New web content and marketing tools promise to make the professional social network more effective in B2B marketing, financial analyst James Lee says.

As marketing targets, business-to-business professionals are 10 times more valuable than consumers because of their potential purchasing power, figures James Lee, a stock analyst who follows LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and other online social networks for the Boston office of CLSA, a global investment research and management firm based in Hong Kong. Yet the business-to-business network LinkedIn, without the marketing tools of the consumer-facing networks, is three times less productive at generating ad revenue compared with the consumer-facing networks, he adds.

But that void in B2B marketing through social media could soon be filled, Lee says. For one thing, LinkedIn is developing more relevant content on its site by aggregating information for business professionals from blogs and other business-oriented sites, and letting its users sign up to receive content that an algorithm matches to their stated interests. “LinkedIn is changing the use case from searching for jobs to discovering useful expert content,” he says. “If successful, this new platform should drive a better engagement and more page views.”

At the same time, Lee says, LinkedIn is expanding the ways advertisers can target the social network’s users by their job titles, job function, seniority at their company and their connections with business groups. In addition, LinkedIn is on a course to increase the number of marketing agencies that specialize in helping businesses run marketing campaigns through LinkedIn, using tools like the network’s Sponsored Update ads, which can be designed to target particular groups of LinkedIn users with content tailored to their interests.

Lee estimates that LinkedIn now has only about five marketing technology and services firms focused largely on working with its network, compared with some 300 that work with Facebook. One marketing software company focused on LinkedIn is ExactTarget, a unit of Salesforce.com Inc., which offers a Social.com advertising application for managing multiple ad campaigns on LinkedIn.

Lee says he expects to see more advertising firms begin to work with LinkedIn to help marketing clients take advantage of the personal information and “deep user data” available for generating customer leads on LinkedIn. He adds that about 40% of business decision makers are already on social media sites.

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“Right now, B2B marketing is caught up with tremendous pent-up demand,” Lee says.

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