Tag: LinkedIn

How Marketo Ad Bridge Enables To Target The Right Audience

Marketo Ad Bridge enables you to target the right audience with personalized marketing content across advertising platforms including Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other widely visited sites. By specifically targeting the right demographic with personalized content that’s based on their interests, businesses can more effectively reach prospects and get better results out of their marketing expenditure.

How does it work?

Ad Bridge leverages Marketo’s behavioral database to show relevant content by analyzing how existing and potential customers interact with your business via email, your website, and social media channels. Personalized ads based on those interactions are then displayed on Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other channels.

Existing as well as new prospects who click on your ad will be taken directly to your business’s website or Facebook page. Ad Bridge allows you to stay in touch with your target market with promotions, useful content, and other information. Focusing on targeted users (rather than on indiscriminately widespread ad placements) helps place ads and useful content in front of those who are more likely to respond to them.

Let’s delve a bit deeper

LinkedIn’s partnership with Marketo Ad Bridge helps businesses take lead nurturing to the next level by leveraging the vast amount of information that LinkedIn has on its users via their interactions with connections. For B2B campaigns, Ad Bridge makes it easy to find new users looking for exactly what your business offers, while respecting the privacy of LinkedIn users.

Marketo’s Ad Bridge partnership with Facebook now offers Lead Ads that make it easy for prospects to interact with a business page in Facebook. For example, clicking such an ad in the mobile version of a company’s Facebook page can bring up a form that is automatically populated with data from the user’s phone (which the user can edit for privacy). This allows the user to easily get in touch with the business for more information or offers. This data is then viewable on the business’s Marketo instance, and can be extremely useful for its lead nurturing program and bring new prospects into the sales funnel.

It’s easy to see how Ad Bridge offers businesses unprecedented ease and targeting across major social media and professional networking sites. Smarter, more focused ad spending provides greater ROI to businesses using the system. Instead of scattershot ad placements that usually do not produce great results, Ad Bridge provides marketers with the tools to focus on prospects that are more likely to become customers.

Stay tuned to the Position²blog for more updates.

November 24, 2015
LinkedIn Makes A Move | Introducing The New Campaign Manager Tool

Compared to other social media channels, marketing on LinkedIn has never been easy. While running campaigns or even reporting data Facebook and Twitter have provided a greater degree of flexibility and granularity. LinkedIn marketers have been looking for more options to efficiently reach targets on the platform. Remarketing would help. So would custom lists, conversion tracking, goal based pricing, and a better interface. Enter the new Campaign Manager tool. LinkedIn still has some issues to work out, but marketers can heave a sigh of relief. Here’s what caught our attention in the new launch:

Improved Account Overview

LinkedIn has overhauled the entire interface structure. Marketers can now view accounts in one location. Reports also follow suit. One click on each account yields a view of all the basic metrics for that particular account.

Name Your Ads

To name ads, the old interface defaulted with the headline. With the new tool users have the option to name their ads, a big plus when you’re running different ads with the same headline.

Campaign Search

The previous LinkedIn interface showed page after page of campaign names, making it confusing and difficult to locate that one campaign. The new Campaign Manager introduces a search tool where all your campaigns are contained in an ongoing list that’s fast and easy to navigate. This feature comes with a handy toggle allowing users to view performance metrics like impressions, clicks, CTR, Engagements, CPC, CPM, etc. at the campaign level, all while doing away with the annoying ‘loading’ symbol. It’s both faster and hassle free.

Campaign Dashboard

LinkedIn has really improved the old dashboard by better organizing the tabs and reducing the page load time. The dashboard now looks concise with the much needed toggle option between Performance, Ads, Audience and Bids & Budgets tabs.

The Audience tab is a major improvement. Users can now select the Targeting criteria and then select Categories to add deeper layers to their targeting. On the weak side, the ‘Estimated Targeting Audience’ head shows only a range of the targeted audience rather than the exact number of people.

