Ivona Mikulčić | Updated September 4, 2026 | 15 min read

How to find your target audience with LinkedIn search [2026 guide]

Going multichannel to reach out to your prospects is a game-changer. With this tactic, you can connect with your target audience on their favourite channel, which boosts your chances for more replies.
And when it comes to favourite channels, LinkedIn is the place to be for most professionals, including your prospects.
But with 1.2 billion+ members (confirmed by Microsoft’s FY2025 annual report) (100+ LinkedIn Statistics 2026: Users & Engagement), how do you find your target audience? I’ve spent the better part of four years testing every search trick LinkedIn offers. Some of them saved me hours. A few were total dead ends. In this article, I’ll show you the exact methods we use at lemlist to find and connect with our ICP on LinkedIn, so you can stop scrolling and start building pipeline.

Getting started with LinkedIn search categories

Let’s imagine you’re a Web3 consultant looking for partners interested in crypto.
To access different search categories:
  1. Log into your LinkedIn account.
  2. Navigate to the search box in the top left corner.
  3. Type your keyword, e.g. crypto (it can be anything related to the title, summary, or experience of your ICP).
  4. Click “See all results” at the bottom of the dropdown menu.
Insert your keyword in the search bar on the top left corner
You’ll land on the search results page and notice these new filters aka main search categories:
People, Companies, Posts, Groups, Jobs, Events, Courses, Schools, Services category

LinkedIn people search

If you want to narrow your search results to only people related to your keyword, choose the “People” filter.
Click on the People filter in the top left corner
You may end up with a huge results list, but the key is in quality, not quantity.
Let’s imagine your buyer persona is located in the USA, Switzerland or Dubai and has a profile in English or French. They work in a Financial Services company for 3-5 years, in a Director seniority role.
To narrow your free search:
  1. Click on the “All filters” button in the top right corner.
  2. From the new dashboard, you can filter your results by:
  • Type of connections
  • The connections of your connection
  • Locations
  • Current or past company
  • School
  • Industry
  • Profile language
  • Open to
  • Service categories
  • Additional keywords (such as first or last name, title, company, and school).
To find your targeted audience, you’ll use “Locations”, “Profile language”, and “Industry” filters.
Use All filters to narrow your free search
If you have a Sales Navigator subscription, you can access additional filters on the “Lead” dashboard, e.g. “Seniority level” and “Years in current company”.
Use Lead filters to narrow your premium search
The catch with LinkedIn’s native people search? It caps your results and limits how many profiles you can view per month on a free account. Sales Navigator extends those limits, but you still can’t export leads or enrich them with verified contact info inside LinkedIn itself. That’s where a dedicated Lead Database with 600M+ contacts and smart ICP filters gives you an uncapped alternative.
To make your filtering process effortless, I suggest you put all your audience knowledge into practice. And if you still don’t have your target audience defined, we’ve prepared this free, step-by-step guide that will help you:
✓ define the companies you want to target (your Ideal Customer Profile)
✓ define the people you want to get in touch with (your buyer persona)
✓ segment buyer personas into tiers for best outreach results
BONUS: get access to the buyer persona template that got us 20k+ customers!

LinkedIn search by name

Let’s imagine you’re a founder who met Mary at a conference a few months ago. The only information you remember about her is her name, that she’s a founder as well, and her company is based in San Francisco.
So, how are you going to find her?
There are two case scenarios in the name search.
1. If you know the first and last name of the person you want to find:
enter their full name into the search bar.
2. If you have just a fraction of their information:
enter a combination of keywords such as “first name + job title”, “last name + company”, or any other target info.
Therefore, you can search for Mary in the “name + title + location” format.
Insert Name, Title, and Location to the search box
The other way to search for people by name is:
  1. Navigate to the “People” search page.
  2. Click on the “All filters” button.
  3. Use keywords filters “First name” and “Last name” (+ any other info you might have).
Use Keywords section in All filters
If you’re searching from Sales Navigator, you can use “Geography”, “Job title”, and “First Name” filters as shown below.
Use Geography, Job title, and First Name filters
Once you’ve found the right profile, you still need their email. lemlist’s Email Finder & Verifier can take that LinkedIn profile URL and return a verified email address (and phone number) in seconds, finding approximately 80% of leads’ emails (Lemlist Email Finder: Complete Guide & How to Use It) through 14 best-in-class data providers (lemlist’s Waterfall Enrichment: Find ~80% Verified Leads’ Emails).

