Life moves differently during the festive season. You do less, but it counts for a whole lot more. That’s true of time spent with friends and family, brisk walks in the great outdoors, long meals where you can savour every course and conversation, and the games you’d never play at any other time of the year. It’s also true of the way people engage with marketing on LinkedIn. The weeks around Christmas and New Year deliver some of the best results for LinkedIn ad campaigns – but a lot of marketers miss out on the opportunity, because they’re thinking about their audience’s time and attentio ..read more

What does it take for marketers to be able to connect their brand marketing investment with their demand generation efforts? How can they ensure that the awareness and mental availability they’re building flows through into interest and action when the time is right? How can they maximise the ROI of performance marketing by zeroing in on the people they’ve already primed to respond? Connecting brand and demand effectively depends on your campaigns having access to four critical advantages. The building blocks of brand to demand marketing Firstly, you need the ability to reach the right aud ..read more

For as long as marketers have distinguished between brand and demand, they’ve wrestled with the dilemma of which to prioritise at a given moment – and within a given budget. Lately, that juggling act has become trickier, because both types of marketing activity can make a strong case for why they should be the main focus, right now. On the demand side, marketers are faced with the task of rebuilding revenues in the aftermath of the pandemic. That puts them under pressure to get calls to action in front of everyone who might consider buying from their category. Add in the fact that B2B sale ..read more

The shift to a digital, distributed workforce creates important opportunities for a global leader in professional audio equipment. It also creates a challenge. Jabra needed to build a pipeline of potential customers that understood how it could help power the transition to remote, digital working. Within its target accounts, the business needed to convince all of those influencing hardware purchase decisions: IT decision-makers, but also the many employees who have a say over which headphones or other equipment they use. In other words, Jabra needed a way to bring together brand building a ..read more

There are times when the world’s professionals feel like a globalised community, responding to common stories, themes and issues that resonate in every region – and drive shared conversations at the world’s Watercooler that is LinkedIn. There are other times when it becomes clear just how powerfully local events and context shape the agenda. At these moments, the mindsets of professionals diverge – and so too does the content they share on our platform. This month’s edition of The Watercooler captures how attention is being drawn in different directions as audiences grapple with the huge i ..read more

Growth. Everyone’s talking about it. Everyone’s making plans for it. Every business expects their marketing function to deliver it. But does growth really mean the same thing as it did before the arrival of COVID-19? Are the ways that businesses used to think about the concept really fit for purpose in 2021 and beyond? Can marketers deliver the growth their businesses need if they still define growth in the same terms as before? These are the types of questions that the Institute for Real Growth was established to answer – and those answers have never felt more pressing and compelling than ..read more

A recent headline offers a message today’s marketers are wise to take to heart: 95% of B2B buyers are not in the market for your products.  This takeaway comes from a recent study carried out by Ehrenberg-Bass for the LinkedIn B2B Institute. The math isn’t all that complicated: Companies change providers of B2B services every five years or so; therefore, only 20% are in the market for those services in a given year, and just 5% in a given quarter.  That leaves 95% who are not actively looking to buy. And yet, so much sales and marketing outreach assumes the opposite. Short-term s ..read more

Last month’s edition of The Watercooler showed audiences responding to content that explored a new workplace ethos for a post-pandemic world. This month, the focus is on a different aspect of the future: the start-up and investment opportunities created by the disruption of last 18 months. From the rapid growth of digital banking in Latin America to innovative logistics solutions in North Africa, thrifty fashion in the Middle East and a payments app in Nigeria: audiences in almost every region are sharing the stories of local or regional businesses that are thriving rather than merely surv ..read more

The move to remote working hasn’t changed the skillsets all great salespeople need, but the proliferation of data and new technology means access to new insights and buying signals. We spoke to sales industry experts from Citrix and Tact.ai to discuss to how organisations can interpret the vast amount of data at the fingertips on our recent Sales Think Tank video series. According to McKinsey, 97% of decision-makers are happy to make purchases through a wholly digital journey, so these new ways of working are here to stay – pandemic or no pandemic. But are we tuning int ..read more

Strengthening existing relationships has been crucial during the pandemic, but the changing landscape we’re all operating in has also raised the question of how to generate opportunities without the undoubted benefits of meeting face-to-face. We tackled how businesses can keep their sales pipeline full in our Sales Think Tank video series alongside industry experts from Oracle and JB Sales Training, read on to discover their perspective.  As we move further into the era of remote selling, we need to know how best to engage with buyers and initiate new relationships – without ever sitt ..read more