LinkedIn Marketing Solutions is a recently (2015) expanded marketing platform for reaching audiences through the popular Linkedin work-oriented social network that includes modules like the Lead Accelerator (supporting segmentation features to improve conversion), Sponsored Updates, LinkedIn Onsite Display, LinkedIn Network Display, and Sponsored InMail. While still at its core a social marketing engine, Linkedin Marketing Solutions now presents a more comprehensive B2B advertising platform. The…
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ZoomInfo Operations
Score 7.6 out of 10
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ZoomInfo OperationsOS/RingLead is a comprehensive data quality management platform for sales and marketing operations teams to clean, enrich, and route their go-to-market data.
Although it offered great features, we didn't really see a lot of traffic or results from the ads we placed. Working in hospitality, we had to strategically time and place our ads around holiday seasons and it can be difficult to predict a marketing campaign. Depending on your market, LinkedIn may not be the best avenue to advertise with.
The application is one that I would highly recommend for your sales team as they are able to seek out information that they would not normally be able to obtain through something like Salesforce or other applications. ZoomInfo for sure is the leader in my opinion in this area and I love the releases and additional features that they are always releasing.
EverString allows us to build account lists based off in-depth firmographic or technographic data. It's far more accurate than trying to build these lists any other way.
EverString is fast. Where it might've previously taken us weeks to build lists of this quality, we now can build them in a matter of minutes (and have them ready to be published in a couple of hours).
The Campaign Manager is not good. It seems like the Campaign Manager (where you create and manage your self-serve ad campaigns) is buggy and doesn't have a good flow. Contrast with FB Ad Manager of the Google Adwords/Ads interface, which has a much more simple process to create and edits campaigns, ad groups, ads, keywords, audiences, budgets, etc. LinkedIn Campaign Manager seems to actively work against you trying to make changes to your campaigns.
LinkedIn Campaign Manager offers three options: sponsored content, InMail, and text ads. LinkedIn used to offer other ad services that you couldn't access unless you had a "managed ad account" run by LinkedIn Staff with a dedicated monthly ad spend. It seems most of those "hidden" features have disappeared, though you still have to contract with LinkedIn to offer dynamic ads. It would be better if LinkedIn empowered marketers to create the ads they want. (Perhaps with a dedicated acct. manager like how Google Ads works.)
This is silly, but it isn't easy to navigate to Campaign Manager. I have a bookmark for Campaign Manager because if you want to click there through LinkedIn, it takes 2 or 3 different screens to get to Campaign Manager. In my opinion, when you click the "Work" dropdown from the LinkedIn header (by your profile picture) you should have a link to Campaign Manager.
LinkedIn, in recent months, has made substantial changes to the Ads platform and Campaign Manager. Though these changes work to address some of the above issues, LinkedIn still has quite a ways to go before their platform is on par with their competition.
Would love to keep everstring as part of our tech stack in the future. if we ever have to move from everstring it will be due to budget not the solution itself.
in terms of promoted content reporting and usability, the platform is not as flexible or easy to use compared to more established social platforms like Facebook. However, it does offer plug-ins to Google Data Studio which makes pulling and manipulating data easier. My main usability gripe comes when looking at organic performance of a company page. There isn't an easy way to export organic performance data.
The rating is simply because the tutorials can be made a lot more interactive. The tutorials are of such a level that it gets boring to a point. Also, another suggestion would be to incorporate pop-up help menus which would I believe help out immensely as well in case of improvement of usage for beginners.
So, everything what I just said previously adds up to the value of LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. Definitely recommending it to a friend. It has its things to improve but its nothing major or nothing to worry about. So I give a 9 because it still has that, some user interface glitches that can be improved but do not damage the experience that you have with it.
Have a plan on how you're going to evaluate. We had a two-month trial period, but a six-month average lead cycle time, making it impossible to evaluate on a purely new-business ROI basis within the trial. We applied the model to our prior data, which demonstrated how much time and effort was devoted to accounts that weren't going to close
If you want more precision in B2B targeting, then LinkedIn is without question the better alternative. However, as I established before, I've rarely seen LinkedIn campaigns be successful for anything other than brand awareness/thought leadership. And that's almost 100% what Twitter is for. Twitter campaigns almost always have a cheaper CPC AND CPM than LinkedIn and accomplish the same thing, so I would say go with Twitter. At times LinkedIn campaigns are just so you can tell someone at a higher level that you did precise targeting to the exact audience they wanted and check that box, because it's easier for them to understand how you'd do well on LinkedIn, and more difficult to tell that story on Twitter. But I honestly prefer Twitter and its platform for B2B awareness campaigns. Heretic, I know, but it's how I feel after several years of experience with both. Facebook is bottom of the barrel for B2B in my mind, so I'm not really going to discuss it. I would take LinkedIn over Facebook for many reasons, but Facebook is an option too, but more for SMB and just covering all bases, not as a primary choice for B2B marketing.
This has a similar issue to RingLead Capture, as it only returns the data that users themselves update, which is often outdated or incorrect. However, RingLead Route does allow lead assignment and tracking in more ways than LinkedIn Sales Navigator does, which is helpful in visibility of what a full sales team is doing.
We have seen a marked increase in inbound agent calls since we began LinkedIn marketing.
LinkedIn marketing is an excellent way to put your content in front of people that are actually going to read it, this has led to a major increase in our content being consumed and acted on.
