LinkedIn Marketing Solutions vs. LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Although it offered great features, we didn't really see a lot of traffic or results from the ads we placed. Working in hospitality, we had to strategically time and place our ads around holiday seasons and it can be difficult to predict a marketing campaign. Depending on your market, LinkedIn may not be the best avenue to advertise with.

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LinkedIn Sales Navigator is hands down the best tool for identifying targeted contacts or leads. You can drill down on a company and look at its entire workforce, or search by the exact title that is your key target. The information is up to date, as people tend to keep their LinkedIn profiles current. In terms of other marketing functions LI Sales Navigator is extremely limited. BUT if you are looking to identify contacts for prospecting purposes, then this tool is what you need.

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• Targeting - they have done a great job of allowing you speak to ideal audiences
• Support - dedicated customer service and account advising is always accessible and very responsive
• Curation of professional audiences - one of the biggest advantages to the platform is that its users are for the most part are professional

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• Search Functionality: LinkedIn Sales Navigator has one of the most powerful search functions. The filters are not unnecessary and some are very well thought of. You can drill down to finding a needle in a haystack of 20000 employee company when it comes to using LinkedIn Sales Navigator if done in the right manner.
• Smart Links: Gone are the days of attached Decks. One can simply create their deck online using this feature on LinkedIn Sales Navigator, or even upload an existing ppt. A smart link is shareable as well as trackable for opens and clicks.
• Fewer Clicks: With a single click, I can filter out decision-makers in any company. With a single click, I can import contacts from LinkedIn Sales Navigator to Salesforce. Lesser clicks are actually less stressful if you think.

• The Campaign Manager is not good. It seems like the Campaign Manager (where you create and manage your self-serve ad campaigns) is buggy and doesn't have a good flow. Contrast with FB Ad Manager of the Google Adwords/Ads interface, which has a much more simple process to create and edits campaigns, ad groups, ads, keywords, audiences, budgets, etc. LinkedIn Campaign Manager seems to actively work against you trying to make changes to your campaigns.
• LinkedIn Campaign Manager offers three options: sponsored content, InMail, and text ads. LinkedIn used to offer other ad services that you couldn't access unless you had a "managed ad account" run by LinkedIn Staff with a dedicated monthly ad spend. It seems most of those "hidden" features have disappeared, though you still have to contract with LinkedIn to offer dynamic ads. It would be better if LinkedIn empowered marketers to create the ads they want. (Perhaps with a dedicated acct. manager like how Google Ads works.)
• This is silly, but it isn't easy to navigate to Campaign Manager. I have a bookmark for Campaign Manager because if you want to click there through LinkedIn, it takes 2 or 3 different screens to get to Campaign Manager. In my opinion, when you click the "Work" dropdown from the LinkedIn header (by your profile picture) you should have a link to Campaign Manager.
• LinkedIn, in recent months, has made substantial changes to the Ads platform and Campaign Manager. Though these changes work to address some of the above issues, LinkedIn still has quite a ways to go before their platform is on par with their competition.

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• Inbox needs work - too much confusion around your LinkedIn inbox and Sales Nav inbox
• Sorting - need a better, faster way to sort by for prospect lists and account lists
• Only voluntarily shared information. No cross checking or using API’s like a ZoomInfo

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This question is a no-brainer. The tool is the industry standard for anyone tied to sales and marketing. The name "LinkedIn Sales Navigator" is synonymous with streamlining relevant customer and account data in an easy to use format that is actionable and intelligent. The focus on continuous improvement and richer means of communicating with customers and prospects is evident each time new features are rolled out. The social component of the tool even includes a gamification component to ensure that peers remain relevant among each other, which is refreshing and enjoyable for those who engage the tool on a daily basis.

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in terms of promoted content reporting and usability, the platform is not as flexible or easy to use compared to more established social platforms like Facebook. However, it does offer plug-ins to Google Data Studio which makes pulling and manipulating data easier. My main usability gripe comes when looking at organic performance of a company page. There isn't an easy way to export organic performance data.

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Overall, it's very user-friendly. It's hard for a tool to make sorting through loads of data easy, but Sales Nav does this very well. Its advanced search features enable us to be selective in finding the right people to talk to and connect with.

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So, everything what I just said previously adds up to the value of LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. Definitely recommending it to a friend. It has its things to improve but its nothing major or nothing to worry about. So I give a 9 because it still has that, some user interface glitches that can be improved but do not damage the experience that you have with it.

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I would recommend LinkedIn Sales Navigator entirely. It has been the most user-friendly tool to use starting off in a sales role. I genuinely enjoy the navigation of the tool and how easy it is to save lists and see job changes within those lists. Generating leads and finding the most up to date information on prospects is all housed within this tool.

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I am unsure of the rollout, as I was not involved. I was an early adopter, and I have had a lot of success with the tool personally at multiple organizations, but I have no idea whether the implementation process encountered any errors. I can personally say that it works, and that I have not encountered significant issues with the tool since adoption, although a few issues like messages showing up as being unread even though they have been opened have been an on-again/off-again issues throughout the past few years. Overall, the company is doing a great job, and our implementation seems to have been effective.

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If you want more precision in B2B targeting, then LinkedIn is without question the better alternative. However, as I established before, I've rarely seen LinkedIn campaigns be successful for anything other than brand awareness/thought leadership. And that's almost 100% what Twitter is for. Twitter campaigns almost always have a cheaper CPC AND CPM than LinkedIn and accomplish the same thing, so I would say go with Twitter. At times LinkedIn campaigns are just so you can tell someone at a higher level that you did precise targeting to the exact audience they wanted and check that box, because it's easier for them to understand how you'd do well on LinkedIn, and more difficult to tell that story on Twitter. But I honestly prefer Twitter and its platform for B2B awareness campaigns. Heretic, I know, but it's how I feel after several years of experience with both. Facebook is bottom of the barrel for B2B in my mind, so I'm not really going to discuss it. I would take LinkedIn over Facebook for many reasons, but Facebook is an option too, but more for SMB and just covering all bases, not as a primary choice for B2B marketing.

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LinkedIn Sales Navigator is much more valuable than Dice or Cognism, as we do most of our prospecting on LinkedIn. Therefore, it means we can build lists of our prospects based on activity, connections, and buying intention. With Cognism and Dice, you cannot do this as they do not work alongside the LinkedIn platform and, therefore, lack the functionality that is essential to what we are using the platform for.

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• We have seen a marked increase in inbound agent calls since we began LinkedIn marketing.
• LinkedIn marketing is an excellent way to put your content in front of people that are actually going to read it, this has led to a major increase in our content being consumed and acted on.

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• Helped warm up a few leads that I was having trouble getting in touch with via phone and email
• Allowed me to better identify the key stakeholders at companies I was targeting
• Kept me up to date on what was happening with my prospects and their companies.

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