LinkedIn’s new Lead Accelerator is a pretty sophisticated tool that performs a strategic analysis identifying your most likely leads and which outreach methods work best at a given time in the marketing cycle.
LinkedIn is expanding its Marketing Solutions business with a full-funnel, end-to-end product suite. LinkedIn Lead Accelerator is the core product that is to be used to connect companies “to the right professionals with the right content as they make their way through the purchase decision process.” LinkedIn Lead Accelerator is what emerged from LinkedIn’s purchase of Bizo’s Multi-Channel Nurturing product last August.
Lead Accelerator Focuses on Nurturing Leads
The word “nurture” has been overused, but in this case, it’s appropriate to describe LinkedIn’s approach to how it helps its members market more aggressively, intelligently, and with a cost-effective mindset. It does this in three steps:
- Integrates marketing and advertising approaches on the LinkedIn network and other platforms, including Facebook’s News Feed.
- Studies the way prospects get information, particularly anonymous ones who have visited through an online channel, and those who subscribe to your feed but don’t open emails.
- Communicates with prospects in the format they appear to favor most and analyzes what’s working best.
Lead Accelerator will look at visitors’ behaviors on LinkedIn, including how they reached the member page and elsewhere, particularly the website. Do they click on display ads or Sponsored Updates? Did they reach a website through a News Feed or an email campaign? It will then engage those who are the most likely prospects, e.g., those who have made multiple visits online and sequence marketing content to them in the formats they seem to like and respond to.
For example, some people just don’t open email, even though they have to actively subscribe in order to receive the email in the first place. But they still see an email in their inbox. If an email recipient doesn't open the email but still goes directly to the website, within say, 48 hours of the email receipt, this says something about what makes him or her tick. (It’s also a solid argument in favor of those statistics about impressions.)
Lead Accelerator tracks campaigns, analyzes behavior, and makes recommendations to improve engagement. It also supports A/B testing.
Prior to this rollout, products like Sponsored Updates or LinkedIn Display Advertising allowed companies to achieve individual marketing goals. Now, with the full-funnel approach, all the products can be used together to enhance the company’s relationship with its prospects.
Pilot Testing for Lead Accelerator Showed Higher Engagement While Lowering Costs
In pilot tests with more than 100 companies, Lead Accelerator proved it can lower outreach costs while increasing lead conversion.
- eCornell, the online offering from Cornell University, doubled its landing page conversions and shrunk its cost per lead by 300% compared to its other retargeting efforts.
- The Cetera Financial Group had 900 new unique visits to its website, more repeat visits, 27% more page views, and almost $1 million in new business.
- Workfront, an enterprise work management tool, was frustrated by its very low conversion rate. As a B2B, its marketing team understood first-time visitors rarely convert, but it was concerned about the cost to get what conversions it had. Lead Accelerator helped them diversify its “nurture streams” (contact and content approaches), which greatly reduced these expenses while increasing positive leads.
Many pilot testers praised the funnel analytics approach Lead Accelerator uses for its reporting because it helped them drill down to see what worked with different audiences at different times. This really helped with improving targeting strategies. For B2Bs, which tend to have higher costs per lead, this proved to be extremely valuable.
Marrying LinkedIn’s content-based solutions with Bizo’s lead generation and analytics products just might be what marketers are looking for to enhance their company’s marketing efforts on the LinkedIn platform.
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