LinkedIn Marketing Solutions vs. Oktopost

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.

Incentivized

Oktopost is great if you have several Social Media profiles you want to manage and want to schedule and post all your things in a simple interface. They have a great calendar view that shows everything that is coming up and you can easily move or change postings with a few clicks. It is also good for managing a single account. It has all the features I need for our single account markets, like campaigns, tracking, scheduling, etc. I think if you are trying to manage a very large number of social media profiles it might get a bit difficult. There are tools more suited for that than Oktopost that may be easier, but Oktopost would still work.

Incentivized

• Targeting - they have done a great job of allowing you speak to ideal audiences
• Support - dedicated customer service and account advising is always accessible and very responsive
• Curation of professional audiences - one of the biggest advantages to the platform is that its users are for the most part are professional

Incentivized

• Auto-poster feature that allows scheduling of posts to be made in relatively short time.
• Calendar view has a great UI with easy to use drag and drop and editing features.
• Message assets can be saved per campaign without having to re-draft them for repeated promotions.
• Good reporting via excel export and dashboard overview
• Great customer service and support! Including response rate and implementation of requested features

• 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.

Incentivized

• Sometimes there were bugs in the user experience, but they seemed to be quickly addressed.
• They didn't seem to have experience dealing with large-scale company use when integrating with Eloqua information. We had a lot of issues with false data or form submits showing up.

Incentivized

I give Oktopost a 9, as a 10 means NO improvement is needed, but all platforms must iterate and improve. Hands down Oktopost is the B2B marketing leader in the social and content marketing world. They are also very quick to work on things and make the experience better for users. I would say I was a very early adopter of Oktopost and have seen them grow into a very useful tool and also a great company! I am VERY excited to see what they will do next to make our B2B marketing jobs more efficient and results producing! Thanks for helping our business close 10 accounts from LinkedIn in the last year! And that is up from ZERO the year before NOT using Oktopost.

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

When I have sent in questions to support, I have received answers pretty quickly and they were helpful. However, I would like to see more information on the support page rather than having to contact them directly.

There is a lack of online training videos or documentation. They have a long list of FAQ's but I would prefer a quick YouTube video instead.

As I stated earlier, I would suggest doing a quick session with the Oktopost team in order to properly set up the account and make sure you are getting the full experience.

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.

Incentivized

The integration with SalesForce and Marketo was the number one reason we went with Oktopost. It wasn't until after I got inside and got my hands dirty that I saw how great Oktopost was. The analytics reporting is sensational. It allowed me to easily pull reports to organize for my marketing department.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Ability to quickly and comprehensively provide metrics on all activities to internal users and external clients helps inform and direct immediate and long term posting decisions.
• Ability to integrate with websites and marketing platforms allows for an understanding of user interest beyond the awareness arena and into the conversion arena.
• Ability to quickly post allows for immediate input during time sensitive social discussions.