LinkedIn rolls out Sponsored Updates

Last week LinkedIn announced the roll out of Spon­sored Updates. This type of adver­tis­ing on the plat­form is not a sur­prise for sea­soned marketers.

LinkedIn is by far the most pop­u­lar social net­work for pro­fes­sion­als, with 3 mil­lion com­pa­ny pages con­nect­ing employ­ees, con­sumers and influ­encers to busi­ness­es. Accord­ing to Forrester’s newest B2B Social Techno­graph­ics® num­bers, 100% of busi­ness deci­sion-mak­ers use social media for work pur­pos­es, with LinkedIn the top plat­form for busi­ness purposes.

In a new blog post, LinkedIn’s VP of Prod­uct Man­age­ment, David Hahn, said the platform’s cur­rent con­tent mod­el means mar­keters have a hard time reach­ing peo­ple, “the high qual­i­ty con­tent they’ve pro­duced – slideshows, arti­cles, videos, and whitepa­pers – does not always achieve enough reach and engage­ment on their own channels.”

For B2B organ­i­sa­tions this announce­ment sounds like a per­fect solu­tion; you can tar­get any seg­ment of the 225 mil­lion mem­bers based on pro­fes­sion­al pro­file data.

A few months ago Adobe was approached to be a beta part­ner for Spon­sored Updates. Our own Poo­ja Prasad wrote in a blog about the test­ing, that “we knew we had to try it.”

For 8 weeks we select­ed con­tent to pro­mote to our tar­get audi­ences – from mar­ket­ing execs to C‑suite lead­ers. The real-time basic engage­ment sta­tis­tics helped decide on how and when to opti­mise the cam­paign. The results showed that spon­sored updates put us in the front of mar­keters’ minds. Sur­veyed users said after the cam­paign they were 2.5 times** **more like­ly to agree or strong­ly agree that Adobe’s Spon­sored Updates “cap­tured their attention.”

The new ad for­mat is avail­able on desk­top, mobile and tablet. It offers a CPC or CPM pric­ing for 20 lan­guages in 200 coun­tries. There’s also new com­pre­hen­sive ana­lyt­ics to help mar­keters report on the ROI of adver­tis­ing on LinkedIn.

Do you think LinkedIn Spon­sored Updates will help give your pro­fes­sion­al con­tent bet­ter expo­sure and dri­ve qual­i­ty leads? Tell us in the com­ments or tweet us @AdobeMktgCloud.