Exciting New and Improved Features on LinkedIn for B2B Marketers

LinkedIn is growing globally; 74% of new account sign-ups have been outside the United States. There are over 774 million members on the social network focused on business. LinkedIn is trying to become the best social media platform for B2B marketing. 

A recent product launch event focused on improvements to data, increased security measures, usability improvements, and page enhancements. These product improvements will help make marketing on LinkedIn a better experience.

Here are the top improvements you should watch out for as a B2B marketer. Some improvements are still in BETA and you may need to sign up for them through LinkedIn support.  

There are four main product improvement categories: pages, ad accounts, data, and security. We will outline each update and share some exciting ways you can use these product improvements to increase your B2B marketing strategy on LinkedIn. 

Enhancements to LinkedIn Pages

LinkedIn announced improvements that will help you build and nurture your prospects. 

Mobile Page Analytics

You now have access to LinkedIn analytics on the go. You can view analytics for your page, events, and ads on your mobile device. 

Mobile usage is increasing globally. 56.57% of all internet usage in 2021 is on mobile. LinkedIn is joining the mobile world by enhancing the data you can view on your mobile device. The improvement will not let you make changes to your account at this time. It is the first step towards a complete mobile ad experience for marketers. 

Understanding your data will help you decide how to promote your next piece of content. Hashtags are included in the data update. Using hashtags on LinkedIn is not as clear as other social platforms. We have an article outlining everything you need to know about hashtags on LinkedIn in case you need help using hashtags.

Articles and Newsletters 

New long-form blog content pages will be available on your LinkedIn company page. These are called articles. They are designed to help your brand showcase the work of your thought leaders. When you post an article it will also be shared on the newsfeed.  

Newsletters have also been added to the LinkedIn page. These are similar to articles, with one major difference - users can subscribe to your newsletter. They will get notified when a new newsletter is launched.  

A brand can have more than one newsletter. A user can subscribe to your newsletter without following you or your brand's page and receive updates when you share content. 

Understanding how to network on LinkedIn can be difficult. Newsletters could be a great way to build interest in your brand without directly asking LinkedIn members to follow you. 

There is one downside to the newsletter feature marketers should think about before proceeding. It is unclear if you will be able to download your subscriber list. 

A LinkedIn newsletter list is not an owned audience. A brand may have to choose where it wants to place its focus.  

Event Enhancements

There is a new event experience on LinkedIn. Improvements to event analytics have created a more robust data set that mirrors all of LinkedIn's other ad formats.  

LinkedIn has also launched Event ads and the ability to boost native event posts. Marketers can create specific event ads using the same ad targeting available on LinkedIn. 

To take it one step further, LinkedIn is launching auto-complete forms. LinkedIn will now have a seamless on-platform event experience similar to the experience currently being used on Facebook. 

Forms data can be downloaded through CSV or pulled into a CRM system through a second-party connection (Zapier), making this a great channel to generate leads.

Linkedin Live 

LinkedIn launched live in 2019. The recent update has lowered the criteria a page needs to use live events. A page now only needs 150 followers. 

A LinkedIn live video will now show up in the header of your page while the live event is happening. This feature helps get further engagement in your live events. 

You can check out more about live events on LinkedIn live event overview. A LinkedIn marketing strategy can now include live events for small or new LinkedIn pages. 

Using LinkedIn for business networking is now easier live video, newsletters, and event sign-ups. 

Improvements to LinkedIn Campaign Manager

Changes to ad formatting, reporting, and optimisation will help you demonstrate the value of LinkedIn marketing for reaching your target audience. 

New Ad Formats

New ad types have been added to the ad manager, including event ads, document ads, and product ads. 

We covered event ads above but to note, these ad formats are not good for external events and are best used for native event listings. If you are looking to run an external event, it is best to stick with sponsored content or other ad formats. 

Document ads allow you to promote any document type, including PDF, Word, or PowerPoint. You can now promote ebooks, whitepapers, and visual assets directly on the newsfeed. Documents can also be shared organically without a paid component. You can also boost a document post. 

LinkedIn recently added product listings to pages. You can now also run ads on your product listings.

Product-focused ads are not new on LinkedIn. What is new is the ability to promote a product listing. Products listed on your page have their own unique landing page dedicated to that product. This is a great way to showcase what your company offers without posting it on your newsfeed. A product-focused ad will promote this listing. 

SMART Campaigns

New SMART campaigns let you set up assets and allow LinkedIn to do the heavy lifting. The algorithm will test different assets and optimise the best ad for your audience. Multi-format campaigns are available within SMART campaigns. 

Landing Pages

LinkedIn added the ability to easily create ad and event landing pages in the LinkedIn ad manager. This will make it easier to launch better campaigns with a customised and focused landing page. 

