LinkedIn partners with Acxiom for brand targeting

With its half-billion users worldwide, LinkedIn contains a treasure trove of personal and professional data about businesspeople.

A marketer can target people on LinkedIn by their type of business, geography and other factors. Or a brand can export a list of email addresses for its customers and, through LinkedIn’s Matched Audiences, target those customers on the professional site via addresses.

To help brands target their customers on LinkedIn, data service Acxiom — and its data onboarding subsidiary LiveRamp — have announced a product integration with LinkedIn.

Rick Erwin, President of the Acxiom Audience Solutions Division, told me that “the number one reason” why brands go through Acxiom to target LinkedIn users, when they could go to LinkedIn directly, “is inertia.”

This arrangement is useful to the many brands that are his company’s customers, he said, because Acxiom in effect acts as the brand’s first-party data house. Their customer data is already in Acxiom, shined and ready.

Acxiom’s customer data management includes not only cleaning or optimization to find the best customers, but matching it to conversion results — some of which come from offline sales — so that a brand can determine how well a particular campaign performed.

It’s also possible that a brand might want to add a missing attribute to a customer list, such as car ownership for an insurance company’s customer list of property owners, but Erwin said that wasn’t a major focus of this announcement.

Acxiom has previously said that its database contains as many as 1,500 attributes for each customer profile.