LinkedIn made several notable improvements to the platform in 2023, strengthening its position with B2B advertisers.
This article reviews LinkedIn’s top 2023 releases and their importance, and makes suggestions for improvements that could make B2B marketers even more fans.
B2B advertising in 2023: Google vs. LinkedIn
Google hasn’t had a great year from a B2B perspective. Between the revelations of antitrust lawsuits about auction games, YouTube headlines about fraudulent/spam placements, and a general lack of B2B-focused innovation, Google sentiment in the B2B industry is as low as I’ve seen it.
While most of my clients still spend more on Google than anywhere else, the B2B budget door opened a crack. As I look back to 2023, LinkedIn has positioned itself for some gains.
In terms of trends, LinkedIn is now a more accepted platform in B2B ad portfolios, and companies are becoming more sophisticated about how they use it.
We’re getting fewer requests about simply reaching cold audiences with demo ads (which never worked) and more about using LinkedIn to nurture audiences throughout the funnel.
Because of LinkedIn’s naturally high-quality B2B audience, new ad or measurement features are always welcome – we tend to try out everything we can get our hands on to see how it works.
LinkedIn Updates 2023: The Hits
Thought leadership ads
LinkedIn’s new thought leadership ads allow companies to promote posts from their people, which is potentially effective for founder-led organizations and companies with a strong employee advocacy strategy.
Thought leadership ads provide a way for businesses to extend their thought leadership/brand reach. Because thought leadership comes from the account of a real human, not an organization, it’s naturally more engaging and less robotic than company ads.
That said, this is almost purely a top-of-the-funnel move, which isn’t a bad thing. Do not target direct contacts; connect with other humans. Recognize their professional challenges and focus on the ways you and your product can help.
Predictive audiences
Of all the LinkedIn releases in 2023, I’m most excited about accessing predictive audiences. It uses AI to help find audiences for your most valuable users. This allows advertisers to say to LinkedIn, “Here are our most valuable people; use your business attribute data to find more of them.”
You can base these lists on conversion events, contact lists or lead generation forms; the minimum number of users for a seed list is 300.
Predictive audiences can fill a targeting gap. Many companies have nuanced profiles of ideal customers and/or specific roles that are not available for targeting.
While I’m skeptical of Google’s targeting equivalent (Performance Max), LinkedIn has a better chance of building meaningful audiences because:
Google is known for its difficulty in matching business emails. LinkedIn’s business data is much richer.
When testing predictive audiences, keep in mind that success depends heavily on your CRM data. Make sure you have at least some basic audience segments that you can define and ask LinkedIn to emulate.
Income attribution reports
B2B companies can now look at closed earned opportunities that generate revenue and study how people involved in the deal viewed and/or engaged with the company’s LinkedIn ads.
This is a bit of a chicken egg (which came first: interest or commitment?). Still, it’s directional information to help you track the impact of the platform and see how LinkedIn can influence offers.
LinkedIn Ad Library
This is a brand new version as of November: a LinkedIn Ad Library which allows you to search for competitor ads based on keywords or company names.
It also goes beyond sponsored content ads; one of my team members spotted some examples of conversation ads while researching a competing client.
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Company segmentation
LinkedIn added the ability to expand business matching lists earlier this year. This provides insight into how many employees within a company have engaged with your content and divides them into low and high intent groups.
Basically, advertisers can prioritize and segment a list of target accounts by engagement level based on intelligence from paid, organic and website signals.
The ability to see which accounts are attractive and which are not offers a great opportunity to refine bidding and targeting strategies.
Guidance for the interests of the services
This is similar to marketplace audiences – presumably companies would use this to target people who are actively engaged in topics aligned with their business solutions.
However, the categories of interest are quite limited at this time. I haven’t tried it yet because no category works for our customers. But in 2024, I’d love to see an expansion of the categories included.
My 2024 LinkedIn Ads Wish List
Schedule ads
It would be a game changer if LinkedIn allowed businesses to schedule ads to run during business hours.
LinkedIn works in UTC time (which is the current way of saying GMT), so from my US East Coast perspective, they technically start spending the next day’s budget the night before.
This means that smaller budgets can be exhausted early in the day and miss out on a large part of a target audience’s working day.
dynamic UTMs
This would be very helpful and seems like a long time to do.
As I write, you cannot make a tracking template for UTM on LinkedIn; you have to build them manually.
It’s simple, but it also gives off an air of stupidity that the platform needs to address.
Likes of followers
This is an idea I’m stealing from X (formerly Twitter), which used to have a similar focus on followers. As more influencers come to LinkedIn, it could be a way to find new pockets of relevant users.
looking ahead
My 2024 requests are all quite minor; the first two are suggestions for how LinkedIn can get out of its way. Overall, the outlook for the platform is pretty rosy from where I sit.
LinkedIn has some built-in advantages (the B2B-centric data and business mindset of its audiences being the biggest) over Google and Meta, which have made a lot of B2B inroads in their own right. These will not disappear in 2024.
If LinkedIn can continue to develop features that help us effectively engage their valuable audiences i measure the impact of these engagements, it could be a boon for B2B.
We’ll have more ways to reach our ideal users and some healthy competition that could push Google to become a better partner for its B2B advertisers.
Dig deeper: B2B Trends 2024: 6 Key Areas for Marketing Success
The views expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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