LinkedIn Adds Audience Engagement Insights to Its Marketing Partner Program

For B2B marketers, LinkedIn can be a powerful platform to identify and engage the right prospects for your business. 

LinkedIn reports that its platform is seeing record-levels of engagement in both newsfeed activity and with content.

As a result, it’s more important than ever for brands targeting professionals to have an active presence on LinkedIn, and that starts with posting the kind of content your buyer personas are interested in. 

However, because LinkedIn’s large audience of professionals covers a wide variety of industries, it can be difficult to effectively target the right people with LinkedIn content, or to know what content they’ll be most receptive to.  

LinkedIn announced it’s expanding its Marketing Partner Program, adding an all-new “Audience Engagement” category with five new third-party analytics tools: Amobee, Annalect, Hootsuite, Ogilvy, and Sprinklr. 

These five platforms will now integrate with the LinkedIn Audience Engagement API and allow marketers to unlock better insights to help them discover new audiences, understand what types of content achieves the best results, and compare how their brand content compares with others in their industry. 

This data gives marketers information to not only improve their performance on LinkedIn, but also provide insights to help them successfully reach new audiences outside of LinkedIn as well. 

How can marketers benefit from Audience Engagement insights? 

The addition of these five audience engagement tools to LinkedIn’s Marketing Partner Program significantly enhances marketers’ ability to not only see who they should be targeting, but what exactly will resonate with that audience. 

According to LinkedIn, the Audience Engagement category provides three key benefits for B2B brands on the platform: 

• Simplify audience discovery: Sometimes, no matter how in-depth your persona research is, you might not be able to cover all the bases and, thus, risk missing out on high-value prospects. Now, audience engagement insights can help simplify this process and uncover opportunities by identifying the audiences who have high engagement with topics or articles related to your industry. 

• Get high-value content recommendations: Nearly every digital marketer has felt as though they’ve run out of content topics at one point or another. Moreover, what’s trending in your persona’s industry may change on a given day, and it’s important to stay up to date on these changes to ensure you’re producing relevant content. Now, these integrations offer an easy way to discover what kinds of topics or content your personas are actively engaging with. Not only can this help you boost performance on LinkedIn, but it can also provide actionable insights to improve your content marketing strategy to attract these audiences via other online tactics. 
  

• Real-time industry benchmark data: When it comes to measuring performance, the true test of how strong your performance metrics are is when they’re compared against others in your industry. Businesses need accurate, real-time benchmarks to see if they’re on the same level as competitors. Audience Engagement insights enable marketers to see not only how competitors are performing, but the kinds of content they’re posting and who they’re capturing as a result. This data can help marketers identify new opportunities or gaps that other competitors are not taking advantage of. 

Final thoughts 

LinkedIn continues to expand its platform to make it more valuable for marketers, and adding more integration opportunities is a natural step in this process. 

While LinkedIn may not have the bandwidth itself to launch these data insights just yet, by partnering with companies that specialize in this type of data analysis it’s able to give its audience the tools they need to see more success on the platform. 

Moreover, these insights are great for marketers who simply want to learn more about their buyer personas. LinkedIn is likely where your audience goes to discuss and discover new topics that are relevant to their professional interests and growth — and those insights can help power your marketing strategy to produce the most relevant content for the right audiences, especially for B2B personas.

To learn more about LinkedIn’s robust list of approved technology partners, you can visit its partner page here.