Ad Scheduling

The Ad Scheduling feature in the new Campaign Manager, accessed through the main dashboard, is easily navigable. Simply go to the Bids & Budget tab in the Campaign Dashboard and select the start date (Start Immediately or Schedule Start option).

Audience Insights

Audience Insights is a remarkable feature in the new Campaign Manager tool. You’ll be able to view the Demographic Categories of the LinkedIn members interacting with your ads. The data is available at the Account, Campaign and Creative level, making it more insightful and actionable.

Improved Ad Testing

Set up accounts for Ad rotation. With this feature you can run multiple versions of the same ad and measure performance.

Exporting Data To CSV

This new version will allow you to export data in CSV format which will lead to greater flexibility and more insightful reporting.

Is the new campaign manager tool better? Use the ‘Comments’ section below and share your opinion.

August 29, 2015

How To Write A Killer Ad Copy and much more…| Best of the Week

This week’s hot news, events and videos from the online marketing and social media world.

How to Improve your Digital Marketing ROI Using Big Data

From the Position² Blog This Week:

How to Write a Killer Ad Copy That Actually Sells
Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is an effective way to jumpstart sales online. You can achieve hitherto unheard levels of targeting via this avenue with a perfect ad copy. Learn how to write an ad copy that rakes in profits in spades.

Best of the Week Video
Watch this video anchored by Tim Schmoyer that elucidates how to make your B2B marketing videos perform their best.

White Paper: Increase Visibility for Your Content by 4x

Today’s traditional SEO is inadequate: Ignite your search results by accelerating visibility in more places than ever before.Download this White Paper and learn:

SEO, why the way we know it is not enough
Introducing and implementing Enterprise Visibility Accelerator (EVA)
Using multi-channel tracking tools for effective monitoring
How EVA benefits businesses.

Download the complimentary EVA White Paper now

Know more about Enterprise Visibilty Accelerator(EVA)

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November 14, 2014

Social Media for Enterprise [Infographic]

Today if your brand is not present on social networking sites you are unwittingly losing out to your competition. Companies around the world are investing heavily in social media marketing in order to ensure favorable customer engagement. Here’s a quick primer of what the social media world looks like in terms of enterprise participation. This might just spur you to take the plunge and actively incorporate an integrated social media strategy backed by real-time analytics, to power your digital marketing campaigns.

October 28, 2014

ROI of constant innovation, online B2B conversations and much more…| Best of the Week

This week’s hot news, events and videos from the online marketing and social media world.

From the Position² Blog This Week:

The ROI of Constant Innovation
Businesses need to be innovative to ensure their survival and growth in the current market. However, innovation requires investment of resources. What is the cost of innovation on a company? Read this blog to know what you should consider before innovating and more…

Position² is a silver sponsor at ClickZ Live! Find us at booth #3

Best of the Week Video
Watch Moz’s Rand Fishkin as he talks about the misconception in the amount of time content marketing takes to start giving returns.

White Paper: Increase Visibility for Your Content by 4x

Today’s traditional SEO is inadequate: Ignite your search results by accelerating visibility in more places than ever before.Download this White Paper and learn:

SEO, why the way we know it is not enough
Introducing and implementing Enterprise Visibility Accelerator (EVA)
Using multi-channel tracking tools for effective monitoring
How EVA benefits businesses.

Download the complimentary EVA White Paper now

If you are reading this blog post via a RSS reader, please click here to subscribe.

August 8, 2014

LinkedIn to Launch New Sales Tool

Arguably one of the most reputed professional networking sites, LinkedIn, is aiming to befriend sales executives.

LinkedIn is going to start offering a new tool this week, Sales Navigator, which it says will make the lives of sales people easier and happier.

Costing $1200 per year, Sales Navigator allows sales people to efficiently look up potential customers who would be more inclined to meet due to shared personal connections. LinkedIn has tested this tool with companies like PayPal and Autodesk and claims to have gained good results.