LinkedIn search by email

There are many ways to extract email from LinkedIn, but how do you find someone’s profile when you only know their email?
The only thing you’ll need is to have both Microsoft Outlook and LinkedIn accounts:
  1. Log into your account on outlook.live.com and go to the “People” section.
  2. Click on “New Contact” and fill out the information you know (to insert “Email Address”, go to “+ Add More”).
  3. Select “Create” to access the Contact dashboard.
Insert email address in the Add contact window
  1. On the new dashboard, click on the “LinkedIn” tab and follow the instructions to link your accounts.
  2. Go back to your Outlook where you should be able to see their LinkedIn profile.
Check out the LinkedIn tab to see the profile
Fair warning: this Outlook workaround is fragile. It depends on Microsoft maintaining the LinkedIn tab integration, and it only works in one direction (email → profile). Most of the time, you need the reverse: LinkedIn profile → verified email.
That’s exactly what lemlist’s Email Finder & Verifier does. Thanks to waterfall enrichment, lemlist fills the gaps in your existing single-vendor coverage with verified emails from other premium data sources. Instead of getting data from 1 source, you get top results from multiple, ensuring the most coverage. (lemlist’s Waterfall Enrichment: Find ~80% Verified Leads’ Emails) Paste a LinkedIn URL, and you’ll get a double-verified email back in seconds.

LinkedIn lead search

Forget all the manual work.
lemlist’s Lead Database gives you access to 600M+ contacts (lemlist | The AI Outbound Platform for Relevant Outreach at Every Scale) (lemlist | The AI Outbound Platform for Relevant Outreach at Every Scale) and 65M+ companies. Filter by tech stack, funding, hiring trends, revenue, growth signals, and website visitors, then enrich in one click with verified emails and phone numbers.
Here’s what makes this different from LinkedIn’s native filters. LinkedIn lets you filter people by industry, location, company, and (with Sales Navigator) seniority and years at company. That’s a good start. But it won’t tell you which of those companies just raised a Series B, switched their tech stack to HubSpot, or visited your pricing page last week.
With one click, built-in waterfall enrichment pulls verified emails and phone numbers from the market’s top providers. (lemlist Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2) That means you go from “I found a list of interesting profiles” to “I have verified contact data and a campaign running” without leaving the platform.
You can also use the lemlist Chrome extension to pull lead data directly from LinkedIn profiles and Sales Navigator lists into campaigns.
And if you want to skip the manual prospecting entirely, lemlist’s Intent Signals detect when a company might need what you’re selling. For example, when they visit your website, hire new people, get funding, or interact on LinkedIn. (lemlist Intent Signals: Spot buying clues & outreach at the best time) Unlike intent-only tools (like Bombora or 6sense), lemlist doesn’t just show signals. It helps you act on them instantly. Everything happens in one place: detect → personalize → outreach. (lemlist Intent Signals: Spot buying clues & outreach at the best time)
lemlist is rated 4.6/5 with 2K+ reviews across G2, Capterra, and Trustpilot.

How to search for someone’s connections on LinkedIn

Let’s imagine you’re promoting a new B2B advertising app and looking for prospects from the IT industry.
Therefore, searching for connections of someone working in IT might bring you a new list of similar members.
The simplest way to search someone’s connections is to:
  1. Navigate to the connection’s profile.
  2. Click “[number] connections” shown below.
Click Connections on member
From there, you can access the list of members’ connections with additional “People” filtering options.
The other way is to:
  1. Narrow your search to the “People” category.
  2. Click the “All filters” button.
  3. Use the “Connections of” filter.
You can apply the filter “Connections of” your connection working in a software development company.
Choose Add a connection in Connections of filter
In Sales Navigator, you’ll find the “Connections of” filter in the “Personal” filtering section as shown below.
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Found inspirational people to follow? Create a list and share it with your whole team. Bumped into someone with impressive experience? Check out their training and courses.
Manually browsing someone’s connections takes time and has limits. If you’d rather automate the signal-watching, lemlist’s Intent Signals can track LinkedIn engagement, job changes, and new job postings from LinkedIn and ATS platforms (lemlist Features: Complete Breakdown [July 2026]) so you catch these moments without the manual scroll.

