In this post we discuss what benefits marketers can experience from Marketo and LinkedIn joining forces.This week, Marketo and LinkedIn announced a partnership dedicated to the integrating LinkedIn paid advertising functionality directly into the marketing automation platform, adding a whole new level to MA journeys.

The functionality isn’t yet available to everyone with only GE trialling it, but we thought we’d give you a little more information while we wait for it to be more widely rolled out.

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The solution connects LinkedIn's ‘Lead Accelerator’ solution with Marketo's Engagement Marketing Platform. The integration fundamentally bridges paid advertising on LinkedIn with the digital marketing Marketo is known for. The solution will help the marketer to tell a consistent story across their various channels based on a lead’s stage in the buying cycle.

The alliance sits under Marketo’s new Ad Bridge capabilities, aimed at building links between marketing and digital technologies. The LinkedIn connection will provide marketers with enriched data on known and anonymous prospects, including relevant business, profile and behavioural information, to deliver more relevant ads.

How does it work?

As an example: a prospective customer visits the company website and downloads a piece of content, but does not provide any contact information, (i.e email, which is Marketo’s unique identifier), they will then see a personalised ad when they visit their LinkedIn page. The tailored ad from the company will be based on the demographic information that is known about the user and the type of content they visited on the company website.

The prospect might then be prompted to join a webinar or event for which they will have to register. As the prospect is already logged in via LinkedIn, the system will use LinkedIn’s Autofill capabilities to register the individual. Which is hoped the increase the chance of a conversion. The company can then further nurture its relationship with this prospective customer via Marketo.

What else is new?

Recently, Marketo also introduced ‘Marketo Calendar HD’, an extension of its original marketing activity calendar functionality. This displays and shares the marketer’s plans and programs visually. Marketo also launched the ‘Marketo Moments’ mobile app so users can access the platform via their smartphone to review campaigns and access reports.

All of these updates to the platform are moving it closer to its goal of being seen as providing a marketing cloud. If you’re a Marketo user we’d love to hear your thoughts on these updates and if you want to get to grips with how you can optimise your use of these features please contact us.