketers know about the types of audiences they are trying to reach and what resonates with them, the better the brand campaign will perform.
LinkedIn has improved the campaign forecasting panel in Campaign Manager, so marketers can now see the make-up of their target audience right from the dashboard. Marketers can also customize the panel to surface specific professional characteristics, like top industries, years of experience, or company sizes for your audience. When combined with contacts marketers uploaded to Matched Audiences, can be sure that they are not only serving ads to the specific prospects they are trying to reach, but that they have the demographic insights to deliver the content and creative mix that will resonate with their audiences.
“Since we gained access to this feature, we have been able to assess the makeup of our targeting and ensure our ads would get in front of decision-makers,” says Tanner Stolte, account executive and media buyer at Elite Digital Group, an early user of the new audience forecasting tool. “This level of insight to improve your targeting in a B2B campaign really doesn’t exist elsewhere. By putting our ads in front of these high-end targets we’ve increased our MQLs 11.3% month-over-month with a comparable ad spend and seen our close rate improve near 5% from our LinkedIn leads, with more deals still in the pipeline that are expected to close.”
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New Boolean logic to target with precision:
As we ‘worked with’ OR ‘surveyed’ customers to prioritize targeting capabilities to build, many of them placed Boolean targeting logic, i.e. using “And/Or” in your queries, at the top of the list. That’s because “And/Or” targeting enable marketers to reach more of the right audiences through more sophisticated combinations of profile facets like job function, seniority, and titles – all in a single campaign.
For example, let’s say a marketer wanted to target people using Director job seniority and the Finance job function. Previously, within a campaign marketers could only do so by targeting Directors in Finance roles. Now, with Boolean targeting, marketers can use a single campaign to reach people who are Directors at any job function, as well as people in Finance roles of any seniority. This gives marketers greater flexibility to determine the kinds of professionals who see their ads.
To learn how boolean targeting can work for your next campaign, check out the how-to video or visit our Help Center.
Understand even more about the professional audiences engaging with your campaigns
Demographic reporting has been one of LinkedIn’s most popular features because it helps marketers see the types of audiences clicking and converting on their ads, based on professional characteristics like company name and job seniority. Today, LinkedIn is making this reporting feature even better by allowing marketers to understand which audiences are watching their video ads, filling out your Lead Gen Forms, and opening the Sponsored InMail messages.
With this data, marketers can demonstrate to their exec team or partners in the Sales org exactly what kinds of professionals are becoming quality leads for their business or engaging with their content.
This type of demographic information also helps marketers better understand the value they are getting from campaigns, and can give them the insight they need to make strategic adjustments to the ad creative so they get better results from the audiences they care about most.
LinkedIn India’s audience forecasting and Boolean targeting updates are available globally, while the updates to demographic reporting will be available to all advertisers over the next two weeks.
Brands
Estée Lauder to shed 10,000 jobs as new boss bets on digital shift
The cosmetics giant raises its profit outlook but stays silent on a possible merger with Spain’s Puig, as job cuts deepen and a three-year sales slump weighs on the turnaround
NEW YORK: Stéphane de La Faverie is not done cutting. Estée Lauder announced on Friday that it plans to eliminate as many as 3,000 additional jobs, taking its total redundancy programme to as many as 10,000 roles, up from a previous target of 7,000 announced a year ago. The company, which owns La Mer, The Ordinary, Tom Ford, and Aveda, employs roughly 57,000 people worldwide. The mathematics of what is now being contemplated is stark.
The fresh round of cuts is expected to generate a further $200 million in savings, bringing the total annual savings from the programme to as much as $1.2 billion before taxes. That money, De La Faverie has made clear, will be ploughed back into the turnaround.
A CEO in a hurry
De La Faverie, who took the helm in January 2025, inherited a company that had endured three consecutive years of annual sales declines. His response has been to move fast and cut deep. A significant portion of the latest redundancies reflects his push to reduce headcount at US department stores, long a cornerstone of Estée Lauder’s distribution model but now a channel in structural decline. In their place, he is accelerating the shift toward faster-growing online platforms, including Amazon.com and TikTok Shop, a pivot that is reshaping not just where Estée Lauder sells but how it thinks about its customers.
The numbers are moving in the right direction
Despite the pain, there are signs the medicine is working. Estée Lauder raised its profit outlook for the remainder of the fiscal year, guiding for adjusted earnings per share in the range of $2.35 to $2.45, above analyst estimates and a notable step up from the $2.05 to $2.25 range it had guided for in February. Organic net sales growth is expected to come in at 3 per cent, the company said, at the high end of the range it set out in February.
The share price tells a mixed story. After De La Faverie took charge, the stock surged nearly 60 per cent, buoyed by investor optimism that a longtime company insider could finally arrest the decline. But 2026 has been rougher: the shares have fallen 27 per cent this year, weighed down by disappointing February results and the overhang of unresolved merger talks with Spanish beauty giant Puig Brands SA. The company gave no additional details about those discussions on Friday, leaving the market to guess.
Silence on Puig
The proposed tie-up with Puig remains the most consequential unknown hanging over Estée Lauder. A deal with the Barcelona-based group, which owns brands including Carolina Herrera and Rabanne, would reshape the global luxury beauty landscape. But with nothing new to say and a turnaround still very much in progress, De La Faverie is asking investors to trust the process.
Three years of sales declines, 10,000 job cuts, and a merger that may or may not happen. At Estée Lauder, the overhaul has barely started.
