5 LinkedIn Insights to Drive Better Performance
If you are in sales, looking for a job or are in B2B marketing, can you imagine a world without LinkedIn?
Undoubtedly, there is no better channel to reach ambitious career-minded executives. Now with 900 million users worldwide and growing at a rate of three new subscribers per second, the social media network has built an impressive niche around reaching professional audiences.
In the place marketing space especially, the company is the top channel for reaching decision-makers in the Western world (and probably should be for reaching international talents too).
What’s most exciting about LinkedIn is that it continues to evolve and push the needle to help marketers more effectively reach their targets. In many cases, it has done so in ways that contrast other social channels, reinforcing its leadership position for B2B.
Below, we highlight 5 insights to maximize LinkedIn for investment promotion. Some present better options than others.
What are LinkedIn Predictive Audiences, and Should You Use Them?
As AI and machine learning get better, LinkedIn is unveiling new technologies to try to help their clientele reach the right audience. This improves the customer experience on the platform, whether we’re a buyer or seller. Enter the company’s predictive audience option, which takes your CRM data and attempts to find additional people that fit the criteria.
Predictive audiences replaced “lookalike” audiences, or the LinkedIn Audience Expansion as it was called. To be honest, as enticing as this option is given its so-called predictive element, it is hard to see how this is much different from lookalike audiences.
At a meeting with LinkedIn in Amsterdam, when pushed on the differences between the two, the main comment was that predictive audiences are typically informed from first-party data from a CRM, where “intent” can be more effectively measured.
But that was also quite similar with lookalike audiences, which typically performed terribly for investment promotion agencies. The niche nature of the sector made it hard for LinkedIn’s “generalist” algorithms to know the difference.
Proceed cautiously.
LinkedIn Connected TV is Here. Is it Worthwhile?
Want to reach professional audiences through their TVs? LinkedIn’s Connected TV Ads can help. By using LinkedIn’s data, you can target specific demographics with precision, ensuring your video ads find the right people.
This approach not only boosts brand awareness, but also drives conversions from other marketing efforts, making it a good match for B2B marketers that were experimenting with Connected TV before and struggled with targeting.
Now that LinkedIn has entered the picture with its niche data, this could accelerate B2B adoption of the awareness channel. Connected TV’s biggest benefit is in the awareness creation, which then boosts the performance of other campaigns. We wouldn’t use Connected TV as a single campaign, but in combination with other LinkedIn platforms, it is enticing.
What’s the Latest on Digital Lead Generation?
Many economic development agencies love LinkedIn’s Sponsored Message feature despite the relatively low quantity and quality of leads. It beats regular email almost every time. But those in Europe have not had this option for years due to GDPR restrictions, with some giving up on the lead generation technique altogether.
We can share that digital lead generation is still very much a viable option on LinkedIn and perhaps growing in acceptance over largely ineffective lead capture strategies from your website.
Using lead forms via LinkedIn’s Sponsored Content feed – either traditional formats or via Document Ads – has produced tremendous results for our clients, with the quality of leads collected as high as 80%-90%. That far outpaces previous years where the 40%-60% range was acceptable.
Meeting rates from these leads are still low, but they beat any cold outreach by 2-3 times easily. If your organisation wants leads and is not using this, you are missing out. As always, just make sure you have a plan to act on the leads – it still surprises us how many lead generation campaigns are run without any follow-up plan in place.
Holiday Season: Should You Pause Campaigns During Summer & Winter?
If you are like most B2B advertisers, the holidays are a time of rest. CPCs typically go up due to consumer demand, engagement goes low because of all the extra noise and onward we go to the next season along with everyone else!
Except that the mass exodus of advertisers in your category means you might get more value out of your spending. How can that be? Relevancy Scores (this is what helps you win the auction with lower bids) reset every two weeks of inactivity, making it harder to win ad auctions with lower bids. Staying active can help you achieve more with less.
Summer offers lower cost per click (CPC) and cost per thousand (CPM) rates due to less B2B competition, while click-through rate (CTR) increases as users plan strategically for the season ahead. Also, cost per leads (CPL) fluctuate around these times, providing a cost-effective way to get more prospects for the same amount of money if you play the strategy correctly.
For example, LinkedIn shared data that the CPC historically runs low in December and it is 5.1% less in the U.S., 13.2% in the UK and 17.2% in the EU. Interestingly, CPL runs high during the same month, but falls the 30 days after.
One solution is to focus on running awareness campaigns in December, then follow those with lead form campaigns in January, where CPCs normalize, but CPL goes down significantly.
Keep in mind that LinkedIn is no doubt trying to avoid the large seasonal fluctuations to their bottom line, so take the advice with a grain of salt and make sure it fits your strategy. But if you have the ad dollars, we support the approach.
Coming Soon: Premium Company Pages
LinkedIn keeps on diversifying. Up next is a subscription for small and medium businesses for a Premium Company Page.
For $99/month, the plan will provide new tools to grow follower counts like custom testimonials, auto-invites to follow the page, enhanced visitor lists and AI to write content (because as SMEs, who has the time?).
This could be helpful for those new LinkedIn pages often launched with strategic initiatives falling under the umbrella of various organisations.
Need help maximizing your LinkedIn Presence?
C Studios is the marketing agency for regions and countries. We can help reach new audiences through strategic advertising campaigns, executive trainings for social media and evergreen content banks.
