LinkedIn’s new B2B features aim to give marketers an edge on measurement, brand fit and engagement as a recession looms.
LinkedIn today announced the launch of a suite of new product offerings designed to help businesses get more out of their business-to-business marketing efforts on the platform.
It’s part of the company’s broader strategy to engage B2B brands (and drive continued ad spending) amid growing economic uncertainty.
Announced at the company’s inaugural B2B marketing summit, B2Believe, the new offerings include new measurement capabilities and a handful of new ad formats aimed at helping improve campaign measurement. They include the following:
1. Income attribution report: This new measurement platform provides a more granular view of how your campaigns are impacting revenue. It aims to help marketers understand the tangible business impacts of their initiatives in plain language.
The development will be particularly welcome for marketers who need to communicate investment returns in easy-to-understand language to their C-suite counterparts and other business stakeholders. “The first and foremost rule for every CMO is to speak the language of business relevance,” says Margaret Franco, chief marketing officer at B2B financial software company Finastra. “It’s important to benchmark against metrics like share of voice and reach, but CMOs need to clearly articulate the impact on financial results—for example, if you spend one dollar on marketing, you get back three dollars in revenue, to be heard because it’s so highly rated. In marketing, it’s all about speaking to your stakeholders in their language, and that applies to both your executive team and customers.”
2. Brand Safety Center: This new platform, created in partnership with media verification and measurement company DoubleVerify, aims to provide B2B marketers with valuable information about where they can run ads and where they are running, to keep a pulse on suitability and brand safety. The Brand Safety Hub includes a list of third-party publishers that can help scale B2B campaigns. Within the hub, users can also prioritize specific types of content that align with their brand and use a series of custom controls to find out where their impressions are sent to LinkedIn’s audience network.
3. New ad formats: LinkedIn is rolling out a slew of new media formats, including:
• Click-to-message ads: With the new click-to-message ads, a potential customer can simply click on the ad they see to start a conversation with the brand. For the brand, this type of ad puts the customer first and allows marketers to customize their engagement strategies.
• Conversation starter ads: These ads prioritize paid messages to users so that only the messages most relevant to them appear. This is intended to help ensure that B2B brands don’t waste ad spend and connect with the right prospects.
• Employee Promoted Posts: LinkedIn said today that it will soon give business marketers permission to promote individual employee posts from their company page. The tool aims to help B2B brands generate more engagement and, according to the tech company, help “humanize” brands.
4. Check for updates: In an effort to make LinkedIn brand articles and newsletters more searchable on the web, LinkedIn will roll out search engine optimization (SEO) titles, descriptions and tags for this type of content. The company says it’s also working to improve the platform’s product search functionality, which could help B2B brands connect with potential buyers.
LinkedIn says there’s a real appetite for new B2B marketing capabilities like these, given a recent study the company today released the results of a survey of nearly 3,000 marketing executives around the world. Key findings include that more than two-thirds (67%) of B2B marketers plan to maintain or increase spending on branding efforts over the next six months.
Marketing is an especially urgent approach for B2B companies amid growing economic uncertainty, the study also suggests. About 78% of B2B marketing leaders believe that companies that maintain or increase their marketing spend during periods of uncertainty recover faster.
However, they are concerned about the economic forecast: More than three-quarters (77%) of CMOs said they feel pressured to demonstrate more near-term investment returns, and 30% indicated they are concerned that uncertainty force them to operate more. reactively
“Right now, marketers are facing an uphill climb,” says Abhishek Shrivastava, vice president of product at LinkedIn. “They need to continue to engage with buyers who aren’t necessarily in the market to make a purchase right now, while demonstrating to their CEO the revenue impact their marketing campaigns are generating.”
LinkedIn is looking at the opportunity and hopes to position itself as an attractive partner for B2B brands during this period of upheaval. It can be a tall order: According to the platform’s own research, only one in four CMOs and CFOs will rely on third parties, including marketing and technology partners, to support their efforts in the next six months.
“There’s a lot of uncertainty right now, but we’re focused on helping marketers face the moment with confidence by announcing new tools…that will allow them to continue to authentically reach their audiences and measure and map their work with business impact”.
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