Creativity + measurability = Internet marketing success

“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

“If your website is on the Internet and no one ever visits it, does it really exist?”

I am not really sure of the answer to the tree question, but when it comes to websites, armchair philosophers all agree: A great website is useless if no one ever visits it.

To take it a step further, no matter how beautiful and functional your website is, it can be a complete waste of marketing dollars if the right visitors never find it.

Internet marketing has become a mandatory part of every general marketing effort. With essentially everyone using the Internet as their primary resource for finding and purchasing products and services, optimizing your Internet marketing strategy is critical to the success of most every business.

With myriad web-based marketing tools and options available, choosing the most effective ones is confusing at best.

Being in the website design and Internet marketing field myself, it has been interesting to witness first-hand which strategies work and which don’t in the quest to draw qualified leads to a website. I have seen email marketing, search engine optimization, paid advertising and affiliate marketing campaigns both succeed and fail in the quest to gain more website leads and sales. Predicting which marketing approaches will work for any given business can be difficult to say the least.

So what’s the secret formula for Internet marketing success?

In thinking about our own marketing efforts as well as those of our clients, the first step to determining the best Internet marketing campaign is to use tools that are easily measurable.

When you initially dream up a web-based marketing campaign, it’s tempting to make decisions based on opinions and hearsay. The color of your logo, the wording of a Google ad, the timing of a mass email — a group of intelligent, experienced and creative individuals often have completely differing subjective opinions.

Whether using email marketing, Facebook ads, Google ads, search engine optimization, or any online effort, the ability to turn the subjective into the objective is what separates a profitable campaign from a waste of money.

The key is to collect your “best-guess” ideas about what marketing strategies and efforts will draw more traffic and sales, and then real-world test them to objectively prove or disprove their effects on profits.

Fortunately, most Internet marketing can be setup in a way that allows businesses to do quick and cheap trial-and-error campaigns before committing to the right mix of long-term marketing activities. Most every aspect from mass email subject-lines, to Facebook ad wording, can be deployed, tested and tweaked both easily and cost-effectively.

Over the past several years, the toolsets available to facilitate this trial-and-error approach to online marketing have multiplied and matured. You can gather most of the data you need using the ever-popular and free Google Analytics. Open rates and click-through rates are reported in most every email marketing system. Web ad testing tools that compare effectiveness of one ad versus another are affordable for any size business. There is no longer any reason to simply guess when it comes to online marketing.

Combining the creative mind to brainstorm ideas with the scientific mind to measure their effectiveness can turn subjective opinions into objective marketing decisions and ultimately increased profits.

http://www.tennessean.com/story/money/tech/2015/05/15/creativity-measurability-internet-marketing-success/27336291/

4 Tips for Supercharging Your Business's LinkedIn Profile

In his book Ultimate Guide to LinkedIn for Business, search engine optimization and online marketing expert consultant Ted Prodromou explains how you can use LinkedIn to quickly engage with ideal customers, partners, and employees, showcase your company and attract new opportunities. In this edited excerpt, the author offers some key tips to help you create a LinkedIn profile that gets people clicking.

When people search the internet for your name, your LinkedIn profile will most likely be one of the top search results, so you want to make a great first impression. Your LinkedIn profile provides people with a comprehensive summary of you, your education, work experience, and your achievements. Your LinkedIn profile also links people to other social media properties and websites where you can showcase your expertise.

Your LinkedIn profile consists of:

• Your headline
• Your photo
• Status updates
• Vanity URL
• Summary
• Applications
• Experience
• Education
• Recommendations
• Additional information
• Personal information
• Contact information

These sections are particularly important to your LinkedIn image:

1. Your headline.

Your profile headline is the single most important part of your profile. It will appear next to your name in the search results. As your name appears in the search results, your headline must be compelling enough to make people want to click on your profile to learn more about you. You should never put just your name and company name in your headline.

2. Your photo.

It’s very important to use a professional picture in your LinkedIn profile. First impressions are very important, and people will judge you within a few seconds when they see your LinkedIn profile. Save your casual pictures for Facebook and Twitter. The best LinkedIn profile pictures are engaging and inviting. I recommend a headshot focusing on your smiling face. Your profile will be associated with your company so you want to present a consistent, professional image and not avatars, caricatures, or other images that aren’t congruent with the image you're establishing for you and your business.

Never use your company logo as your personal profile picture. First, it’s not engaging and doesn’t give people a chance to get to know you. Second, it’s a violation of the LinkedIn End User License Agreement.

