The New Way to Leverage LinkedIn to Personalize Your Digital Campaigns
Delivering relevant content to the right audience is the best way that today’s marketers can maximize the effectiveness of their campaigns in today’s increasingly noisy digital space. This is particularly challenging when targeting new prospects where you may not have useful data for segmentation and personalization. You may fall back to a “shotgun” approach of sending the same message to a wide audience. Even if you can capture your prospect’s interest in your e-mail or banner ad, you will most likely drive them to a “one size fits all” landing page or web site – forcing your prospect to find the data that is most applicable to them.
As a marketer, what excites me about social media networks like LinkedIn and Facebook is finding ways to leverage the relationships and data that people add into the network on a daily basis. If I can personalize a campaign based upon a prospect’s connections, their likes, their school, etc. as well as their title and company, I am much more likely to have my message resonate.
Both Facebook and LinkedIn offer targeted banner ads where you can create unique banner ads targeting specific people based upon their profile data. Through Facebook Connect, companies are able to leverage that data to personalize an experience based upon their Facebook profile data. However, particularly in the B2B space, more and more companies would like to leverage the up to date data within LinkedIn to customize their campaigns. Until recently, this has been difficult to do.
Enter LinkedIn’s updated API which has been combined with an award winning development effort to allow you to not only target specific people, but pass on that profile data to a personalized landing page. This opens the door to things such as:
- Personalizing case studies and value propositions based upon company, title, and industry.
- Displaying connections between your prospects and your company and/or existing customers.
- Recommending products and solutions based upon company size.
- Mixing in prospect specific data gathered from outside studies or reports.
Companies like Microsoft, AARP, and Vestas have already begun to embrace this approach. For example, Vestas, one of the world’s leaders in Wind Turbine Technology, used this technology to target C Level executives at Fortune 1000 companies. Dynamic banner ads (as well as targeted LinkedIn Inmail messages) were pushed to specific people at the targeted companies. Anyone who clicked on the link was brought to a microsite which is personalized specifically for them based upon their LinkedIn profile data and data from a Bloomberg study.
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