LinkedIn today announced additions to its Marketing Solutions portfolio that it claims gives B2B marketers full-funnel capabilities to nurture leads. Most notable is the new Lead Accelerator, a product of the business social network’s $175 million acquisition of Bizo last July.
Bizo’s platform was tailored to target and nurture B2B customers through long selling cycles. According to company literature, it owns data on 90% of the U.S. business population which its system integrates with existing CRM, marketing automation, content management, and Web analytics programs.
Initial promotional materials for Lead Accelerator promises to engage the 80% of known prospects who don’t open emails by identifying them across the Web and serving them relevant content as they research new purchases.
“The bottom line is, most [B2B] marketers are converting less than 1 percent of all possible leads,” wrote LinkedIn Marketing Solutions Head of Products Russell Glass in a blog today. Glass (above) is Bizo’s founder. “Our new lead generation and nurturing product…connects companies to the right professionals with the right content as they make their way through the purchase decision process.
The other new addition, LinkedIn Network Display, integrates the Bizo audience data with current first-party data owned by LinkedIn to allow marketers to follow leads with ads placed across 2,500 other publisher sites on the Web.
According to LinkedIn, beta tester eCornell—an online executive development operation of Cornell University—doubled its landing page conversion rate using the new services. Lenovo, another tester, decreased its cost per lead by 60%, LinkedIn claims.
“We ultimately sold to LinkedIn in large part because we believed that the platform and the brand provided a huge opportunity for our products to reach even more marketers and to reach them faster,” Glass wrote in a guest commentary yesterday on CNBC.com.
