LinkedIn Announces New ‘Engagement Insights’ to Boost Marketing Performance

Recently, LinkedIn announced a new way which will leverage more of its user data to help marketers connect and engage in a more personalized fashion.

As explained by LinkedIn;

“Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of PYLON for LinkedIn Engagement Insights, a reporting API solution sold by DataSift, that lets marketers around the world access LinkedIn data to help them improve engagement with their content and deliver positive ROI on LinkedIn.”

The idea of this way is simple – it just wants to make it easier for you to learn more about your ideal prospects on the platform before you even begin talking with one another.

Like Facebook, LinkedIn has a virtual treasure-trove of insights on its members – everything from where you live, work and went to school to your hobbies and professional interests. Now it’s looking to provide access to more of those insights to help marketers improve campaign performance.

More Effective Marketing

LinkedIn has long kept their data under lock and key, but the new process opens up the opportunities on this front.

As explained by LinkedIn:

“Our strategic partnership with DataSift is rooted in a desire to help marketers take the guesswork out of media planning and ad optimization on LinkedIn. Through LinkedIn Engagement Insights, marketers can get the information they need to build better marketing campaigns and more effectively reach premium professional audiences on LinkedIn.”

LinkedIn provides an example of a software company who’s trying to reach IT decision makers – through the new Engagement Insights, you could work out what types of content and topics this audience engages with most, then use that insight to help reach them.

I’ve long been an advocate of using LinkedIn’s advanced search features to narrow your target audience down by specific niches, and then engage in 1-on-1, personalized marketing to build the relationship.

LinkedIn’s new tool – designed for advertisers – takes that approach to an even higher level.

Using  Engagement Insights, marketers can filter the interests and opinions of professionals in a whole new set of ways, including by industry, seniority, company size, job title, job function and more. These new data points will help marketers hone in on the right audiences, create better content and gain more understanding of how their brand stacks up against the competition on LinkedIn.

The Right Prospects + A Personalized Approach

Best of all, you don’t need to be a paying advertiser to utilize this approach on LinkedIn – you can simply scan someone’s profile, and within a few seconds find multiple ways to break the ice and personalize your interactions.

It’s critical to always utilize an element of data from your prospect’s profile – where they live, went to school, hobbies/interests, where they volunteer, etc. – to help break the ice and spark a non-work conversation to get things off on the right foot and build camaraderie.

Just like in real life, you need to start off a LinkedIn relationship with a little bit of small talk.

The power of selling your product or service on LinkedIn lies in locating, engaging and quickly building a 1-on-1, personalized relationship with targeted prospects you find on LinkedIn.

Whether you decide to use LinkedIn’s new advertising tools or peruse profiles individually, the power of personalizing your engagements in this fashion is the secret to success on the network.