Feature Articles

By Matt McKenzie, Contributing Editor

Editor’s Note: The following article is the first in a two-part series highlighting the nuances of B2B marketing on LinkedIn. Part two will be available in next week’s edition of DemandGen Report.

Over the past few years, LinkedIn has evolved into a major social media platform for B2B marketing. But just how does LinkedIn compare to other social media platforms, and how should marketers take advantage of its unique capabilities?

These are big questions, but many experts and B2B marketers are increasingly confident about the answers. As it turns out, LinkedIn is far more effective at generating leads than other social media sites, and it now offers an impressive arsenal of tools designed specifically for B2B marketing. At the same time, weak analytics and a conservative approach to third-party app support mean that marketers still face some challenges managing – and measuring – their LinkedIn activities.

Download the full article in PDF format here. 

Last week Bulldog Solutions hosted a webcast, "The State of Demand Generation 2012: Trends and Guidance,” hosted by Bulldog Solutions. The webcast, which featured three expert panelists, who also contributed to a recent DemandGen special report on this topic, examined several of the most important challenges and opportunities facing B2B marketers.

One area where the panelists differed involved the importance of persona-driven versus account-driven approaches to B2B marketing. "One of the biggest obstacles we face is that we don't pay enough attention to the fact that we sell to companies and not individuals," noted Jason Stewart, Director of Marketing at Demandbase. "B2B techniques of one-to-one marketing are sort of encroaching into our B2B space" – a trend, he noted, that leads to marketers "neglecting the top of the funnel" as they lean too heavily upon tools that profile and target individual buyers.