LinkedIn’s Latest Update Helps B2B Marketers Launch Scary-Smart Campaigns

LinkedIn has recently made some significant updates to its platform. With the aim to drive more engagement and generate more leads through LinkedIn Pages, the company rolled out new custom CTAs and community hashtags. What’s more, admins can now update key page details and edit published posts on their mobile devices.

LinkedIn has also just announced a new partnership with technology intelligence firm, HG Insights, to give digital marketers the ability to find better-targeted prospects and create much more effective ads on the platform.

HG Insights: why its partnership with LinkedIn is a big deal

HG Insights uses advanced data science methodologies to help some of the world’s largest and fastest growing organizations out-market, out-sell and out-grow their competition. As a leader in technology intelligence, HG Insights processes billions of unstructured digital documents to produce the world’s best technology installation information, IT spend and contract intelligence, enabling companies to accelerate their sales, marketing, and strategy efforts.

In case I haven’t yet it made it clear why HG for LinkedIn is such a big deal, let me break down what it means for B2B campaigns.

The value of technographic data

With HG for LinkedIn, marketers can now build campaign segments based on technographic profiles, and this data serves as the backbone for the new integration. A unique and powerful data set consisting of real-time insights, technographics showcase the hardware and software technologies that companies use to run their businesses. 

By understanding the technology products installed at their accounts, companies can be more precise in their targeting and outreach. On top of that, HG’s comprehensive intelligence provides insights into the technologies that companies are currently using, as well as those that were used in the past. The takeaway here is that this data can lead to faster conversion and close rates.

Technographic data can help drive high levels of success for businesses when used alongside account-based marketing, demand generation, market discovery, reactive news-driven campaigns, competitive conquesting and other targeting and outreach initiatives.

To help you better visualize technographics in use, let’s create a scenario for a news-driven campaign. If, for instance, a competitor received a negative review in the press, you could take this opportunity to create a campaign that highlights how your solution is a helpful alternative. 

And with HG offering the ability to quickly build campaign segments for LinkedIn based on technographic profiles, marketers can hyper-target their LinkedIn campaign to fit their ideal customers and get it launched in just a few clicks, ensuring that they can strike while the iron is still hot.

Competitive conquesting

Another way HG for LinkedIn’s technographics can help brands gain an advantage is through competitive conquesting - the ability to directly target ads to competitors’ customers. With HG for LinkedIn, brands can show potential customers how their own offering can and should displace their competitor’s product.

By targeting companies using competitor solutions, Zendesk was able to win back market share. Using HG Insights technographics, Zendesk identified companies using products from competitors and determined their total available market, which ended up to be 3 - 5x larger than anticipated. This information helped Zendesk focus its marketing efforts on the right prospects, leading to email open rates of over 20% on all demand generation campaigns.

Product interoperability

HG for LinkedIn now also lets marketers focus campaigns on companies using products that are interoperable with their company’s own offerings. If you’re unfamiliar with interoperability, it’s the ability of two or more components or systems to exchange and use information. 

Interoperability is the property that allows for the unrestricted sharing of data between different components or machines, or the exchange of information and resources between different computers through local or wide area networks.

In terms of healthcare, for example, interoperability makes it easier for medical services providers to share patient information with each other. Additionally, it makes healthcare more efficient (helping specialists communicate faster with referring doctors and avoiding redundant patients tests, for example) and can lower costs, as a result of the enhanced efficiency in data sharing.

By helping brands connect with businesses using interoperable products, HG for LinkedIn offers opportunities for them to highlight how their products can easily integrate and enhance the existing solutions that companies have installed.

With so much valuable information to be harnessed from HG for LinkedIn, this new integration is going to be a prized asset and game-changer for brands and marketers seeking to target the right audiences more precisely, connect with prospects using relevant and engaging messaging and overshadow competitors with strategic ad campaigns. 

On the other side of the spectrum, with the knowledge that the competition can now easily reach existing and potential customers, HG Insights for LinkedIn may be keeping brands on their toes. Now more than ever, it’s essential for companies to maintain high-quality products and services, as well as close relationships with connected business professionals -- both on and off LinkedIn.

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Shama Hyder is CEO of Zen Media, a leading marketing and new media consultancy, a best-selling author, and an internationally renowned keynote speaker.

As seen previously on Inc.