As well as serving as a way to connect professionals and the wider business community, LinkedIn is also increasingly being used as an effective marketing channel.
In fact, LinkedIn Marketing Solutions is currently growing at a rate that is 3x as fast as the overall B2B digital advertising market.
The LinkedIn Marketing Partner Program is a global community of qualified technology and service providers, helping marketers deliver their campaigns on the platform. It currently recognises partners such as HubSpot, MediaOcean, Salesforce, Oracle and Adobe.
Speaking with B&T, LinkedIn’s Senior Partner Manager, ANZ Amanda Margariti said the program is helping advertisers
“Our partners help marketers across a number of specialties such as Campaign Management, Reporting and ROI, Audiences, and Lead Generation,” she said.
“With partner-enabled use cases, marketers can scale their marketing and advertising on LinkedIn through functionality like more targeting capabilities, better lead management for routing leads and enriching data, and multi-channel measurement and revenue attribution.”
The data shows that LinkedIn Marketing Partner Program can deliver on its promise, with all of the top 50 advertisers on the platform currently using one or more partners to drive value for their business.
“When LinkedIn and partners come together, marketers win. LinkedIn is better able to meet every marketer where they are and leverage their existing tools to execute their LinkedIn marketing strategy,” Margariti continued.
“For marketers who may not be using tools with LinkedIn, discovering partners creates opportunities to achieve more against their marketing objectives through innovative platforms and features that make their day to day simpler and more efficient.”
Growing the partner program
After launching in 2017 with a handful of partners, the LinkedIn Marketing Partner Program has experienced rapid growth, particularly over the past 12 months with the number of partners growing by 69 per cent and the number of customers leveraging partners up more than 50 per cent.
So what has been the driving force behind this growth? A sense of community.
“Community is at the heart of the Marketing Partner Program. Earlier this June we hosted our first Partner Connect event in APAC. As a well-established event for North America and Europe, it was an incredible milestone to bring the event to APAC,” Margariti said.
“Given the growth we had seen in the region, the time was right for us to put the APAC partner community on the map for LinkedIn globally and to build and foster the local community.
“Partners are deeply engaged because they are growing their businesses with LinkedIn. They understand the value that they can create for their customers by connecting to LinkedIn and making what LinkedIn does available to their customers. Partners get access to support, resources, training, and exclusive events including Partner Connect.”
With the COVID-19 pandemic accelerating the pace of digital transformation around the world, solutions like the LinkedIn Marketing Partner Program are becoming even more valuable for marketers, Margariti explained.
“Buyers now expect a full end-to-end digital experience and will increasingly look for providers that offer one. While technology changes quickly, organisations commonly do not. Martech can bridge a part of this gap though, helping organisations keep pace with customers’ expectations and giving marketers the access and speed to make change happen now,” she said.
“This second wave of digital transformation, these new buying behaviours, this new connected but more distributed workforce has led to some of the fastest growth in the history of our Marketing Solutions business.”
Want to find out more about the program? Reach out here.
