There are 96 mountain peaks in the US with an elevation of at least 14,000ft. Colorado has the most of any state at 53. No doubt, if you’ve been to Colorado, you’ve heard about these “fourteeners”. It’s a common goal to try to summit all 53. None are easy, but many are just long beautiful hikes. Eventually, though, you finish those and need to take on more challenging climbs.
Last summer, my son and I set our sights on Snowmass Mountain. The fastest and safest way up is via a steep snowfield that covers much of the mountain well into summer. An ice axe and boot crampons are essential equipment. When shopping for crampons, I came upon a pair for a little over $20. Sure, they were from some company I’d never heard of, only had 2 customer reviews and were a fraction of the cost of name-brand competitors. But the price was right! I bought them.
Did they just about get me killed? Yep. Did they prevent me from getting to the summit? Yep. They just kind of fell apart when I needed them most, as my son continued on to eternal glory and bragging rights. Sometimes not investing in the right tools can cost you a lot more in the end. The same is true in marketing.
Ads and Attribution
If you manage a marketing budget, you know how much money goes into two critical areas: paid media and marketing technology. This post is about the intersection of those two things. Namely, B2B advertising leader LinkedIn and the #1 B2B marketing attribution application, Bizible. Each brings unique value and, now connected via an enhanced integration, their combined value has become downright mountainous! Marketers have never been in a better position to break through the clouds and step onto their own summit of marketing mastery.
LinkedIn Ads have proven to be a powerful tool for B2B marketers. Sure, LinkedIn Ads might cost a little more than some competitors, but do they get you to the top of the mountain? Do they pay you back many times over in revenue growth? The evidence suggests they do. But more on that in a bit.
Measuring B2B Marketing Performance
As it turns out, measuring revenue and ROI performance in B2B advertising (and really B2B marketing overall) is a sufferfest. Why? In short, your CRM.
CRM holds hostage all of your sales opportunity, pipeline, and order value information and it’s built to track sales reps instead of buyer behavior. Thankfully, Bizible solves this problem by combining B2B marketing channel and CRM data to create a new 1st party dataset. It’s built exclusively to help you measure and optimize marketing performance at every stage of your lead-based or account-based demand funnel. With it, you can finally prove and improve the impact of marketing. With it, you can see what pipeline and revenue is coming from LinkedIn or any other channel. And that’s how we know LinkedIn rocks.
The ROI of LinkedIn Ads and Bizible
Results certainly vary and different advertising tactics work better at different times, but Bizible benchmark data showed that, on average, LinkedIn Ads provided the #1 ROI among major paid media platforms. Bizible is also a great example of “You get what you pay for”. There are other ways marketers try to do B2B marketing attribution without investing in a B2B marketing attribution application. But the other ways have limitations. These limitations are what has brought (and continues to bring) thousands of marketers to Bizible. In a 2020 Total Economic Impact Study commissioned by Adobe and conducted by Forrester Consulting, Forrester found that organizations investing in Bizible saw a 298% ROI and a <1yr investment payback period. Since each interviewed Bizible customer was already doing some form of attribution before they implemented Bizible, this return is even more impressive because it reflects not the value of doing attribution, but the value of doing attribution right.
A Strong Integration Gets Stronger
If LinkedIn and Bizible are each capable of providing such great returns, can that get even better when you connect them? Oh yes. How? Bizible automates the tagging, tracking, and attribution of LinkedIn Ads. Bizible proves the revenue contribution and ROI of advertising to win more budget. Finally, Bizible gives you the insight you need to know which ads, campaigns, and creative are generating not just leads, but leads that turn into pipeline and revenue. Of course, Bizible also helps you compare performance across all your channels so you can optimize your channel mix and overall spend.
As the latest result of Adobe’s strategic partnership with Microsoft, we’re excited to introduce a new native integration between Bizible and LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms. This new capability enhances the current and very popular integration between Bizible and LinkedIn Sponsored Content. Now, when marketers choose to take advantage of LinkedIn’s awesome auto-filling, high-conversion-rate forms in conjunction with Sponsored Content, Bizible can track and attribute revenue to those form fills. And it’s all automated. Bizible also captures form metadata such as Form Name and ID, Campaign Name and ID and more so that marketers can understand and optimize form performance right along with ad performance.
“This integration will make a huge difference for our team in assessing the impact of our LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms and using Bizible data to pivot our campaigns, as needed, to drive even more growth.” -Sydney Mulligan, Sr. Manager, Marketing Automation, Hyperscience
All of this is available to joint Bizible and LinkedIn users at no additional cost. This isn’t just a “possible integration” you need to sort out and maintain yourself or connect through some third-party data integration tool. Like all of Bizible’s marketing channel integrations, it’s easy to set up with just a few clicks and is fully vendor-supported.
Reaching your Summit
There are few things more important in marketing than knowing which investments and engagement tactics are driving progression and wins (and which are not). Marketers who have the tools to do this put themselves in a unique position to win and help their organizations win. LinkedIn Ads and Bizible are two tools we should all bring with us on our climb to the summit of state-of-the-art B2B marketing.
For more information, please visit our Bizible LinkedIn Integrations product docs or ask an Adobe representative.