Why LinkedIn believes marketing will become more important

In today’s fast-evolving technological society, brands face constant pressure trying to stay relevant and creating timely digital marketing strategy. Recently, LinkedIn’s Asia Pacific senior director of marketing, Olivier Legrand spoke at IAB’s Summit in Sydney, and revealed the key to leveraging engagement on the social networking site for professionals is to harness the ‘relevancy imperative’.

When analysing social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, each bring entirely new data sets to the table and help marketers be more relevant.

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According to Legrand, today’s websites have a 95 per cent chance of never converting, meaning the consumer doesn't even want to write you an email. Out of the five people that do interact, the truth is once you send that email, only 20 per cent will engage with a conversation.

“So the reality is, your success rate is only about one per cent,” Legrand said. “If you’re a really good marketer and have a strong automation system in place, you may get to a conversion rate to make that viable in your business.

“But what this means for me, is there is a huge lack of efficiency, because of a huge lack of relevance, and our ability to engage these people in a conversation that they really care about. On top of this, relevancy at scale is hard to achieve on a large, consumer level.”

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Below are five ways marketing will be even more relevant in the future according to Legrand:

Fusion between marketing and advertising technology

“For Linkedin, everything starts with our audience and with about 380 million members and 200 countries, people come to us to manage their connections, consume news, stay informed and find jobs,” said Legrand. “But now, more and more, they come to publish and to broadcast themselves. So all our members are now allowed to blog on our platform.”

Due to this new initiative, LinkedIn has had over a million posts since the beginning of 2015, with a current publishing rate of about 10,000 posts every day.

Data

According to Legrand, Amazon and Google are using data sets effectively to establish ways to use relevancy to deliver a better customer experience.

“Beyond technology, what has changed very much and it driving technology is the reality is the customer-buyer’s journey has changed dramatically,” Legrand said. “In many ways the journey looks like a walk down the internet. People are searching for something, they go to a website, they go and watch some reviews, they then go onto social media to get feedback from their friends and then they’re moving on. This means you’re going to have to find ways to insert yourself into those conversations.”

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Mobile

With the way mobile technology is changing the way brands become more relevant to customers. Currently over 50 per cent of members are using mobile technology to log on and interact on LinkedIn.

Legrand believes what is most interesting is that mobile is very personal. Brands can become more innovative in providing the right information at the right time to their customer on their mobile device.

“The personal nature of a mobile device can either mean brands give customers a really good experience, or a really terrible one,” he said. “I believe that in the next five years, technology and the way we will be doing this is going to get a lot more relevant and we will be able to deliver better experiences.”

Predictive Technology

As predictive technology continues to get stronger, there are ways we can think about leveraging relevancy.

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“If you can look at your customer data, and really identify the sweet spots of these people, you will be able to better focus on the right people, sell the right solutions and your results will get better,” Legrand said.

Marketing Automation

Through a successful marketing automation strategy, you can enhance relevancy to your customer’s journey and effectively walk them through the funnel, all the way to acquisition, Legrand said.

“If brands are listening to their customers, they will find ways to meet them in the middle,” he added. “They will be able to bring value to your search and help you find what you are looking for if they have relevant solutions. That I think will make a big difference moving forward.”

Source: CMO.com

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