3. Experience.

Your current position and your past three positions will be displayed in your profile. Up to three additional positions will be displayed if the viewer clicks on View All.

Make sure you add a brief but clear description for each position. Use your target keywords in your description, so you'll be found when people search for your skill sets. If you're going to use the Request Recommendations option, I recommend sending personal invitations to one person at a time something along the lines of this:

I’m sending this to ask you for a brief recommendation of my work that I can include in my LinkedIn profile. If you have any questions, let me know. Thanks in advance for helping me out.

LinkedIn is about building strong personal connections, and using automated tools is not the way to build a strong connection with me or with others. If you want a good recommendation from someone, take the time to write a personal invitation, and you will receive a much better recommendation than you would from a mass invitation.

When asking for a recommendation, make sure you include personal details about how you met, projects you’ve worked on together, and other details about your working relationship. Specify exactly what you want in the endorsement, such as a specific project you worked on together or to highlight a certain skill set of yours. Some people even prefer that you send them a brief endorsement you’ve written about yourself they can edit or modify to save them time.

Notice you can create another professional headline in your Experience section. This lets people instantly get to know you and learn how you can help them when they view your profile.

4. Contact information.

This is the section where you can add links to your website and blog, which will generate lots of web traffic and help your search rankings. Links from popular sites like LinkedIn are very valuable, so you want to use this trick when you enter your website or blog URL.

One of the most common mistakes people make when adding their website or blog URLs is to choose one of the default options like Personal Website or Blog. Choose Company Website so it displays Company Website instead of your actual company name or target keyword phrase. This helps add valuable links and keyword phrases in your LinkedIn profile that will help your Google search rankings.

LinkedIn also lets you add social media feeds to your LinkedIn profile. This lets your profile visitors see what you’re up to on the social media front, such as on Twitter or Google+.

One of the newest additions to your profile is "Publications," where you can display your published books. To use this section, you must have a valid ISBN number for your published book. Your publication listing includes your book title, publisher, publication date, and a description of your book. You can also add a link to your website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or any other website where people can purchase your book.

Your LinkedIn profile is now optimized for the search engines and is ready to promote.

8 Tips how to Grow your LinkedIn Network in 2015

8 Ways to Better Market Yourself on LinkedIn in 2015

Best Tips from the Pro's for the best year in LinkedIn!!!

LinkedIn has always been the industry standard when it comes to marketing yourself professionally, but the past few years have seen the social network’s importance and reach increase dramatically. TechCrunch reports that LinkedIn has roughly 187 million unique visitors per month, and that number looks like it’ll continue to grow.

In addition, LinkedIn has ramped up its efforts to become a content platform. In the past three years LinkedIn has acquired Slideshare, Pulse and Newsle; all of which hint at a continuing push towards content distribution.

Instead of just maintaining your profile and company page and being active in LinkedIn groups, LinkedIn is now encouraging brands and individuals to leverage its robust, new publishing capabilities. It is clear that LinkedIn sees itself as a vital part of the future of content marketing.

Building out your LinkedIn presence can seem intimidating. There are so many options now that the thought of exploiting them all can overwhelm even the savviest marketers.

Recommended for YouWebcast: Strategies, Tactics & Tools for Content Marketing in 2015

Keeping this problem in mind, I set out to track down the most influential and accomplished LinkedIn experts and ask them to weigh in on their recommendations for making the most of your LinkedIn Marketing.

Viveka von Rosen: Leverage LinkedIn’s CRM

image: http://cdn2.business2community.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Vivekavon-Rosen-picture.png.png

Viveka von Rosen is a prominent LinkedIn expert and author of the book LinkedIn Marketing: An Hour a Day. Her recommendation not only highlights some interesting, often overlooked LinkedIn features, but also shows how they can be used to strengthen your networking connections.

Viveka notes that “LinkedIn is about building relationships, and one of the best ways of building relationships is to show your top prospects that you were listening to them.” With this in mind, she points out that LinkedIn actually provides users with fairly robust CRM tools.

image: http://cdn.business2community.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Linkedin-CRM.png.png

She recommends leveraging these tools in five steps:

1. Research your prospect or client. (Better yet, have a conversation with them – maybe at a conference or trade show?)

2. Make your notes about the person on their LinkedIn profile. (Click on the star icon to “unfold” LinkedIn’s CRM feature.)