This is a game-changer for small businesses that don’t have the ability to create landing pages. This is also great for large companies that don’t have enough resources to create new landing pages quickly. The landing page builder will be easy to use with a click and fill component. 

Audience Network

LinkedIn has added content interests to audience insights. You can now check out what a saved audience likes to read or view. This will help to enhance your content marketing strategy and ensure that you are creating relevant content to connect with potential customers. 

They have partnered with business sites to create a strong audience network allowing for off-platform display ads similar to what Google offers. The LinkedIn audience network is a large group of highly focused websites that will display ads from the campaign manager. 

Measurement Improvements

There are a few measurement improvement upgrades that are worth mentioning to help improve your data collection. You can now connect offline conversions like calls and in-store visits to your LinkedIn ads. 

LinkedIn is also offering brand lift surveys to measure brand impact on your LinkedIn connections. The lift survey is done using questions similar to the poll feature. 

LinkedIn has improved revenue attribution. You can finally connect a CRM to your LinkedIn campaign manager connecting your ads to your closed leads. 

And finally, new A/B testing will allow you to run multiple campaigns with one variable difference. You can easily set metric goals (CTA, copy, visual) for different ad types. For more details on improvements to the campaign and performance, check out LinkedIn's help article. 

Your LinkedIn strategy may need a refresh after seeing all of these great measurement improvements. 

LinkedIn Usability Improvements

To help you simplify how you do business on LinkedIn, the platform has improved several features directly within your page section. 

Post Boosting

You can now boost posts directly from your LinkedIn page. They have even added video boosting. When you boost the post you can boost it to a saved audience without having to leave your page. 

If you are unsure when to update a post or how to get started on your strategy, check out our LinkedIn Strategy article. 

On-Page Usability Improvements

LinkedIn now offers the ability to delete old campaigns. Something many believe should have been there a long time ago. For marketers that love to keep their data clean, this is a great way to remove campaigns that may have flopped or never been started. 

This improvement also came with the ability to complete bulk actions at the ad level (you can even upload a CSV).

Account Access

LinkedIn is moving to the business manager model. The new business manager will let you manage which digital assets each user can access. This is the best tool when working with agencies or contractors.

Security

LinkedIn is working to increase platform security. Using LinkedIn for business networking will now be safer with newly launched partnerships. 

• Media Rating Council, Inc.

• Lab.

• MOAT by Oracle Data Cloud

• IAS Integral Ad Science

• Pixalate

What Does This Mean? 

LinkedIn is an essential business networking tool, social network and, with these new improvements, a sophisticated marketing platform. We’re big fans and heavy users of LinkedIn for ourselves and our clients. These new features and improvements are very welcome Whilst we advise caution over becoming too dependent on social media at the expense of gaining insight from delivering your own online experiences, these new features are really worth considering as part of your overall marketing mix and sales funnel.

The addition of content planning support via audience insight, more ad formats and automatically optimised SMART ads, newsletters and landing pages mark a shift for LinkedIn from business network to marketing platform, elevating its marketing features significantly.

Besides the new ad formats and audience insights, we’re pleased to see the platform is also working to meet industry standards to ensure measurements are consistent across all platforms. This will help marketers compare their LinkedIn marketing data to other social platforms at equal data points. 

For a quick win on your LinkedIn organic efforts, check out our recent article to get a better understanding of how the LinkedIn algorithm works. 

How Big Brands Are Using New LinkedIn Features

One of the top new LinkedIn features is LinkedIn live. It gives companies big and small the ability to connect with their audience on a more personal level. 

Dior, the fashion house, has started offering live fashion shows. Not every brand has the production value that Dior has. A financial technology company in the UK called Refinitiv is using live on a much lower budget. 

Refinitiv offers weekly live panel discussions. Each week the brand brings a new guest to talk about the industry. They get an average of 15 - 20 attendees a week. 

Live can be used to host major events with large productions or small chats that focus on your product, service, or industry. There are lots of opportunities when using LinkedIn live. 

L’Oréal Case Study

Making the most of LinkedIn, L'Oréal combined LinkedIn Events with LinkedIn Live to replace their well-known event, Brandstorm, after the pandemic made it impossible to host their major event. The final product was a 2-hour live event with over 2,000 users. 

Putting social media marketing to the test, the team at L'Oréal had a final paid and organic reach of 8.5 million users. The team created 40 social posts and a teaser video to distribute the event. 

Using LinkedIn to Promote Your B2B Business

With the introduction of LinkedIn Live, events, and the audience network, LinkedIn has quickly become one of the top social media platforms for B2B marketing. 

Although some of the improvements listed are still in BETA testing and may not be available to all users, one thing we can say for sure: LinkedIn is upping its game with these new improvements.