In our recent article about LinkedIn Newsletters, we mentioned that LinkedIn is constantly pioneering new features for marketing and sales professionals.

Case in point, LinkedIn recently announced a new tool, called Business Manager, aimed at B2B marketers working for large enterprises and agencies.

For the first time, marketers can connect their Page brand presence to their LinkedIn ad campaigns in a single tool. And as anyone who has to coordinate multiple Ads accounts and Pages can tell you, this is an exciting (and long-overdue) development.

So let us take a look at what the Business Manager platform has to offer!

The Dual Nature of LinkedIn Marketing

When it comes to marketing, the LinkedIn platform has long existed as two separate parts.

First, there is the organic side of things. Professional networking lies at the heart of LinkedIn’s mission, so they emphasise the importance of creating professional value through genuine connections. In this sphere, marketers use tools like personal accounts, Company Pages, Newsletters, etc., to implement inbound strategies like content marketing. 

Then there is the paid marketing side, which falls under the purview of Campaign Manager. LinkedIn recognises that online advertising is an important tool for B2B marketers (and a source of revenue for themselves). Indeed, provided they are relevant and useful to members, ads can provide yet another way for companies to genuinely connect with professional audiences. As such, to be a successful LinkedIn campaign manager, people—not profit—need to be the focus of your efforts.

However, as technology like conversion tracking has shown us, paid marketing and organic marketing are intertwined. Rather than being entirely separate spheres, they are two sides of the same coin.

The B2B buyer’s journey is complex, and members of the purchasing team will find and connect with brands in multiple ways. Text ads, social media posts, great content, and email conversations all play a role in successful lead generation and community building. Moreover, ad formats like sponsored content and sponsored messaging are blurring the line between paid and organic marketing. Therefore, it is important that B2B marketers can view both strategies side-by-side to get a comprehensive picture of their marketing efforts.

Yet, before now, there was no real way for marketers to do so on LinkedIn—much to their frustration. To view organic and paid activity, they had to toggle back and forth between Pages and Campaign Manager.

The situation was even worse for agency and enterprise-level marketers, who not only had to switch between platforms, but also between accounts. For example, imagine your agency was in charge of a group of fifteen client accounts (Pages and Ads) for a national franchise. There was no option to monitor this account group as a whole, and handling updates and billing was a hassle.

And let us not forget the intricate dance required to gain access and assign user roles for each individual account. What is a relatively innocuous activity on the individual level turns into a huge time sink when scaled up to the agency level.

B2B marketing professionals are busy people; our time should be focused on campaign planning, not handling administrative minutia.

The Promise of LinkedIn Business Manager

Designed to simplify the marketing efforts of B2B professionals, Business Manager brings Campaign Manager and Pages together on a central dashboard. Doing so will make scaled marketing and campaign optimisation much more straightforward. At last, you will see all the people and businesses you interact with on LinkedIn, whether you are connected through ads or organic content.

Business Manager offers several improvements that will make it easier for agency and enterprise-level marketers to coordinate their efforts across accounts. For instance:

• A Centralised Platform: In Business Manager, People, Partners, Ads accounts, Pages, and Matched Audiences all have dedicated tabs on the new dashboard. This design will make it much easier to navigate between different tasks.

• A Streamlined Workflow: Business Manager will free up time by allowing you to change settings and permissions across ad accounts AND Pages with a single adjustment. It also simplifies the billing process where you will be able to download all of your monthly invoices directly from the platform.

• Improved Targeting: You will be able to share and update Matched Audiences across all of your Ads accounts directly from the Business Manager dashboard.

Unlike their other business solutions (Sales Navigator, LinkedIn Recruiter, etc.), LinkedIn is offering Business Manager as a free tool. Early test customers included Merkle B2B, Vmware, GroupM Canada, and Xero, who reported seeing immediate value from the platform.

In their June 8th post, LinkedIn hinted that Business Manager will gain additional capabilities over time. ‘As the platform evolves, it will play a key role in how you uncover strategic insights that make marketing at scale more efficient.’

In addition to Business Manager, LinkedIn Marketing announced they are rolling out some additional organic features for LinkedIn Pages. These include adding @mentions and #hashtags in Articles and Newsletters to help you help further engage and grow your audience. Another change is the ability for Pages to respond as the brand to any post in the feed. Moreover, they will be able to respond regardless of whether they are @mentioned or following the hashtags used in the post.

And changes aren’t just coming to marketing—LinkedIn is also launching a new CRM data validation feature for Sales Navigator.

Previously, LinkedIn would flag accounts that were out-of-date within your CRM. However, you still had to go into your CRM and update it manually. Now, assuming your CRM integrates with Sales Navigator, you can flag, validate, and update your CRM contacts directly within Sales Navigator. This ability to update your CRM with LinkedIn’s real-time first-party data is particularly useful in the wake of the Great Reshuffle.

However, the data validation feature is currently only available to Advanced Plus customers. Considering that LinkedIn has integrated many Sales Navigator and Campaign Manager features, it will be interesting to see this might affect Business Manager.

When Will Be LinkedIn Business Manager Available?

At the time of writing, Business Manager is available to select enterprise customers. However, in their June 8th announcement, LinkedIn said it will be made publicly available to businesses worldwide ‘in the coming weeks.’ 

This is an exciting development for B2B marketing, so make sure to stay up to date as updates are coming thick and fast!

If you want to learn more about using LinkedIn for effective B2B marketing, contact the experts at 1827 Marketing today. We can help you understand various tools and solutions LinkedIn offers to enhance your marketing and sales strategy.