LinkedIn native targeting can be hit-and-miss. Sometimes it works. But often, it pulls in too many irrelevant companies when you do industry targeting. There’s a lot of waste.

So here’s what I do instead.

Use Clay “find companies” feature. You can narrow it down much more and use keywords for more precise targeting. As an example, I created a list of B2B SaaS companies. Company size 51-200 people, based in San Francisco. It took me 2 minutes.

And the best part. It’s free. Well, not exactly free. You have to have baseline subscription, but you don’t need to use any Clay credits to create company lists. They already include LinkedIn company pages. That pretty much guarantees 100% match rate. No need to enrich with emails or anything else.

So my current workflow is often running company lists in Clay, first. Creating custom audience on LinkedIn from that, and then adding job titles on top of that. It gives me more controlled lists of companies we want to target.