3. Set a reminder to follow up with your prospect.

4. Find an article of your own or search Pulse to find content you think they might be interested in.

5. You can also tag your prospects, segmenting your network in a way that makes sense to you, and that will allow you to follow up with them in smaller groups.

Brian Murray: Be Active, Get Noticed

image: http://cdn2.business2community.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Brian-Murray-picture.png.png

Brian Murray is the director of talent and culture at the prominent New York-based Digital agency Likeable. Although Brian’s profession is technically HR, he is careful to note: “My audience is NOT HR professionals. It is people with agency experience who love or have a focus on social.”

This is already a powerful lesson. The first step to connecting with your audience is identifying who you are aiming to target. Once you know who you want to notice you, Brian outlines the next step: “I share relevant content that causes them to continue to see me and recognize my name. When I reach out they are a lot more likely to respond than a cold email from somebody who doesn’t regularly use the platforms.”

We tend to misunderstand why it is that we trust certain people online or give them a certain degree of credibility. Brian nails it on the head with this insight. Oftentimes it’s not the amount of followers you have, it’s how often you show up on people’s radar. Perhaps the best piece of advice Brian gives derives from an analogy to sales:

Similar to sales, the time you need to make a sale is not the first time you call or email them. They need to trust you. They need to see you.

Going further, Brian believes that the only thing people like more than seeing someone tweeting or sharing things they love is when you engage with that audience and provide personal interaction. This actually speaks a lot to another piece of advice I got from our next expert.

Stephanie Sammons: The “10 in 10″ Rule

image: http://cdn2.business2community.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Stephanie-Sammons-Picture.png.png

Stephanie Sammons is a renowned LinkedIn expert, named a Top 30 Marketing Thought Leader and a Top 25 Social Media Expert by LinkedIn, who coaches professionals on how to maximize their social presence. Her recommendation for marketers and business owners who hope to build their presence is to adopt what she refers to as the “10 in 10” rule.

“While others are pumping out content and status updates to their entire network” Stephanie instead encourages professionals to “go one-to-one with 10 of your connections 10 minutes a day.”

If you spend 10 minutes a day engaging personally with 10 of your valued LinkedIn contacts, you will grow your influence.

The first step in her process is to identify your MVC’s (Most Valuable Connections) LinkedIn. “These may be prospects, clients, influencers, or advocates for your business. Next, study their profiles and learn more about who they are, what they do, and who they help.”

She continues by noting that “once you are armed with greater intelligence about your MVC’s, strive for a one-to-one engagement with at least 10 of these individuals per day. One-to-one engagement can be in the form of a personalized, private LinkedIn message, a public comment or conversation, a or even an @mention.”

The reasoning goes that a personal, intimate connection with a smaller number of followers can be much more beneficial than an attempt to please everyone. This appears straightforward, but it seems that so few actually spend the emotional energy necessary to foster these connections.

Stephanie offers the assurance that although this consistent connection is hard to maintain, it will be well worth it in the long-run and ultimately lead to social media success.

Lewis Howes: Leverage LinkedIn Pulse

image: http://cdn2.business2community.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Lewis-Howes-Picture.png.png

While there is no denying the effectiveness of a more personal approach, LinkedIn has recently become more than a networking tool. The past few years have seen Linked grow from a job-hunting, and resume site into a publishing empire. So how can marketers or professionals leverage this increasingly important aspect of LinkedIn?

Lewis Howes is a LinkedIn expert who hosts the School of Greatness podcast and he recommends leveraging the new LinkedIn Pulse platform by consistently creating engaging content on your profile. Howes points out that until recently the publishing platform was only reserved for select influencers. However things have changed recently and this presents a big opportunity for marketers to earn the attention of the right professional audience on LinkedIn:

With Pulse open to everyone (not just influencers), it’s a massive opportunity to expand your reach.

This is not just a hunch either. Howes shared that he’s “seen a big bump in traffic and leads from this alone” and assured me that this would be the most effective way of reaching a larger and more targeted audience on LinkedIn in the coming year.

Looking at the current trend of LinkedIn’s updates and acquisitions, Howes’ prediction feels spot on. LinkedIn has already gotten hundreds of millions of users accustomed to networking on the site, and now they hope to build that same familiarity with consuming and creating content. The ability to get in on the ground floor of this kind of change is too good for marketers to pass up and should not be ignored.

Alex Pirouz: Have A Strategic Plan In Place

image: http://cdn.business2community.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Alex-Pirouz-picture.png.png

The previous advice has all concerned committing to continuous and sustained interactions with your professional network, but sticking to so many initiatives at once is difficult. Alex Pirouz, a serial entrepreneur who founded Linkfluencer.com, offers a bit of sobering yet crucial advice.

