Congratulations to the LinkedIn Marketing Awards winners

Huge boosts in awareness through a cleverly co-ordinated job title update, entire new markets opened up by a famous set of floorplans, massive engagement levels through challenging marketing stereotypes, a brand achieving 258% of lead gen targets through exceptional, in-depth content. Who says there’s no room for creative thinking in B2B marketing?

Today, we’re extremely proud to announce the winners of the first ever LinkedIn Marketing Awards – the awards that recognise the great B2B marketing taking place on our platform. These winners prove not only that creativity is alive and well in B2B – they demonstrate how original marketing thinking consistently makes a difference to the fortunes of businesses and the lives of those involved with them. All of our winners delivered measurable and significant benefits to the bottom line through the work they created. And the diversity amongst our winning campaigns shows that, whatever the brief, there’s a creative way to approach it on LinkedIn.

Our judging panel of top B2B marketers, high-profile creative directors, media planners and strategists had a tough task, with hundreds of entries showing the range of great B2B marketing taking place on our platform. We’re hugely grateful to all of our judges for the enthusiasm and energy they brought to the judging process. We’d also like to thank the hundreds of marketers who took the time to submit their vote for our People’s Choice Award.

Here are the results of that judging and voting process: nine great B2B campaigns – and nine worthy winners of the LinkedIn Marketing Awards:

Belgium’s online real estate marketplace needed a way to drive demand for its high-end marketing services (including VR and 3D floorplans) in the US market and across Europe. Creating 3D floor plans for office-based US shows like Mad Men, The Office, The IT Crowd and Parks and Recreation set sharing on LinkedIn alight. The campaign generated hours of free media coverage, new enquiries from more than 40 countries and enabled a US launch for the business without spending a dollar on marketing.

Get full details in our LinkedIn Marketing Awards winners gallery

How could a renewable energy business generate big uplifts in awareness with no media budget? E.ON unlocked the power of its employees’ LinkedIn networks when it asked its employees in Sweden to add a new title, Solfarmare (Sunfarmer) to their LinkedIn profiles. Within just a few hours, LinkedIn updates had turned the Sunfarmer into an organic movement reaching tens of thousands of members in the country.

Get full details in our LinkedIn Marketing Awards winners gallery

A content strategy rooted in current affairs content, bold visuals and animated videos has transformed engagement levels for this innovative investment solutions business. The campaign beat all benchmarks, doubled the size of the brand’s LinkedIn follower base, and drove significant uplifts in relevant investment products.

Get full details in our LinkedIn Marketing Awards winners gallery

Lenovo’s always-on content programme, including its innovative Office 2020 interactive report, has helped the world’s leading PC manufacturer to build awareness of its commercial and enterprise technologies, outperform its industry in terms of engagement and significantly grow its pipeline of high-quality leads.

Get full details in our LinkedIn Marketing Awards winners gallery

The social media moderation and risk management business generated the high-quality leads that it needed, at scale, to extend its offer into new areas. Original content in the form of in-depth, industry-specific reports helped to deliver 258% of its lead generation targets whilst almost halving cost and significantly increasing quality.

Get full details in our LinkedIn Marketing Awards winners gallery

The financial technology brand’s email-driven strategy was failing to engage the C-suite decision makers that it needed to influence. An ABM approach leveraging LinkedIn’s targeting capabilities and reaching C-suites through Sponsored Content and Sponsored InMail, trebled the number of impressions that the brand achieved. It led to LinkedIn driving 30% of registrations for all of the brand’s events, with 15% of these attendees becoming sales qualified opportunities.

Get full details in our LinkedIn Marketing Awards winners gallery

The creative media agency brought the power of true insight to life by taking on some of the most prevalent stereotypes in advertising – and the hidden impact that they have. Self-published LinkedIn posts took on the industry’s treatment of fathers, the LGBT community and women, leading with though-provoking original data and impactful imagery. This approach delivered extremely strong engagement levels, sharing by industry influencers and major trade titles, and achieved all targets in terms of views, likes and shares. UM developed an unconventional KPI for success as well: in a test for how provocative the pieces really were, it aimed for each to be trolled at least once.

Get full details in our LinkedIn Marketing Awards winners gallery

The Irish Food Company built an entire brand and communications strategy around the power of employee sharing on LinkedIn, helping to drive awareness of its role as a strategic partner to the food and beverage industry and raise its profile across Europe and the US. Kerry leveraged the insight that employees’ LinkedIn networks were not only 10x larger than the company’s own reach – they also involved more senior people within the types of organisations its B2B marketing needed to target. The marketing team developed an internal campaign to engage employees in curating and sharing content – and used LinkedIn Elevate to execute its employee advocacy strategy. The results? Sharing by 381 employees on Elevate delivered 1.7 million impressions and close to 40,000 incidences of engagement. When rolled out across global markets it continued to beat all Elevate benchmarks.

Get full details in our LinkedIn Marketing Awards winners gallery

Accor Hotels has succeeded in putting social media at the heart of its customer journey, by empowering employees as brand advocates – and leveraging their knowledge of food, drink and hospitality on LinkedIn. Linking its talent brand and its customer-facing brand in this way, helped to build a pipeline of talented employees at the same time as driving awareness of Accor Hotels’ brand values and expertise. 

Get full details in our LinkedIn Marketing Awards winners gallery

Congratulations to all of our LinkedIn Marketing Awards winners – and also to our other shortlisted campaigns. All of these demonstrate how great B2B marketing stands out on LinkedIn, and how bold thinking consistently delivers the results that businesses need. You can explore the full story behind all of our winning campaigns on the LinkedIn Marketing Awards website.