LinkedIn is arguably the most popular networking site, in the social world, for professionals.

The site has a really attractive ad products’ suite to which it added Sponsored Updates in July last year.

So what is it all about?

Sponsored Updates are very much like regular LinkedIn updates, the only distinction being that they are marked as ‘Sponsored’. LinkedIn users can like, comment, share and follow sponsored updates posted by brands.

Sponsored updates can be viewed on desktops, smartphones and tablets.

With every increase in the amount of content generated on the web, the chances of your content getting missed in the virtual ocean of content are higher than before. At the same time, marketers can’t do too much to make their content stand out because readers don’t appreciate content presentation that is at odds with the rest of the page that they are reading.

Effectively, brands need to do some amount of tight rope walking to get noticed by customers without alienating them.

The future of Sponsored Updates and how it’s helping B2B marketers

Sponsored Updates cater to two important requisites in digital marketing today: native advertising and targeted marketing.

Sponsored Updates is a good example of native advertising where the ad takes the form of regular content.

Using Sponsored Updates, B2B brands can target the right people with the right content. LinkedIn’s competence in targeting combined with the subtle nature of Sponsored Updates makes it a powerful tool in the hands of canny marketers.

One of the common problems these days is the quality of leads that marketers get but this may soon be a thing of the past.

The combination of the right audience, subtle and well-targeted content is resulting in Sponsored Updates delivering high quality leads. It is expected that as more marketers start using these updates and best practices evolve, Sponsored Updates will become a large source of high quality leads for B2B businesses on LinkedIn.

Another aspect that will be observed in the coming days is that as marketers develop greater familiarity with this tool, more of them will use images and different content types including rich media. This will increase the types of brand messages that marketers can communicate using Sponsored Updates.

For example, Sponsored Updates can be used to not only make company announcements and gain new customers, but also to deliver communication to their current customers about upgrades to products/ services they are using.

Success Story – Adobe

Adobe, a top B2B brand on LinkedIn, was a part of LinkedIn’s Sponsored Updates testing phase. The brand has continued using Sponsored Updates with impressive results after testing. Research indicated that after Adobe used Sponsored Updates, targeted decision makers were:

• 50% more likely to agree that Adobe is shaping the future of digital marketing
• 2.5x more likely to agree that Adobe’s Sponsored Updates captured their attention
• 79% more likely to agree that Adobe can help them optimize their media spend

Have LinkedIn Sponsored Updates been useful for your B2B brand in any other way? Tell us in your comments!

Image Source: Tech Marketing Buffalo