His advice is dead simple, but so often overlooked. “My top tip to anyone looking to use LinkedIn as an effective marketing tool is to first create a clear plan on what they’re looking to achieve from the platform.” Drafting a plan requires: “looking over [your] marketing objectives over the next 6-12 months, identifying the target market [you] would need to connect with in order to achieve those objectives and then building a LinkedIn profile that resonates with this audience.” Just like you would plan your editorial calendar, you should plan your LinkedIn posts.

Not having a plan is the number one reason businesses aren’t using LinkedIn to it’s full potential.

Alex told me that “over the past 12 months we’ve trained over 8000 businesses on how to leverage LinkedIn to grow their business and over 90% of those we speak with don’t have a plan or clear strategy.” He quipped that Ben Franklin said it best, “People don’t plan to fail they fail to plan.”

Bert Verdonck: Earn Greater Visibility With Slideshare

image: http://cdn.business2community.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Bert-Verdonck-Picture.png.png

Bert Verdonck is the founder of the pioneering social agency ReallyConnect and a LinkedIn expert in his own right. According to him “one of the most underutilized strategies on LinkedIn today is the use of rich media and SlideShare in particular.”

Most people have no idea of the impact SlideShare can have on their LinkedIn marketing.

Besides being, as Bert refers to it, the “YouTube for Powerpoint,” he told me that “Slideshare links index brilliantly well, often ranking higher than LinkedIn or Facebook.” As if this was not reason enough to embrace the platform, LinkedIn purchased Slideshare in 2013 and has since offered substantial integration capabilities.

He notes that, “Of course, there are some SEO experts who let you pay a ton of money to artificially increase your search results, but SlideShare is for free and beats a lot of other strategies easily and in a natural way.”

His logic here is simple, but speaks to an understanding of the way search visibility works. Slideshare offers “a lot of quality content and Google loves great content, resulting in higher natural rankings. People will find you more easily for your topics.”

In other words, Slideshare helps your profile become more visible not only by putting you higher in search rankings in the search engines and LinkedIn, but by providing engaging content your potential audience wants to see when they do reach your profile. Talk about a win-win scenario.

Neal Schaffer: Embrace Long-Form Publishing

image: http://cdn2.business2community.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Neal-Schaffer-Picture.png.png

Neal Schaffer is the author of the excellent LinkedIn book Maximize Your Social as well as a social media coach, consultant and trainer. His recommendation for professionals looking to maximize their LinkedIn presence is to take advantage of long-form publishing.

Neal points out that “LinkedIn opened up their blogging platform to all users in 2014, but very few have taken advantage of being a part of the LinkedIn publishing empire.” Sure people have taken to posting some content, but the efforts of many users are scattershot or lack-luster short-form posts. Instead, Neal believes LinkedIn should be treated like a full-fledged syndicated blog.

If you are only blogging on your corporate blog you are missing out on the opportunity to get your content in front of eager eyes on LinkedIn.

This is a wasted opportunity because “when you blog on LinkedIn, your content is seen not only by your connections but also by others who are consuming news on LinkedIn Pulse.” Neal mentions that he has seen great long-form content by users that “received more views than their number of connections, and some that have literally received hundreds of thousands of views.”

As LinkedIn positions itself as a content platform, the benefits of embracing a content-centric strategy will become more and more pronounced. Stay one step ahead of the curve by creating engaging, rich, long-form content.

John Rampton: Call Out Your Profile Often

image: http://cdn.business2community.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/John-Rampton-Picture.png.png

John Rampton is a social media expert and columnist for publications such as Forbes, Entrepreneur, and Inc. The advice he gave was something that frustrated him because it is so easy, yet so many people miss it. “I can never understand why people go to networking events, hand me their business card, and they don’t have their LinkedIn profile on there.”

He continued, “They have other social networks on there, but LinkedIn is THE professional networking site. When I want to size you up professionally, that’s where I go.” While it’s certainly easy enough to find someone on LinkedIn, John is right that the additional step to make people go through is an unnecessary barrier between connecting.

Don’t be shy about calling out your LinkedIn profile. Put it on your email, business card, etc… – anything with your name on it, your profile should be there too.

Another place he feels people miss calling out their profile is in their email signature. “Email is the same thing, your professional email can just as easily be an additional touch point or place to connect.”

