Life will soon be a little bit better for teams that rely on LinkedIn for B2B sales and marketing. LinkedIn is rolling out LinkedIn Business Manager, a tool that will make it much easier for companies to:
- Manage all of their LinkedIn assets in one place
- Assign permissions to team members and partners, and
- Share LinkedIn data intelligence
Some Highlights of LinkedIn Business Manager
Controlling Key Assets
The challenge: Without Business Manager, company pages and ad accounts are tied to individual users rather than the company. Because of this, employee turnover can cause situations where a former employee still controls a key asset. There are ways for companies to claw back control through an appeals process, but it can take weeks to prove who should own the asset and regain control. The solution: With Business Manager, company assets can be tied to a company profile, and assets can be assigned to team members or partners. Essentially, rather than individual accounts “owning” some of your company assets, the company retains ownership and instead assigns authorized users.Sharing Data
The challenge: Prior to Business Manager, most data existed at the individual account level, and those accounts acted like data silos. Keeping data separate made sense since LinkedIn accounts are owned by individuals who want to control their professional profiles. But as LinkedIn has developed into a more robust tool for B2B prospecting, those data silos created a big problem: Keeping data in sync between sales and marketing team members. One powerful way to target LinkedIn users is by using Matched Audiences. You upload a contact list and then LinkedIn uses that list to target LinkedIn users with matching profiles. Unfortunately, in the past, these Matching Audiences had to be uploaded for each user. There was no way to share a Matched Audience between accounts. As a result, sales teams were often working with old lists. The solution: With Business Manager, matched audiences can be treated as a company-owned asset, which allows them to be updated once and then pushed out to all of the users and ad accounts that need the updated data. A cumbersome process is now simple.Saving time
The challenge: The old way of managing LinkedIn assets forced social media managers to chase after a thousand loose shoe strings, trying desperately to keep data, goals and permissions aligned. Seriously — sales teams — you probably owe your social media manager a drink. The solution: This is now streamlined. Social media managers are now free to actually drive results through creativity and analysis rather than spend inordinate effort welding the B2B machine back together.Current Limitations
LinkedIn Business Manager is a huge advance for B2B marketers, but it still has some limitations:- Limited intent data: While you can manually investigate what prospects are posting, sharing and liking on LinkedIn, you can’t really scale that process to find insights for all of your accounts.
- Lack of buyer stage intelligence: Understanding company firmographics, job titles, and LinkedIn Group memberships can help you develop a TAM, but it doesn’t tell you much about which accounts are actually in-market to buy the solution you have to offer — or how close they might be to making a purchase decision.
- Does not automatically collect data from other platforms: The platform lacks an efficient mechanism to obtain data from other platforms. Other than B2B sellers and HR recruiters, most people don’t spend much time each day in LinkedIn. Instead, most of their online activities happen on websites, Facebook, Google search, and apps. In terms of understanding buyer behavior, only using LinkedIn data is a bit like the parable of blindfolded people trying to identify an elephant by touch. If you only feel the trunk, you might think it’s like a snake. If you only feel the tail, you might think it’s like a rope. It helps to have a fuller picture.
Taking These Solutions to the Next Level
6sense is thrilled for anything that makes life easier for revenue teams. We’re big believers in the power of advertising to the LinkedIn audience. Here are three ways we take LinkedIn to the next level:Intent Data
We help you spot when your target customers are researching the B2B solutions you offer, whether they’re doing the research on third-party sites, through search engines, or anonymously on your own website. By tracking intent, we can determine which of your target accounts are in-market for your solution. By narrowing your marketing and sales outreach to this band of potential customers, you can:- Close more deals
- Achieve higher deal values
- Shorten your sales cycles
More Robust Customer Profiles and Targeting
6sense uses an embedded CDP to gather data from a wide variety of sources and consolidate that data into a unified customer record that is updated in real-time. This means that all of the intel gathered — by your website, third-party sites, chat bots, apps, your CRM, email, ad campaigns, etc. — all exists in one place. The unified, updated data allows you to create dynamic audience segments that power personalized campaigns. From a marketing perspective, what’s incredibly powerful is that this data can be pushed directly into LinkedIn and other platforms — allowing you to continually update Matched Audience lists in order to hit precisely the people who are most likely to buy — and to hit audiences with messages that align with their interests. The result: Less money wasted on accounts that were never going to buy, and higher conversion rates among the accounts that are truly interested.Focused Efforts
6sense uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyze customer intent data and recognize:- Buying Stages. When you understand which buying stage an account is in based on its intent data patterns, you can deliver messages that are more helpful and impactful.
- Deal Value. Some of the accounts in your pipeline will exhibit the same behavior patterns as deals you have closed in the past. Our AI looks at the firmographics, technographics, and online behavior of accounts in your pipeline, and uses that info to forecast the potential deal value of opportunities. This helps you forecast pipeline and also prioritize outreach.
- The Right Time for Outreach: When an account matches your ideal customer fit and has buying team personas engaged in significant research, we flag these as 6sense Qualified Accounts (6QAs). These are accounts that represent your best opportunity to close a deal.
Turn Strategy into Action
Check out our new ebook, Ways to Create Effective, Perfectly-Timed Linkedin Ad Campaigns, to get step-by-step guides for:- Lead generation campaigns
- Retargeting
- Pipeline acceleration
- Event registration
- Outbound sales enablement