LinkedIn company search

Once you find targeted companies, you can easily find new prospects by looking up the employees.
Let’s imagine you’re a Growth Marketing Manager looking for law practice companies located in EMEA, with 1-10 employees, and 5-10M Annual Revenue.
To find targeted businesses:
  1. Narrow your free search to the “Company” category.
  2. Choose the “All filters” option.
  3. Select additional search filters such as:
  • Locations
  • Industry
  • Company size
  • Job listings on LinkedIn
  • Connections (the companies of your connections)
By choosing “Industry”, “Locations” and “Company size” filters in your basic account, you can access more than 20k matching companies.
Use All filters to narrow your Company search
Your Sales Navigator account will allow you to narrow your search even further by using “Annual revenue” in the “Account” dashboard.
Use Annual revenue additional filter
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You can use Company search to check out what companies similar to yours are doing and stay in the loop with the industry happenings.
LinkedIn’s native company filters cover Industry, Location, and Size. That’s about it. lemlist’s Lead Database lets you filter companies by tech stack, funding stage, revenue, growth rate, hiring trends, and website visitors. If you’re looking for SaaS companies between 50-200 employees that use Salesforce and just raised a round, LinkedIn search can’t do that. lemlist can.

LinkedIn group search

Let’s imagine you’re a Head of Sales who’s trying to pitch a new product to retail managers.
You can use LinkedIn groups not only as an insightful hub of knowledge but also to connect with like-minded users.
If you don’t know the name of the group you want to join:
  1. Insert related industry keywords into the search bar, e.g. retail.
  2. Click on “See all results” at the bottom of the dropdown menu.
  3. Filter your search results by the “Group” category.
Insert your keyword in Groups category
Once you join the group, you’ll have an option to search for specific content within the group. Simply navigate to the search box at the top left corner of the group.
Insert your keyword in search box to search groups
The cool thing about joining a LinkedIn group is that you can see all the members and, maybe, potential prospects.
If you’re subscribed to Sales Navigator, you’ll have the option to see the members of a certain group without joining. To do that, use the “Group membership” filter in the Lead search dashboard.
Search for members of a group
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Use Group search to ask questions that help you understand your audience’s needs and promote your work in an educational, inspiring way.
Monitoring group discussions manually is time-consuming, though. Intent Signals track when a company hires new people, gets funding, or interacts on LinkedIn, (lemlist Intent Signals: Spot buying clues & outreach at the best time) so you can catch buying moments without refreshing group feeds every day.

LinkedIn posts search

Let’s imagine you’re launching your social media management business and want to connect with other experts from the industry.
You might ask yourself “Why search for posts on LinkedIn?” Well, the answer is simple. Through posts related to your product/service, you can find new audiences and vice-versa!
Here’s how to do it:
  1. Insert the related keyword in the search bar, e.g. social media, and go to “see all results”.
  2. Navigate to the “Post” category on the search results page.
  3. Choose the “All filters” button to narrow your results with filters:
  • Who posted – 1st connections or me
  • Date posted – past week, month, or 24h
  • Sort by – top match or latest
  • From member – by adding a person’s name
  • From company – by adding the company’s name
  • Mentioning member – by adding a person’s name
  • Mentioning company – by adding the company’s name
  • Author industry – add industry (marketing, sales, etc.)
Insert your keyword in the Posts category
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Start using the Posts filter to get inspiration for your new posts and stay up-to-date with B2B social media trends.
Here’s the thing I learned the hard way: manually tracking who’s posting about topics relevant to your product takes forever. lemlist’s Intent Signal Agents can detect LinkedIn engagement with your profile or company page (lemlist Features: Complete Breakdown [July 2026]) and trigger personalized outreach automatically when a signal fires. That turns passive post-browsing into an active pipeline motion.