Especially for people working in sales, John feels that having a LinkedIn profile link in email is such an easy, effective opportunity to connect that people miss all too often.

“My other recommendations would be leveraging the LinkedIn publishing platform and engaging more frequently, but these efforts are all maximized by having more connections, and calling out your profile is such an easy way to bring that number up.”

Lastly, here are these same LinkedIn marketing tips in a ready to pin infographic!

http://www.business2community.com/linkedin/8-ways-better-market-linkedin-2015-01114663

LinkedIn Goes Big in 2015

http://tiny.cc/clkprx

LinkedIn Tutorial 2014 - Creating a Profile

6 Social Media Marketing Tools to Make Your Management Quick and Easy

Social media can be confusing.

Keeping up with the multiple social channels; posting original content and coming up with a social media plan that generates leads, engagement, revenue or some other tangible goal can make you feel like pulling out your hair.

However, studies show that social media marketing works. In 2014, investment in social media is a necessity, and no longer a luxury.

According to Social Media Examiner, companies using social media for 3 or 4 years see an improvement in their search rankings too

However, studies show that social media marketing works. In 2014, investment in social media is a necessity, and no longer a luxury.

According to Social Media Examiner, companies using social media for 3 or 4 years see an improvement in their search rankings too.

Social media is not just a trend that’s going to pass – and marketers are taking note of it. Since there’s no ignoring social media, here are some tips on how you can make it painfree and easy (even if you hate it).

Choose your social media platforms

You don’t have to be active on all social platforms out there. There, I said it. You can breathe now.

In fact, be very aware of what accounts you monitor and focus on.

Don’t spread yourself too thin. As a rule of thumb, if you’re starting out, have your presence on the “Big 4” sites:

1. Facebook
2. Twitter
3. Google+
4. LinkedIn

You should consider Pinterest and Instagram depending on your target audience. Once these are out of the way, you may then consider the more focused community-based platforms such as Tumblr, StumbleUpon and the likes.

Everything else? Only focus on them once you’ve crossed the bare-minimums off your list. So when your photographer friend comes raving about a new social platform, stop and ask some smart questions before jumping in and creating another “free” (and soon-to-be-dormant) account.

It could be that a platform works well for them because it attracts a strong community of people interested in photography and related services.

But for you? It’s plain distraction. Choose and invest your time wisely.

Be intentional about social media

Many small business owners focus on the immediate number of followers or shares. Only about one in three marketers agree that they are able to measure their social activities ROI.

What is your goal from those followers? Is it brand awareness, leads or loyalty? If most of the 25,466 followers on your Twitter are disengaged, does that do any good to your ROI?

In short, get clear about your end-goal from social media.

Make posting a part of your morning routine to schedule posts for social media. For example, if you’re a retailer, you can have a daily post about “Featured and discounted item of the day” with visuals.

Have “themed days” so your audience gets used to expecting a certain type of content from you depending on the weekday. When your intention is clearly laid out, it’s super-easy to come up with content and you gradually build a habit to post everyday.

You can spend as little as 6 hours/week on social media and still generate leads off it.

According to Social Media Examiner’s 2014 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, more than 64% of marketers are doing just that. Out of those, more than 84% saw an increase in their traffic from the invested hours of effort.

Here are 6 social media marketing tools to make your management pain free, quick and easy.

1. Outsource

Sometimes you just don’t have the time, inclination or energy to manage several social accounts.

In an ideal world, you want an inhouse person or team to take charge of your social media. But hiring a dedicated staff as a small business can be expensive.

For small businesses, outsourcing is a brilliant midway that doesn’t cost much and let’s you dedicate a resource for your social media tasks. Done-for-you service $99 Social can help you save time and money.

At $99/mo, you get a dedicated account manager who posts individualized content 7 days a week to your pages.

If you’re the DIY type, here are more tools that will help.

2. Scheduling

You can use popular tools like IFTTT and Buffer for scheduling purposes. But what if you’re posting great content all at wrong times?

Small businesses can be smart by analyzing the best times to post with Tweriod.

Go to Tweriod and sign in with your Twitter account. Tweriod will work out a report based on your followers. Once the report is ready, they share it via DM. The free version can analyze upto 1000 followers.

3. Management

You’ve already heard about tools such as Hootsuite and Sendible. These work well for small and mid-sized businesses.

If you are a B2B marketer with a lot of content to distribute, Oktopost makes social media management easy across your many profiles, groups and company pages. It can also monitor LinkedIn company pages and groups. Oktopost focuses on tracking to determine which channels bring the most ROI.

