Marketo & LinkedIn: A Powerful Marketing Automation Solution

May 8, 2015

April was an exciting month for Marketo and LinkedIn. In a press release, the engagement software and solutions provider and the business professional social media network announced that they would join forces to create a method of more personalised engagement for marketers – whether they’re online or offline.

This new partnership will combine LinkedIn’s Lead Accelerator and Marketo’s powerful marketing automation solution to further intertwine offline, digital and social channels so that marketing professionals can nurture engagement with prospective leads wherever they are in the online world. GE, one of today’s most innovative companies and a key component that made this venture possible, will be leading the joint solution.

“We’re incredibly focused on delivering a superior customer experience at GE, and that means engaging with each of our customers and prospects in a meaningful way to forge relationships,” GE’s general manager of Performance Marketing Labs Andy Markowitz says. “Marketo and LinkedIn are coming together with their best-in-class marketing and digital nurturing platforms, so we can have personalised conversations with our customers at scale and deliver the best solutions for their business.

What This Means for You

Customers of Marketo and LinkedIn Lead Accelerator will finally be able to weave together marketing efforts from email, direct display and social display to craft a finely-tailored experience for all visitors to GE websites.

This joint venture between Marketo and LinkedIn will allow marketers to connect with both known and anonymous prospects and create a better method of fostering long-term relationships with consumers. This method moves beyond email and instead opts for using display and social ads on both desktop and mobile browsers and devices. The ads will target consumers based on their specific stage of the buying process.

Marketers will also be provided with usable data that will tell them more about their leads than ever before. This new method will provide more information about known lead while helping marketers better identify anonymous leads – those who do not complete sign-up forms or any other identifying task. Using behavioural, business and profile, ads will be more targeted to fit the needs of consumers.

This venture will also give marketers the opportunity to engage in long-term conversations with consumers by creating a way to send quality content to consumers at just the right moment. By doing so, marketers will be able to promote both brand loyalty and advocacy. 

To further clarify this point, let’s look at an example. John is scrolling through a GE website and downloads a free ebook provided by the company. Unfortunately, John does not fill out a sign-up sheet so the company seemingly has no way to contact John and follow up with him.

The next day, John logs into his LinkedIn account to scroll through his feed. Because of the Marketo and LinkedIn partnership, GE can send personalised advertisements based on the content the viewer downloaded. In this example, John might see an ad quoting some of the content in the ebook and promoting an upcoming webinar on the content. Now interested, John clicks on the ad and signs up for the webinar, giving the company his email address. GE will now send John more targeted emails based on what he appears to be interested in, nurturing a positive relationship between the company and John.

“Until now, marketers were forced to manage their programs separately on different channels,” Marketo’s CEO Phil Fernandez says. “This challenge made it nearly impossible to engage customers and prospects with relevant, useful content that builds trust and long-term relationships. Marketo’s integration with LinkedIn removes that barrier and makes it possible for marketers to nurture customers in a personalised and consistent way across channels.”

Consistent Lead Nurturing

This new globally-available venture will help marketers track anonymous visitors from the moment they log onto a company’s website, provide relevant content across multiple marketing channel, pull the visitor into the sales funnel and continue the lead-nurturing process at all times in the customer lifecycle.

Some of the more important capabilities of the integration include being able to:

1. Foster current Marketo contacts with timed ads that run in conjunction with other related digital marketing efforts on other channels.
2. Encourage anonymous users whose profile and onsite activity falls in tandem with buyer personas to become leads and then consumers.
3. Utilise A/B testing to better efforts in ad design and optimisation as well as nurturing stream design.
4. Accurately measure and track leads as they enter the sales funnel and continue towards the purchase phase.
5. Provide analytics to better understand ad display effectiveness and help marketers see new avenues for improvement.

With this joint venture, marketers now have the power to better understand their leads and how they can further nurture them along. This will help them improve the content they produce and answer the concerns that their audiences actually have. There will be a lot less guesswork as marketers learn what their audiences respond best to, and with Marketo’s great A/B testing platform, testing out new ad designs and messages has never been easier.