image via socialbiznow.com
Yesterday I received a briefing on LinkedIn advertising opportunities. Placing ad buys isn’t one of my main roles, but I always stay current on issues my clients might need, and all of them use LinkedIn in some way.
There have been some changes lately in the LinkedIn experience. Last month LinkedIn replaced its LinkedIn Today reader with one from Pulse, a mobile news reading app it acquired earlier this year. It’s a move to make LinkedIn “stickier” and offer more dynamic content. And as I learned, it’s also an advertising opportunity.
One of the LinkedIn advertising options is the ability to insert a sponsored message into a member’s Pulse. As you can see below from my feed, it is labeled but otherwise identical to something shared by your contacts. These are targeted by your background and your activity on LinkedIn. I did have a couple of crises today, so amazing targeting LinkedIn!
According to the presentation today, LinkedIn now has 259 million members, and presumably a lot of background and behavioral on each one. Another interesting and intimate way to reach them is through a sponsored InMail, a commercial message which arrives in your Inbox. My salesperson said these InMails are only sent once in a 60 day period so they don’t get overused and incur member backlash.
There are also various types of display ad options, including one described as self serve PPC. Here’s a link if you’d like to review the options in more detail yourself.
As part of client content marketing campaigns, LinkedIn groups are almost always a good place to promote thought leadership content. There is a group for every niche. As long as the content is high quality and relevant, this type of promotion and the comment threads it can create are a positive for the group managers as well.
Many companies will no doubt be interested in going beyond that kind of “earned” promotion to paid opportunities. You will need to bring a healthy marketing budget – I was told the minimum quarterly spend with LinkedIn is $25,000. But for larger B2B companies looking for this kind of targeting, these advertising options could be compelling.