LinkedIn has a network of over 500 million members, of which, 46 million of those users are students that are looking to get a jumpstart on their career search or are recent graduates.
This is a huge audience for your business to market to. However, there are many features available to business marketers that narrow down the target audience, even as the network continues to grow.
With that many members, it’s hard to imagine not using LinkedIn in your business marketing strategy.
When Microsoft acquired the platform in 2016, it enabled the company to look further into what LinkedIn can do for all of its members.
In October of 2018, LinkedIn partnered with Oracle, a software company that specializes in databases, to announce that it has several new integrations working the two businesses together.
The most prominent of the integrations is the overhaul of the recruitment tools, which makes maneuvering back and forth between screens easier for recruiter and finding talent easier and more streamlined, among other things.
The recruiter can now use the LinkedIn sourcing with Oracle Recruiting to find more candidates recommended by the “Recommended Matches,” who show candidates based on position fitness.
This has allowed Administrators and Recruiters the ability to see the skills of their current employees, any gaps that they might have, and it enables them to compare their workforce with their competitor’s workforce.
Oracle customers also gained access to the LinkedIn Learning feature, which means they can now use the learning catalog offered by LinkedIn, and a centralized location for administrators to view which of their employees have accessed and completed courses.
Administrators can also view reports on engagement with the course. Currently, there are 30 to 50 new courses offered every month, including courses on how to make work environments more inclusive. Some of the other new features on LinkedIn Learning include the following.
• Insights and recommendations for making the learning more relevant.
• Allowing administrators to add their own content, or use third-party created videos.
• Upload, manage, and track videos.
• Reports showing the progress of learners and the completion of videos.
• Tag videos to make searching videos for content based on purpose easier.
Microsoft products are also seeing updates. In Microsoft’s email software, users can now see the profile information on the people in their contacts and in 2019 added insights into the people you meet with to further personalize interactions. Collaborating with members on LinkedIn will be easier as well since you will now be able to create content in Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint with your connections even if you don’t have their email address.
The “Groups” feature in LinkedIn has also undergone improvements. It is available now in the app, with the ability to manage, post, and edit content as well as accept join requires and all other moderator functions and receive notifications of activity.
Searching for jobs will also be easier. When searching for jobs and entering criteria, the option for “remote jobs” is in the “location” checkbox, and jobs offering telecommuting or working from home will be the posted results.
Company information on the right side of the screen now shows quick context for each posted job so users don’t have to leave the search results page. The option for notifications when certain companies and positions open up is also a newly available feature in LinkedIn.
LinkedIn has many new integrations and feature updates planned for the future. It will be more dependent on Artificial Intelligence (AI) to get to know a member’s clients and make minor decisions, including scheduling, accepting or denying connection requests, and facilitating meeting mutually beneficial people.
Virtual meetings will allow face to face contact without having to leave the office. Video profiles will replace regular resumes and give opportunities to add personality to your self-promotion.
LinkedIn will start allowing Learning Lounges to be set up as virtual training centers, and will offer resources to current employees and potential candidates to help them improve their current skills or learn new ones.
This will be helpful for both recruiters and candidates because it will show a candidate’s willingness to learn new skills as well as their adaptability to changes that may be required in their position.
LinkedIn for Business
Another new feature that businesses should take advantage of is the Campaign Manager feature. This new feature will automatically adjust bids on sponsored content through the automated bidding feature so businesses can gain the optimal outcomes for their advertising budgets.
The Campaign Manager feature, allows marketers to put in an objective and the automatic bidding feature will find the best members to fulfill the objective.
Advertising will now be allowed on personal pages as well to support the branding of products for smaller businesses.
Customer-centric marketing will start to become more prominent when the AI elements begin to change how we use digital products and how we communicate online.
These days, the business to customer buying cycle is getting much shorter because of recommendations from artificial intelligence compiled data. Customers are starting to rely more on the data compiled by the artificial intelligence.
This allows them to make minor purchases on behalf of them, which becomes more passes in their buying cycle.
However, the opposite is true of business to business buying cycle. That cycle is getting longer due to more consideration of and deeper examination proffered of the proffered content.
Due to the growing popularity and increased practicality of AI, more business marketers are planning to invest in artificial intelligence in the coming years.
Artificial intelligence is being recognized as the next important thing in business. AI can significantly raise efficiency with communication and notifications of better marketing approaches.
LinkedIn is joining this train by adding the Lead Gen Forms to make generating leads easier by automatically populating a customer form using that member’s LinkedIn profile when they click on an ad.
Then Lead Gen From transmits that customer’s information, including their name and contact information. Once the potential customer clicks the submit button, they can be transported to the thank you page.
Then the business will be able to see the content that attracted the potential customer to the page to begin with.
On the marketer’s side of Lead Gen Form, once the prospect submits the data, it can be stored into the Campaign Manager for follow up, or download it into other marketing tracker software.
LinkedIn is providing business members more and more of these marketing tracking tools to better assist a company’s marketing campaigns. It is also offering ways to integrate sales and marketing teams to better streamline the buying process for business to business sales by creating an easier to navigate sales and marketing tab.
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