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LinkedIn Goes All-In on B2B Video

Editor’s Note: This is a special encore post. It attracted the second-most traffic in the first half of the year of any LinkedIn Marketing Blog post that first appeared in 2018.

As a B2B marketer, capturing your audience’s attention has never been harder. While video is a proven and popular tactic to engage decision-makers, the challenge has been finding a quality environment in which to reach them. According to an internal LinkedIn study, over 46% of B2B advertisers surveyed said this was a top challenge when running video campaigns on other platforms.

Today, we’re excited to announce two major updates that let you use sight, sound and motion to tell more compelling stories: video for Sponsored Content and Company Pages. These offerings build on the momentum of member video, which we launched in August.

Bring Your Campaigns to Life with Video for Sponsored Content

Native video ads represent the next evolution of LinkedIn Sponsored Content that lets you engage with business decision-makers throughout the buyer’s journey on Linkedin. Unlike pre- or post-roll video ads, video for Sponsored Content lives directly in the news feed as a standalone post.

Video for Sponsored Content helps you achieve your marketing objectives across the funnel by:

  • Building brand awareness by telling rich, visual stories in the premium context of LinkedIn
  • Driving qualified traffic to your desktop or mobile website, and
  • Collecting high-quality leads with a persistent “call to action” button or through our integrated Lead Gen Forms product.

Without accurate targeting, your ads won’t be seen by the right audiences. With LinkedIn’s suite of B2B targeting capabilities available for video for Sponsored Content, you can find your audience by traits like job title, seniority, company name, industry, skills, and more. What’s more, the integration with our Matched Audiences solution ensures you can target your Sales team’s highest-priority accounts with account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns.

Since launching our private beta in October, over 700 advertisers, including GE, Philips and Audi Canada have tested video for Sponsored Content to highlight not only their products and services, but also their company mission, customer success stories, and thought leadership content. These videos are helping marketers deepen engagement with their brands: on average, LinkedIn members spend almost 3x more time watching video ads compared to time spent with static Sponsored Content.

Video content is crucial for our brand, and these changes allow LinkedIn's professional community to more easily derive value from the content we are producing. While our videos can be long – up to 3 minutes – we are seeing deep engagement at a great value. — Kaydee Bridges, Vice President, Digital & Social Media Strategy at Goldman Sachs. 

Marketers understand that everything hinges on delivering greater ROI. With video for Sponsored Content, you can measure your campaign’s success through insights and detailed breakdowns about the types of professionals watching, engaging with, and even converting on your video ads. LinkedIn’s proprietary Conversion Tracking tool is also integrated, enabling you to measure the number of leads, sign-ups, website visits, and other valuable actions that your video content generates.

Renske Siersema, Social Media Manager at KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, also shared the importance of leveraging video to engage with their audience of business travelers. "Video stands out because it doesn't tell, but it shows. On a platform where there's more business content, a video stands out more, especially on LinkedIn."

Make Connections with Company Page Video

Organic native video has been embraced by members as a new and creative way to share knowledge and express themselves. Today, we’re also making video sharing available for all companies and publishers.

With Company Page video, organizations can now share first-hand looks into their:

Companies are also showing how they're effectively attracting talent, and driving engagement, and conversation with professional audiences right from their Company Page on LinkedIn. Company Page video is 5x more likely than other types of content to start a conversation among members, based on results in our beta program.

Video for Sponsored Content and Company Pages is rolling out and will be available to all businesses in the next few weeks.

As a part of video for Sponsored Content, we’ve signed an agreement with Oracle’s Moat to offer third-party video measurement and viewability, and intend to make these services available to customers later this year.

For more information, go to linkedin.com/videoads. To learn more about best practices we’ve compiled from the more than 300 million video impressions and 7,500 ad campaigns, visit our video ad tips page.