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Segmentation is one of the most crucial aspects of a successful outreach campaign. It about 60% of the reason why someone will reply to you.
Even if your message isn’t perfect, reaching out to the right person at the right time significantly increases your chances of getting a response. This is why it’s important to take the time to carefully define your target audience.
When building a campaign, a common mistake is trying to reach too many people at once. If your audience exceeds 400 leads, that’s usually a sign that your targeting isn’t precise enough. The more refined your segmentation, the better your chances of getting meaningful engagement.
To start segmenting your audience, you’ll need to use LinkedIn’s search tools.
There are two versions:
We’ll focus on the basic LinkedIn search and how to use its filters to refine your targeting.
When performing a search on LinkedIn, you have access to various filtering options.
First, you’ll need to search for “people“,
Then the most common ones are company and location, but there are many more that can help you narrow down your audience effectively.
For example, the connections filter allows you to select people based on their relationship with you.
First-degree connections are people you’re already connected with, second-degree connections are people your connections know, and third-degree connections are everyone else on LinkedIn.
In most cases, targeting second-degree connections is a great way to find potential leads because you can leverage a mutual contact as an icebreaker.
One powerful but often under-utilized feature is the ability to target connections of a specific person.
This means you can enter the name of someone in your network and find people they are connected to.
This is useful when reaching out to a new audience because you can reference that shared connection in your message.
Similarly, you can also filter people based on who they follow.
For example, if you want to find people interested in a specific topic, you can search for those who follow an industry expert.
Other filters allow you to refine your search based on past experiences, such as previous companies people have worked for, or schools they attended.
If you went to the same university as your leads, that could be a great conversation starter.
You can also filter by industry, which is particularly useful when targeting professionals in a specific field.
LinkedIn categorizes users into about 30 different industries, making it easy to reach relevant prospects.
There are other available filters you can use depending on what you want to acheive:
Language, Open to work, volunteer/pro bono work, service offerings, and more.
While these filters are powerful on their own, LinkedIn’s search can sometimes be a bit messy. That’s why using Boolean search operators can help improve accuracy.
Before we dive into hands-on practice, it’s important to understand what Boolean search is and why it’s so valuable.
Boolean search is a method that allows you to create more advanced and flexible queries by combining keywords with special operators like AND, OR, NOT, and quotation marks.
These operators help you control what shows up in your search results and eliminate the false result that often comes with broad or imprecise filters.
At its core, Boolean search helps you answer questions like:
For example:
"Marketing Director" OR "CMO" will return profiles with either title."Marketing Director" AND "SaaS" ensures both terms appear in the profile."Marketing Director" NOT "Assistant" excludes junior profiles."Head of Sales" in quotes gives you only exact matches, not random “head” or “sales” results.These Boolean operators are supported in various fields such as Job title,
Mastering Boolean search will allow you to:
⚠️ You have to pay attention to one thing though: using boolean as keywords in Lead keywords search will look for matching results within the entire profile. This will include not only the current experience and its description but also past experiences and/or school.
Use it with caution as this may return irrelevant leads.
Now that we have the basics down, let’s apply this logic in real-life scenarios, first for Linkedin Standard search.
To put these concepts into practice, let’s walk through how you can refine your search step by step.
Imagine you’re looking for Marketing Directors working in agencies.
First, instead of randomly searching for new people, you can search for second-degree connections of that specific person. This is a great way to personalize your outreach’s copywriting since you can reference that mutual connection in your message.
Then, if you simply type “Marketing Director” in LinkedIn’s search bar, you might get results that include variations like “Marketing Assistant Director” or “Director of Marketing and Sales.”
This happens because LinkedIn’s search is broad by default. To get exact matches, you should use quotation marks (“”), like this:
Now, if you also want to ensure that these Marketing Directors work in agencies, you can use the AND operator to combine both terms:
This tells LinkedIn to only show profiles that include both of these terms somewhere in the profile. If, on the other hand, you want to include people who might have slightly different job titles (for example, “Marketing Director” or “CMO”), you can use the OR operator:
This expands the search to include either one of these terms. Additionally, if there’s a term you want to exclude, you can use NOT. For example, if you want to find Marketing Directors but exclude assistants, you would search for:
Boolean search operators are incredibly useful because they help you avoid irrelevant results and ensure that your lead list is as accurate as possible.
Once you’ve applied these filters and refined your search, you’ll get a much more precise list of leads. At this point, you can export the data and use it in La Growth Machine to automate your outreach while ensuring that every message feels tailored to your lead.
While LinkedIn’s standard search offers a good starting point for segmentation, it comes with several limitations. The filtering options, though useful, are quite basic and don’t allow for the level of precision needed to truly refine your audience.
For instance, you can’t filter by job seniority, company headcount, or specific engagement behaviors, which can be crucial for identifying high-quality leads. Additionally, LinkedIn’s standard search results are often cluttered with irrelevant profiles due to its broad search algorithm.
Another major drawback is that you can’t save your searches or set up alerts for new leads matching your criteria. This means you have to manually repeat the process each time you want to find new prospects.
Furthermore, the inability to exclude inactive or unresponsive users makes it harder to optimize your outreach efforts.
For those who want to take their segmentation to the next level, Sales Navigator provides advanced search filters, including the ability to target by seniority, company size, engagement, and more.
It also allows you to save searches, track lead activity, and access more in-depth profile insights.
If you’re looking for a more scalable and precise approach to segmentation, Sales Navigator is the next step.
Now let’s move on to the next course : Building a LinkedIn Sales Navigator list
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