LinkedIn Released Six New Features This Week—Here’s How EDOs Can Use Them
May 3, 2017 | By: Molly Murphy
Digital branding through social media can easily be an economic development organization’s (EDO’s) first impression with a potential business or investment partner. The National Journal conducted a study and asked Washington Insiders to rank social media sites and news sources on a scale of one to trustworthy, and the results were surprising.
Q: On a scale of 0 to 100, where 0 is “the most untrustworthy source you can imagine” and 100 is “the most trusted source you can imagine”, how much do you trust information you find on the following sites?
February 2017 LinkedIn Omnibus Survey
EDOs at the local, regional, state and national level—are successfully utilizing LinkedIn for marketing and lead generation initiatives. There’s opportunity to engage with c-suite decision makers in a professional environment, target key prospects utilizing LinkedIn’s 1st party professional data, and nurture professionals by delivering insightful, relevant, and educational content in a native newsfeed format. With unmatched use by business executives and trust in the information on the platform, LinkedIn is a powerful, yet underutilized tool, in the economic development marketer’s arsenal.
LinkedIn’s new features now give EDOs access to more sophisticated targeting and lead generation tools, allowing them to generate even higher-quality leads. Below are six tools that EDOs could add to their marketing mix:
1. Lead Generation Forms
Removing the barriers to collecting lead information is one of the most important actions to increase lead volume from valuable prospects.
Lead Gen Forms can generate higher quality leads by tracking compressive lead records, including name and contact info, company name, seniority, job title, location, etc. Lead data comes from the members’ up-to-date LinkedIn profile, so it’s typically more accurate and complete than traditional website forms—where people sometimes enter false or partial information.
Additionally, Lead Gen Forms drive higher quality leads by removing the main barrier to conversion: manually completing long contact forms, which can be especially burdensome for mobile traffic.
2. Email Contact Targeting
LinkedIn now allows you to upload email contacts from your database to create custom audiences on LinkedIn. Putting an email database to work increases the touch-points with prospects without overwhelming their inbox. Lookalike audiences can also be built to find similar professionals who may not yet be on your radar.
3. Website Retargeting
Website retargeting gives EDOs the ability to reach website visitors when they’re on LinkedIn by serving them content based on the sections of the site that they previously visited.
It’s easy to get started with retargeting. First, add the LinkedIn Insight Tag to your website and then re-target via Sponsored Content that appears in their LinkedIn newsfeed.
4. Target Account List Upload
Expanding the capabilities of our Account-Based Marketing tools, EDOs can target large lists of companies (up to 30,000!) and scale organization targeting initiatives and outreach. Tailor your campaigns to target a priority list of businesses, in addition to using LinkedIn profile-based targeting (job function, seniority, etc.) to refine target audiences and reach the influencers and decision makers that matter most to your business development team.
5. LinkedIn AutoFill Button
When sending traffic to a landing page, the LinkedIn AutoFill button is a single-click button that sits on website lead forms, which instantly populates information from a member’s LinkedIn profile. Like Lead Gen Forms, the AutoFill Button helps to improve the quantity and quality of leads by removing friction and submitting information in a more effortless way. Lead information is collected through whatever system you’re currently using (Ex. CRM).
Standard populated fields include: First name, last name, phone number, email, company, title, city, state, country, and postcode.
6. Conversion Tracking
In any lead generation strategy, the follow-up question is always, “Now what?” The next step is keeping track of conversions and understanding KPIs to get the best ROI. Conversion tracking provides insight into the business demographics associated with conversions, to help advertisers understand the audience sub-segments that are converting best. From there, audience and creative optimization decisions can be made based on conversion-level data instead of click-level data.
The LinkedIn Government & Advocacy team based in Washington, D.C. regularly collaborates with DCI to offer the latest EDO marketing best practices to help EDOs achieve their goals. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to either of us with questions!