LinkedIn Video for B2B Brands is a No-Brainer. Read More Here.

Shelly Kramer / July 9, 2018

According to a study developed by LinkedIn, some 94 percent of B2B marketers report using LinkedIn as their number one social media channel for distributing content. Based on my personal experience working with many B2B brands, this is true. Sort of. If B2B brands are using social at all, sometimes they are using LinkedIn. Sometimes well, most times not so well. But that’s a topic for another day. What we’re talking about here is LinkedIn video for B2B brands and why integrating that into your marketing and lead generation strategies is smart. In fact, it’s a no-brainer.

Why LinkedIn Video for B2B?

So why LinkedIn video for B2B brands? Well, it’s no secret that video marketing is-or should be-an integral part of a marketing strategy when it comes generating sales leads in today’s digital landscape. So, when LinkedIn introduced Sponsored Content for LinkedIn Videos, it made sense. LinkedIn video for B2B brands is yet another way to get your message, your business development team, and your solutions, in front of a very large audience. How large?

I’m glad you asked. With more than 562 million members in some 200+ countries and territories worldwide, LinkedIn is a veritable powerhouse of a B2B business social network. With this reach and the advertising tools available, B2B brands using LinkedIn Video for Sponsored Content in their marketing strategies is, as I mentioned earlier, a no-brainer.

But what can LinkedIn video for B2B do for your B2B business and your sales and marketing strategy?

Build Your Brand’s Awareness Among Professionals

LinkedIn video for B2B brand awareness and lead generation allows you to create informative, educational, entertaining, or compelling content (or all of those things!) that tells your brand’s story or illustrates your value proposition. Once you’ve created that LinkedIn video for B2B audiences, you can get that content in front of your prospects using LinkedIn’s Sponsored Content offering. By incorporating this tactic into your marketing strategy, you can effectively build brand awareness for your business and, more importantly drive qualified traffic (and leads) wherever you want them to go.

How LinkedIn Video for B2B

Again according to yet another survey done by LinkedIn (and of course there’s a wee bit of bias there), some 46 percent of B2B advertisers claimed that finding a suitable environment to run video campaigns was one of their biggest challenges. With the majority of LinkedIn members being business pros using the site for information, networking, and business development, the LinkedIn News Feed is often where they look for useful content to stay informed about latest industry news. Sponsored Content gives B2B brands the ability to deliver your brand’s content directly to your audience’s LinkedIn News Feed.

Want an example of this actually working? Our friends at Adobe wanted to raise awareness of the company’s digital solutions among marketing executives. That’s where they used the opportunity to test LinkedIn video for B2B brands. The marketing team at Adobe integrated LinkedIn Video for Sponsored Content with their marketing strategy, and what they found was interesting. Their campaign results showed that Sponsored Content in the form of LinkedIn video for B2B prospects proved to be effective in increasing brand awareness and also gained the attention of what they called ‘hard-to-reach marketers.’ Their post-campaign survey resuls showed that marketing decision makers reported they were 2.5 times more likely to agree that Adobe’s Sponsored Content by way of LinkedIn video for B2B brands had “captured their attention.”

LinkedIn Video for B2B – Target High-Quality Leads, Boost Customer Acquisition

LinkedIn Video for B2B brands utilizing the Sponsored Content offering has a suite of B2B targeting capabilities built-in for accurate targeting. These tools are designed to help marketers target their ideal audience through categories like company name, industry, job title, skills, and more. On top of this, integration with LinkedIn’s Matched Audiences allows B2B marketers to target high-priority prospects through the following options:

• Website Retargeting – You can re-engage your audience by delivering relevant ad content based on particular web pages your target audience visited on your site.
• Account Targeting – Use account-based marketing (ABM) to target decision-makers at your target accounts.
• Contact Targeting – Customize your target audience by uploading your contact list or syncing with your contact management platform.

Lead Gen Forms is another tool used alongside LinkedIn Video for B2B brands and the Sponsored Content offering that can boost customer acquisition. According to Kissmetrics, one of the main reasons for cart abandonment in e-commerce stores is the negative user-experience of sign-up forms. In B2B marketing, in order to register for a webinar, purchase a product or even download a free eBook, a user will need to provide personal details using a sign-up form.
LinkedIn’s Lead Gen Forms makes this process painless for involved parties, by automatically populating sign-up forms based on a LinkedIn member’s profile data.

Measure Conversions From Your LinkedIn Video Campaigns

Conversion tracking of Sponsored Content is designed to allow marketers track the performance of their LinkedIn Video for B2B campaigns. It does this by recording website conversions based on scenarios such as sign-ups, purchases, downloads or ad click-through-rates.

Using the LinkedIn Campaign Manager, marketers can analyze what Sponsored Content is performing best (or worst) and understand the true value of their advertising ROI. With this data, it’s also possible to distinguish what content was most effective for a particular audience. This information is marketing gold because marketers can then optimize the content and targeting that works, and scale campaigns accordingly.

The future looks increasingly bright for B2B brands using LinkedIn marketing solutions with the recent announcement of Carousel Ads being made available for Sponsored Content. This will give B2B brands more options to connect on a personal level and create higher-quality interactions with their ideal audience.

Bottom line, when it comes to B2B marketing, B2B lead generation, or reaching a target customer base in general, LinkedIn is doing amazing things. It’s been pretty incredible watching a platform that so many (uninformed) people thought was nothing more than a job search site totally begin to transform B2B marketing. This offering of LinkedIn video for B2B brands is but one of many impressive moves on the part of LinkedIn. And in the time you can blink, there will be more. Just you wait and see.

The original version of this article was first published on V3Broadsuite.