LinkedIn says that sales people can turn out better results and be more productive since Sales Navigator lets them contact prospects through known people. Sales Navigator allows you to import existing contacts from Salesforce.com or Microsoft Dynamics. Using this imported data, LinkedIn can bring up more information about those contacts. With the ability to draw more information about contacts imported from other tools like Salesforce, sales people can improve their productivity for prospects arising from platforms other than LinkedIn also

LinkedIn can also scan contacts’ social data for additional insights that will tell you if people are warm prospects or cold calls. Insight into contacts’ social behavior can enrich and make sales executives’ approach more relevant when contacting prospects.

LinkedIn will also allow whole companies to pool their sales executives’ connections. This can help sales people to connect with a prospect through another sales person’s connections even if they don’t know the prospect personally.

However, LinkedIn is also conscious of the effect this feature can have on users. To prevent people from being deluged by mails from sales people, LinkedIn is restricting Sales Navigator users to only 25 targeted InMails every month.

Check out these screenshots of the Sales Navigator tool:

Image source: Mashable

Do you think LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator will benefit sales executives? And, will it be accepted well by users?

August 1, 2014
LinkedIn acquires Bizo and Launches Direct Sponsored Content

LinkedIn & Bizo

LinkedIn has acquired B2B ad tech company Bizo in a deal costing approximately $175 million.

This acquisition comes after Facebook bought LiveRail and Twitter purchased TapCommerce recently. These moves by social networks are aimed at bolstering their ad reach beyond the boundaries of their websites.

Bizo enables B2B marketers to post ads to professional target audiences across the web. Bizo is integrated with marketing automation platforms and also has a database that will help marketers target by company, industry and functional area parameters. Bizo helps marketers nurture prospects at every stage of the buying funnel through targeted content and supports precise and measurable multi-channel marketing programs.

Bizo’s targeting capabilities coupled with LinkedIn’s large professional network can help B2B marketers improve performance of multi-channel campaigns.

LinkedIn Direct Sponsored Content (DSC)

LinkedIn’s acquisition of Bizo was closely followed by the launch of a new feature, Direct Sponsored Content (DSC), which will help marketers reach out to specific audiences with more personalized content.

DSC is an extension of LinkedIn’s Sponsored Updates. DSC enables marketers to publish sponsored content to their LinkedIn homepage feed without posting it on the Company Page. DSC can be viewed by page administrators on the Company Page but it will show only for those users who fit the target criteria specified for the campaign. The launch of DSC will allow marketers to target and engage with the right members of the target audience using more personalized content.

Earlier, with Sponsored Updates, marketers had to post content to their Company Page. If they wanted to test an ad, they had to repeatedly post ads on the Company Page to measure the audience’s reaction. It was very likely that users would get irked by this. Marketers collected a mix of organic and paid results and could not measure the performance of posts accurately.

DSC now allows marketers to optimize content according to the preferences of specific consumers and conduct A/B tests across audience segments.

Will LinkedIn’s acquisition of Bizo achieve the desired results? Can Direct Sponsored Content (DSC) contribute to LinkedIn targeting and personalization capabilities?

Image Source: Bizo

July 25, 2014
LinkedIn Expands its Ad Network across the Web

Following in the footsteps of Twitter and Facebook, LinkedIn is testing advertising outside its platform.

LinkedIn has kicked off a pilot project that lets marketers to post ads over the web using its data repository. The participants of this pilot program include GroupM’s programmatic focused agency Xaxis and marketing technology and data specialist company Dstillery.

LinkedIn is also opening up its own ad inventory through programmatic channels. Marketers can now target specific audience groups on LinkedIn through a ‘private exchange’.

LinkedIn’s entry into the programmatic ad buying market is new and will take some time to strengthen its hold in the domain.

The digital marketing industry is leaning heavily towards programmatic buying lately. Being a social platform better suited for business professionals, if launched as a full time capability, LinkedIn’s expanding ad network can prove to be a blessing for marketers, B2B in particular. When targeting business professionals, LinkedIn is a top platform and if this pilot project is launched, targeting will become more precise and effective.

