One of the biggest challenges facing B2B businesses is how to reach out and make the vital contacts they need in order to grow their networks. Some organisations make the mistake of wasting a huge amount of time trawling sites like LinkedIn, in the desperate hope of sparking up a connection or some interest from their target clients. But surely, there must be a better, more efficient way.
New hope for B2B digital marketers now comes from LinkedIn itself, which has recently announced a brand new tool for targeting accounts. LinkedIn Account Targeting aims to provide brands and marketers with a new, more effective way to run account-based marketing campaigns using the platform.
Enabling great quality content to reach exactly the right people
As for how the new tool will work, it basically embraces the premise that great quality content will always be the most effective way to reach new audiences. However, it goes one step further and gives businesses the power to put their content in front of the perfect and most appropriate audiences.
The customer gives LinkedIn a list of accounts they’d ideally like to engage with on LinkedIn, by making use of its existing advertising product range. This list is cross-references with company pages in the LinkedIn network, of which there are around 8 million pages, and the results can be used to create a tailored account target segment.
Going one step further, LinkedIn Account Targeting gives businesses the opportunity to layer additional profile information such as job title, profile and seniority – to make sure that the amazing content that brands have put so much work in producing ends up in front of exactly the right people in the organisation. You can perfectly tailor your campaign and once it’s launched, monitor the results and make changes as you go.
So, what does this all mean for B2B digital marketers? To put it simply, it means greater efficiency and a higher chance of engaging exactly the right people, without wasting anyone’s time or effort. it remains to be seen whether the tool will deliver tangible results, but in theory, marketers should see greater success with their campaigns by utilising it.
Commenting on the launch of the tool, LinkedIn said on its Marketing Solutions Blog:
“LinkedIn Audience Targeting is a demonstration of how neatly our data-driven targeting can be integrated into our native advertising solutions. We are particularly excited about this launch because it puts us further along on our journey to create a unified ad platform which is powered with data from LinkedIn and our customers, and will allow us to innovate more quickly.”
Do you think this new tool could benefit your business, or have you found an alternative way to reach out to your ideal B2B customers and partners? Are there any other challenges and obstacles facing B2B digital marketers that LinkedIn has not managed to solve with this tool? Please feel free to share your thoughts.
