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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Sprinklr Marketing
Score 7.2 out of 10
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Sprinklr Marketing is a unified marketing and advertising platform that brings together planning, publishing and reporting for campaigns across 30+ channels, with workflow automation, integrated collaboration, unified reporting and AI-powered campaign optimization. Supports end-to-end content planning, production and distribution on a single platform for lower content production costs and faster go-to-market. Content planning and scheduling…
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.
Sprinklr is well suited for several teams working together to all use one tool. It's helpful for brands running several paid initiatives on several different platforms for monitoring or turning ads on and off quickly if a PR issue arises. You can have ads set up for timely/seasonal scenarios to quickly take advantage of messaging that's relevant for geo-targeted locations. If you're looking for a very simplified quick step process, Sprinklr is too robust and costly for that.
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.
It can be overwhelming when you first start. There is so much functionality. Go to a formal training to see all of the things it can do and pick what you need. Once you learn it, it is a great tool, but it is a lot to learn!
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.
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.
We do not have the closest relationship with our Sprinklr representative. It would be nice for them to be more proactive like our other platform reps who are in constant communication when it comes to new products and launches within the platform. I usually sign up for webinars in order to learn about new products.
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.
We are using different platforms for different clients. It depends on how the client's budget and what they can invest in their reporting tool. Sprinklr is the most complex, biggest, and most customizable. We say if Brandwatch is LEGO Duplo, then Socialbakers is LEGO Classic and Sprinklr is LEGO Technic. I really love the Powerpoint export from reports from Socialbakers because it saves me a lot of time (one of their best selling points) & the integration of competitors and their metrics is very helpful. But their publishing tool does not work well. If we want to have the cheapest version, we implement a simple Google Data Studio dashboard.
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.
