LinkedIn Expands Marketing Capabilities

Drew Williams | @DrewWillyums Last year, a LinkedIn document leaked details of the company’s plans to turn their B2B marketing into a billion dollar business. Last week, one of the first major steps in those plans was finally announced.

The “LinkedIn Lead Accelerator” is the main attraction in the rollout, and is being branded by LinkedIn as completing a “full-funnel” with their current marketing platforms. Together with Onsite Displays, Network Displays, Sponsored Updates, and Sponsored InMail, the Lead Accelerator will help generate leads for your company by getting the right content to the right people. But how does it do that?

Onsite Displays, Sponsored Updates, and Sponsored InMail aren’t new to anyone familiar with advertising on LinkedIn, and are essentially self-explanatory in their names. The Network Display, however, is just as new as the Lead Accelerator. It “gives brands the opportunity to engage professional audiences with display advertising both on LinkedIn and off-platform across thousands of publisher sites on the web,” according to LinkedIn. In layman's terms, the Network Display, if bought through LinkedIn, will give your company or business a chance to advertise on websites and outlets other than LinkedIn itself, by using LinkedIn. A little confusing, but pretty cool nonetheless.

The Lead Accelerator seems to be less about advertising in nature and more about finding out who likes your business, or finding leads, and who your target audience should be. It leverages information from users’ LinkedIn accounts to let your business know who has been visiting their website, while still keeping the user anonymous. For example, if I were logged in to LinkedIn and visited Joe’s Bait Shop’s website and Joe was using the Lead Accelerator, he wouldn’t know that Drew Williams visited his website, but he would know that a 26-year-old Social Media Specialist from Denver, Colorado is thinking about going fishing. This information is then used together with the other four components of the “full-funnel” approach to give your business the best chance to get your best content to the people who would more likely be interested in your product. And with LinkedIn’s 347 million registered users, this seems like a good start to get the company to their billion dollar goal.