LinkedIn made some big updates to its platform and services over the last few days.

On June 8th, Jim Habig who is Vice President of Marketing at LinkedIn Marketing Solutions published a post where he highlighted that:

“81% of senior B2B marketers globally believe B2B brands are increasingly producing creative campaigns that rival consumer brands”.*

As LinkedIn has become a major tool as part of the marketing mix for numerous companies, especially in what is affectionately still referred to as the B2B sector, it is important to understand what these changes may mean.

It is equally important to look at how one can take advantages of the changes and how you can align your company’s marketing activity to the upgrades we have seen

What are the changes

There were a number of changes and updates. In this post I am going to focus on 3 main areas.

• LinkedIn Business Manager
• B2B Edge
• CRM & API integration

LinkedIn Business Manager

So let’s start with Linkedin Business Manager. This is a top down dashboard and management view across all of your LinkedIn activity. It allows you to manage your team’s access, pages, ad campaigns etc.

Tests were conducted directly with brands like VMware and Xerox alongside large agency partners like GroupM and Merkle B2B and have now rolled out globally. The feedback also shaped its functionality. It is designed to be a one stop shop that not only does the above but provides access to everything from permissions, account privileges through to downloading invoices.

Having previously written about the blurring of lines within the B2B marketing community and campaigns adopting a far more creative approach, like their B2B counterparts, LinkedIn Business Manager is designed to minimize the administrative hassle that was normally associated with LinkedIn, to allow more focus on running far more engaging campaigns on the platform.

A much needed and forward looking change, expect this to grow and add more functionality as the fight for ad dollars heats up and LinkedIn looks to leverage its position as the go-to B2B marketing platform.

B2B Edge

As previously mentioned about the need for creativity and strong data, it becomes even more imperative from brands that sell across the enterprise marketplace as well as those organisations that are large enterprises. Large enterprises being classified as over $1 billion turnover and over 2000 employees as classified by G2.

With this in mind, LinkedIn’s B2B Edge has worked with brands such as HP, Oracle and have been working with a number of brands to offer a dedicated B2B solution via a consultancy approach. B2B Edge in its own words, is a dedicated marketing and brand building advice based on academic research and first-party data.

The consultancy will offer a performance branding service to organisations. Peter Weinberg, Head of Development at The B2B Institute @ LinkedIn posted more about the service in a recent post – here

One area that is worth highlighting again and mentioned by the c Often forgotten by marketers, the findings from The B2B institute and Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, Institute of Marketing Sciences found that:

“95% of B2B buyers are not actively in-market at any given time”.

According to B2B Edge, these “future buyers” are the source of future cash flows, which is how businesses are valued in financial markets. The Performance marketing offered by the consultancy, can help convert the 5% of buyers who are in-market today. 

Like many organisations that start honing their offering, B2B Edge are and exciting addition to other strategy led specialist consultancies (like Digital Clarity), that don’t conform to the norms of traditional B2B measurement and are always looking to go further with data, insight and good old fashioned business marketing know-how.

CRM & API integration

Last and by no way means least, are the announcement by LinkedIn on CRM and API integration. LinkedIn recently announced an API with the Gong Reality Platform, where users can gain access to the full wealth of LinkedIn Sales Navigator information on any sales contact.

The CRM data validation feature will integrate LinkedIn data and CRM platforms. More information can be found at the CRM integration section on LinkedIn.

Moving forward

These updates and changes by LinkedIn show a company maturing to address the needs of the wider business market and offer tools that will help it stay relevant to this increasingly complex landscape. 

With Web3 and Ai looking to integrate itself into everything, the changes made by LinkedIn show a company ready not only adapt to but lead change. 

* LinkedIn commissioned YouGov to survey 1,600 senior B2B marketing decision makers in the US, UK, France, Germany, Netherlands, Italy, Spain, UAE, KSA, Brazil, Australia, India and Singapore during April 28 to May 25, 2022. The research was conducted online.

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