Will this move help LinkedIn gain reputation as a top targeting platform and lead to increased revenues?

June 30, 2014
LinkedIn Powers up Search and Google Launches Premium Programmatic Video Marketplace

LinkedIn

LinkedIn’s burgeoning user base – more than 300 million registered users – has made its search methodology insufficient. LinkedIn’s current search feature that allowed people to search for jobs, groups and other criteria was not catering to its user base.

As a solution, a new search feature, Galene, was developed by LinkedIn.

With Galene’s introduction, search will be twice as fast. New aspects with the updated search structure include instant results and suggestions that offer clues when users type in. For example, if you type ‘C++’, LinkedIn will ask you if you are looking for jobs in C++ programming.

This feature will be rolled out to all users over the next few months.

Google

Google is unveiling its programmatic video marketplace, Google Partner Select, with a group of select partners, whose names are yet to be revealed.

Google Partner Select will connect premium publishers and brands through direct buying. According to Neal Mohan, Google’s VP of display and video advertising products, “This new premium programmatic marketplace will connect a select set of publishers investing in top-quality video with the brands that want to buy against it.”

Neal also said that this venture will help brands and publishers in leveraging programmatic video buying. Brands want to take advantage of premium video content but are having trouble finding high quality videos. On the other hand, publishers want to exercise control over programmatic.

Google Partner Select will build a bridge over these troubled waters, meeting the needs of both brands and publishers by bringing together “the best of brand with the best of programmatic.”

What do these changes mean for marketers?

Better and quicker LinkedIn search can mean easier content searches for users, especially with the recent boost for LinkedIn Influencers. If content is easy to find, the reader will engage more, which can lead to better conversion rates. This will also help you expand your reach by bringing relevant groups and forums closer to you.

Google Partner Select will close the gap between brands and publishers in programmatic video buying. Brands can get access to high quality videos while publishers will be getting some control over the process.

June 6, 2014
Twitter Offers Mobile Ads Beyond its Site and LinkedIn Shuts Polling in Groups
Twitter’s Mobile App Install and Engagement Ads

Post its acquisition of MoPub in 2013, Twitter is expanding its reach by selling ads in mobile apps beyond Twitter. According to Twitter’s blog, “For marketers, this means a rich, native ad unit that combines the best of Twitter Cards and Promoted Tweets. Users can easily install and engage with apps, directly from the Twitter timeline.”

Through MoPub exchange, you can purchase ads that power mobile app installs and engagement. These apps appear on Twitter as well as thousands of apps on MoPub’s network. Currently in private beta, these ads will be available for purchase in Twitter’s ad auction. You can apply other targeting parameters offered by Twitter for these ads.

You can also participate in real-time bidding to buy mobile app installs and engagement ads programmatically through MoPub within Twitter’s ad system. The ads will appear in the form of banners, interstitials, videos and also in native formats.

A few brands like Spotify, HotelTonight, Kabam, Deezer, SeatGeek, GREE and GetTaxi have already tested this feature in beta.

Mobile app installs and engagement ads will work on both, Android and iOS.

MoPub reaches more than 1 billion unique devices, which is a huge bonus for advertisers in terms of reach. With Twitter being a lead source of engagement, a wide reach can help brands in enriching user experience more.

LinkedIn Group Polling is Shutting Down

LinkedIn is closing the Polling feature in Groups. The announcement on its Help Center claims that this update is part of LinkedIn’s bid to build a better product suite.

As an alternative, brands can continue to engage with fans by:
- Posting questions to get the Group’s response
- Sharing an update or
- Participating in conversations directly on the LinkedIn homepage
Though this update may not interfere with brand engagement on LinkedIn Groups overtly, it does make a difference where brands will no longer be able to engage through an organized ‘questionnaire’ format that LinkedIn Polling offered.

Do let us know your opinion on these updates…

Image Source: Twitter
April 21, 2014