LinkedIn continues to expand its audience targeting capability, this time through a new partnership with Adobe which will expand LinkedIn's account-based marketing capabilities to Adobe Experience Cloud users.

As explained by Adobe:

"Adobe and Microsoft are aligning key data sources to populate account-based profiles in Adobe Experience Cloud, including Marketo Engage and Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales. This will empower B2B marketers and sellers to easily identify, understand and engage B2B customer buying teams."

The deal will essentially enable marketing and sales teams to utilize data from LinkedIn, Marketo Engage and Microsoft Dynamics 365 to gain greater insight into the audiences they need to reach, and target them more effectively. So say, for example, an Adobe customer is selling office supplies - they'll now be able to utilize LinkedIn's audience data and ad targeting tools to show ads to the specific decision-makers, based on job roles, locations, etc., to more effectively market their offerings.

The main target for this new partnership appears to be Salesforce, which provides similar targeting and reach capacity, though without the full, in-depth professional and career dataset of LinkedIn. As you may recall, back in 2016, when Microsoft's pending takeover of LinkedIn was first announced, Salesforce voiced its opposition to the merger, noting that:

"Microsoft's proposed acquisition of LinkedIn threatens the future of innovation and competition. By gaining ownership of LinkedIn's unique dataset of over 450 million professionals in more than 200 countries, Microsoft will be able to deny competitors access to that data, and in doing so obtain an unfair competitive advantage."

This new deal, partnering Adobe's back-end tools with LinkedIn's insights, will definitely broaden their combined offering - and with LinkedIn now serving more than 610 million members, and seeing 'record levels' of engagement, that data resource is growing every day.

As noted, this is the latest in LinkedIn's efforts to make better use of its professional dataset, and expand its advertising potential. The platform also recently launched lookalike audiences and a new integration with search data from Microsoft Bing, further building on its targeting capacity.

Each of these moves has significant implications for advertisers, making LinkedIn a more powerful tool for reaching the right people.