Sixty percent of the world’s population—4.5 billion people—are using the Internet, and 3.8 billion of them are using one or more social media platforms. As more people get access, the numbers will continue to grow, making social media presence a must-have for marketers. Many marketers recognize the importance of social media in their broader efforts, but limit themselves to organic posts and neglect the additional benefits that come from paid social media advertising.
From a business perspective, which social platforms deserve attention?
While LinkedIn has fewer total users than the top three, it’s the largest professional network available and tailor-made for B2B marketers:
1 https://business.linkedin.com/marketing-solutions/audience
2 https://www.bluecorona.com/blog/b2b-marketing-statistics
3 https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2019/10/success-differentiators-b2b-research/
In his article Channel Marketers Are Missing a Big Opportunity: The New VAR Mindset, LinkedIn’s Jason Carriere explains, “Unlike other tech marketers who can focus solely and primarily on their own business, VAR channel marketers have the opportunity and expectation to utilize vendor dollars in a partner marketing program or advertising spend.” What’s one of the most direct and measurable ways to use those vendor dollars? Paid advertising on LinkedIn. With LinkedIn advertising channel marketers can implement highly targeted programs that align with partner goals and generate long-term ROI opportunities rather than one-and-done leads.
Getting Started with LinkedIn Advertising
A company must have a LinkedIn company page to publish content and purchase advertising. Fortunately setting up a company page is straightforward and an opportunity to showcase the partner’s brand to millions of potential customers. Once the company page is up and running there are four different types of ads available that are designed to support different marketing objectives including text ads, sponsored messaging, sponsored content, and dynamic ads.
Turnkey Programs for Channel Partners
What if you and your partners don’t have the time or expertise to develop, launch, and monitor your own campaigns? No problem. Yeager has partnered with LinkedIn to co-develop turnkey programs specifically for suppliers to provide to partners. These programs let partners benefit from the power and reach of LinkedIn’s platform to drive awareness, engagement, leads, and sales pipeline. With highly targeted and measurable programs that enable partners to maximize marketing dollars for direct impact and results, LinkedIn is the perfect solution to elevate partner marketing activities to the next level.
These programs enable channel marketers to:
- Implement LinkedIn paid advertising at scale for all key partners, with Yeager managing program strategy, implementation, and optimization
- Give partners program options that align with their marketing goals
- Offer campaign investment levels that enable all partners to benefit
- Make it easy for partners to participate with turkey programs and concierge service
Yeager offers three different LinkedIn advertising programs that are specifically designed for channel partners including:
Organic Social + Sponsored Posts
Organic posts keep partners in front of LinkedIn followers with consistency, helping showcase their capabilities and value proposition. This fully managed program implements organic posts on the partners’ behalf and chooses one or more posts to sponsor to help increase awareness of their capabilities:
The program includes:
- Editorial calendar
- Post copy and coordinating graphics
- Audience targeting
- Program set-up, implementation, and reporting
- Organic reposting
Sponsored Content
Sponsored Content ads promote your content to targeted audiences, inviting them to download with a simple, auto-populated inline form. Yeager works with partners to identify ideal existing content assets and can also help to create new content assets as needed. We produce multiple unique ads with graphics for each piece of content to determine top performing ads.
The program includes:
- Unique ads with graphics for each piece of content being promoted
- Audience targeting
- Advertising budget
- Campaign set-up, implementation, and reporting
Conversation Ads
Conversation Ads are presented to targeted LinkedIn users when they access LinkedIn Messaging, offering a choose-your-own-path experience with the partner’s company. Yeager works with you to identify specific calls-to-action that can be promoted to contacts for engagement. Content can include existing web pages, downloadable assets, requests for product demos, webinars, success stories, and more. Based on the calls to action, we craft the conversation ad(s) that will run.
The program includes:
- Ad goal setting
- Creative development
- Campaign set-up and audience targeting
- Budget management, implementation, reporting, and optimization
Yeager excels at developing comprehensive and results-driven channel partner marketing programs. Whether you need to recruit new partners, get existing partners more engaged, or enable them to sell more with lead generation campaigns or selling tools, Yeager has best practice solutions that can make the difference. If you’re interested in using LinkedIn advertising, or other channel marketing opportunities, for your company or your partners, get in touch with us.