LinkedIn hashtag search

The main advantage of the LinkedIn hashtag is increasing the visibility of its users. It makes posts accessible to everyone who searches or follows the specific hashtag.
Let’s imagine you’re a freelance copywriter, offering blogging services to SaaS companies.
One of the ways to look for your prospects is to search for hashtags they might use. Simply enter your hashtag, e.g. #SaaS, in the search bar to access content on the same topic.
Insert your hashtag in the search box
From there, you can filter posts containing your hashtag even further with the filters mentioned in the section above.
To stay in the loop with interesting posts, you can follow all your favourite hashtags.
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You can use the Hashtag Search to find companies to work with and people to network with.

Boolean search on LinkedIn

If you want to minimize the additional tweaking of your results, try using Boolean search.
Here are a few options to construct your search:
  • Quoted searches: If you want to search for an exact phrase, enclose the phrase in quotation marks. Try to avoid curly marks and words such as “by”, “in”, or “with”.
Enclose the phrase in quotation marks in the search bar
  • Parenthetical searches: To do a complex search, you can combine terms using parentheses.
Use parentheses in the search bar
  • NOT searches: To exclude a term from your search results, type “NOT” before the term.
Type NOT before the term in the search box
  • AND searches: To see results from all search terms, type “AND” between terms.
Type AND between terms
  • OR searches: Type “OR” between words to receive the results from either one term or the other.
Type OR between words in the search bar
Pro tip → Keep in mind this prioritization order: 1. Quotes [“”] 2. Brackets [()] 3. NOT 4. AND 5. OR
If you use Sales Navigator, you can use Boolean searches in the “Company” and “Title” fields as well.
Boolean is powerful but finicky. One misplaced operator and your results go sideways. If you’d rather skip the syntax entirely, lemAgent’s AI Search feature lets you type in natural language queries to surface leads (Lemlist Review 2026: Features, Pros & Cons, Alternatives) (Lemlist Review 2026: Features, Pros & Cons, Alternatives) from the lemlist lead database. Instead of writing ("VP of Sales" OR "Head of Sales") AND "SaaS" NOT "Consulting", you just type what you’re looking for in plain English. It’s a workflow shortcut, especially if you’re not fluent in Boolean logic.

LinkedIn’s native audience targeting tools (Ads & Page posts)

This guide focuses on organic search and prospecting, but it’s worth knowing that LinkedIn also has built-in audience targeting through two other channels:
LinkedIn Ads targeting. If you’re running paid campaigns, LinkedIn’s Ads targeting options let you target by location, company attributes, job experience, education, demographics, and interests. You can also build Matched Audiences from your own data (website visitors, email lists, CRM contacts) and use Predictive Audiences that expand your reach based on conversion patterns.
Targeted LinkedIn Page posts. If you manage a Company Page, LinkedIn lets you create targeted posts that only show to followers matching specific criteria: organization size, industry, function, seniority, geography, and language. It’s free and useful for ABM-style content distribution.
Both of these are worth exploring if you’re running brand or demand-gen campaigns alongside your outbound motion. But they’re advertising tools, not prospecting tools. They help you reach audiences at the impression level. For building named contact lists with verified emails, enriched data, and multichannel sequences, you need a prospecting workflow, which is what the rest of this guide (and lemlist) is built for.

Final thoughts

LinkedIn’s search is more capable than most people realize. Between people filters, Boolean operators, group mining, and post tracking, you can build a solid prospecting workflow with just a free account and some patience.
But “solid” has limits. Free search caps results. Filters are basic. You can’t export. You can’t enrich. And you definitely can’t launch a multichannel campaign from inside LinkedIn.
That’s where lemlist closes the gap. A 600M+ Lead Database with filters LinkedIn doesn’t offer (tech stack, funding, hiring trends, website visitors). Waterfall enrichment that pulls verified emails and phone numbers from 14+ providers. Intent Signals that surface buying moments in real time. And lemAgent, which lets you search for leads using plain language instead of Boolean operators.
We’ve used every method in this guide ourselves. The ones that scaled were the ones we plugged into lemlist.
Start a 14-day free trial, no credit card required, cancel anytime.
IvonaIvona Mikulčić
Product Marketing Manager
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