The tool integrates with Marketo and Salesforce also.

You can start your 30-day free trial and choose from plans as less as $9/mo to $249/mo for multiple users.

4. Content curation

Swayy tells you what to share with your audience on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Once you share a suggested piece of content, you can view analytics inside the app (retweets, mentions, favorites, followers, shares links clicked etc).

You can start with $0/mo for one dashboard.

5. Visual content

Social has evolved into visual social. Twitter recently allowed larger header images following Facebook’s successful move to Timeline in 2011 that brought a whopping 65% increase in engagement for Facebook.

According to a study conducted by the folks at Buffer, images can increase retweet rate by 150%.

Compfight is a free Flickr search tool that makes image sourcing a breeze. It pulls all photos under Creative Commons for Commercial use license.

You can do a quick search for emotions, objects, concepts and pick an image that best represents your content. Compfight also provides you with an HTML attribution code to give attribution to the owner.

Search results for “smile”

6. Online reputation

Topsy is a neat little social search engine to keep a tab on what’s being said about you or your brand online. Just punch in the keyword (or your name, industry, competitor) and Topsy will search links, tweets, photos videos, and any influencers who mentioned you.

You can sort the search results by relevance, oldest or newest.

Here’s a search result on my name:

Wrapping it up

There are simple ways to make your social media management a breeze, and they don’t have to cost you a fortune. When it comes to social tools, which ones are your favorites? Share with us in the comments!

http://www.business2community.com/social-media/6-social-media-marketing-tools-make-management-quick-easy-01056402

LinkedIn becomes a more effective B2B marketing tool

New web content and marketing tools promise to make the professional social network more effective in B2B marketing, financial analyst James Lee says.

As marketing targets, business-to-business professionals are 10 times more valuable than consumers because of their potential purchasing power, figures James Lee, a stock analyst who follows LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and other online social networks for the Boston office of CLSA, a global investment research and management firm based in Hong Kong. Yet the business-to-business network LinkedIn, without the marketing tools of the consumer-facing networks, is three times less productive at generating ad revenue compared with the consumer-facing networks, he adds.
But that void in B2B marketing through social media could soon be filled, Lee says. For one thing, LinkedIn is developing more relevant content on its site by aggregating information for business professionals from blogs and other business-oriented sites, and letting its users sign up to receive content that an algorithm matches to their stated interests. “LinkedIn is changing the use case from searching for jobs to discovering useful expert content,” he says. “If successful, this new platform should drive a better engagement and more page views.”

At the same time, Lee says, LinkedIn is expanding the ways advertisers can target the social network’s users by their job titles, job function, seniority at their company and their connections with business groups. In addition, LinkedIn is on a course to increase the number of marketing agencies that specialize in helping businesses run marketing campaigns through LinkedIn, using tools like the network’s Sponsored Update ads, which can be designed to target particular groups of LinkedIn users with content tailored to their interests.

Lee estimates that LinkedIn now has only about five marketing technology and services firms focused largely on working with its network, compared with some 300 that work with Facebook. One marketing software company focused on LinkedIn is ExactTarget, a unit of Salesforce.com Inc., which offers a Social.com advertising application for managing multiple ad campaigns on LinkedIn.
Another marketing software firm, Marketo, is gaining traction with LinkedIn users by helping them direct the right content to the right business professionals, Lee says. A software technology provider, for example, would use Marketo to automatically show an ad offering a demonstration or a trial version of their software product to a LinkedIn user identified as an I.T. director, but not to the CEO of the same company. Figuring that a CEO doesn’t have the time or technology expertise to view a demo or check out a trial version, the Marketo tool would instead send the top executive an invitation to a webinar or other material designed for a high-level view of the software company’s product.
Lee says he expects to see more advertising firms begin to work with LinkedIn to help marketing clients take advantage of the personal information and “deep user data” available for generating customer leads on LinkedIn. He adds that about 40% of business decision makers are already on social media sites.

“Right now, B2B marketing is caught up with tremendous pent-up demand,” Lee says.
For a free subscription to B2BecNews, a weekly newsletter that covers technology and business trends in the growing B2B e-commerce industry, click here. B2BecNews is published by Vertical Web Media LLC, which also publishes the monthly trade magazine Internet Retailer.


http://www.internetretailer.com/2014/09/09/linkedin-becomes-more-effective-b2b-marketing-tool