Running ads for your own brand terms in B2B paid search – yes or no?
John Woods
August 21, 2024
LinkedIn Business Manager and Premium Company Page
In this short blog post we review LinkedIn’s Business Manager and new premium company page subscription—and what they offer B2B marketers.
First, the free feature.
LinkedIn’s advertising platform, Campaign Manager, has long lagged behind other paid platforms in terms of how ad accounts, pages, people and audiences are managed.
Finally, LinkedIn have got around to sorting that out with their own version of an MCC or centralised management account.
Business Manager allows organisations, and the agencies they work with, to bring their ad accounts, pages, people, and matched audiences together under a single umbrella.
What do we like about it?
A centralised place to manage access, especially important for large organisations and agencies managing multiple accounts. Access management will make onboarding, and removing, individual access much simpler.
The downsides?
Even when you add a new person to your Business Manager account, you have to then add them one by one to specific ad accounts. This sort of granularity is helpful to prevent giving too many people too much access, but by comparison, Google’s MCC makes the entire access process much easier.
As an agency, adding new client accounts is a bit off a faff; you can only add them via csv which feels a bit silly when you’re onboarding a single new client (but made the initial uploading process of current client accounts super easy).
Overall, though, Business Manager is a step in the right direction, and we absolutely recommend you take advantage of it to enhance management and security of your LinkedIn pages and paid accounts.
Premium Business Page
What is it? Check out the full FAQ from LinkedIn, or read on for the short version!
Summary:
For about $100 per month, organisations can have enable six new features on their company page, including:
Three visible, on-page, features
Custom call-to action (CTA) button, with the premium subscription, you can add a button to encourage visits to “visit website”, “book a demo” or some other call to action. It sounds good, and looks nice, but if it’s anything like the CTAs on personal accounts, probably won’t, in reality, get used much.
A LinkedIn ‘IN’ logo: LinkedIn seems to like badges even more than the Scouts and promotes them as a way to elevate the status of your personal or business profile. This one is just pay to play so doesn’t really feel all that special.
Custom testimonial: We quite like this one! With the premium account you can feature a short (max. 80 character) client testimonial and a logo—a very nice piece of social proof to round out your page.
More stats
With a premium business account, just like a premium personal account, you will be able to see recent visitors to your page. If you have the internal resource to use view these stats on a regular basis, it probably will feel useful, especially for sales teams, but remember people can opt out so it’s not necessarily a full list of visitors.
Auto-invite
This feature automatically invites people who engage with your company posts to follow your page. Sounds good in theory, in practice, we worry it will become an irritant that puts people off visiting company pages or just fades into the background of the user experience.
AI Post Writing Assistance
Feels a little like LinkedIn have jumped on the AI bandwagon with this one, and there are definitely better AI tools out there to help write posts, but if you’ve paid for the account, it’s probably worth a trial (note it’s only in English at present).
The verdict?
$100 feels like a lot for what’s on offer, but if your marketing budgets aren’t tight, we suggest giving it a try and see how useful you find it.
Finally, a note that LinkedIn are rolling this feature out slowly so you may not have access yet.
If you need help with LinkedIn Business Manager or any other aspect of your B2B digital marketing, please get in touch. We offer a free, no-obligation 30-minute consultation.
