Lessons to learn from the marketing and design of LinkedIn’s B2B marketing eBook
A message popped up in my LinkedIn inbox recently. It turned out to be from LinkedIn itself with an invitation to download an eBook guide to B2B marketing.
LinkedIn is uniquely positioned to know what works best on its own platform, so presumably their communication is state of the art and something the rest of us can learn from.
I’ll share that message, along with highlights from the eBook and observations on what does and doesn’t seem to work in this bit of meta marketing.
The message
First up, this is the initial message that was marked ‘Sponsored’:
Our 6 Big Ideas will transform your B2B marketing
Hi Miles,
Marketing is an industry with plenty of Big Ideas – but when the talking stops, how do you turn those ideas into better marketing strategies and better results?
Our latest eBook looks at the big themes dominating the agenda at this year’s big marketing festivals – and reveals how you can use them to drive growth on LinkedIn.
Download our eBook and explore how to:
- Use brand purpose to drive growth for your business
- Influence B2B buying decisions by engaging emotions
- Leverage technology in a way that puts the audience first
- Unlock new approaches to building trust
- Get control of your content marketing through better measurement
- Unleash the potential of content co-creation
I hope you enjoy and start putting Big Ideas into action today!
The message came from a named individual, but there was nothing (until you got to the small print) to say it was from LinkedIn. I was about to delete it – and it was only when I realised that it was probably from LinkedIn that I clicked through.
The message itself is relatively short. It starts with a question to engage the reader. The sentence about big themes as marketing festivals is clever in that it plays on a fear of missing out. The bullets all start with active verbs that promise results.
The data capture
Clicking on the link takes you to a data form that must be completed. You can autofill using your LinkedIn information, but there is a compulsory box that asks for a telephone number. This, somewhat surprisingly, is a deal breaker for LinkedIn. The coding isn’t that clever as entering a jumble of numbers allows you to proceed. A drop down asks whether your marketing spend is greater or less than £6k per quarter.
You can see for the form for yourself and download the book.
The eBook
The document is 32 pages, has a circus theme to the title page and heading fonts that are not continued in the rest of the design. There’s a mix of illustration and photography with a clean layout that doesn’t cram too much text on the page.
Is it really a book?
“We decided that big ideas need a little book”, states the introductory text. Do 32 pages make a book? Maybe not, but the use of language is interesting. A book has more perceived value than a guide, eBook or perhaps a white paper.
The 6 Big Ideas
- Purpose is the source of competitive advantage
- B2B choices are more emotive than B2C choices
- Marketing’s use of technology needs to put the consumer first
- Brands need news ways of building trust
- Marketers should focus less on producing content, more on measuring content
- Story telling is becoming story curating
Each idea is presented as an overview of the concept, specific actions to realise it and a brand case study.
We’ll return to evaluate how LinkedIn explain these ideas in future posts. For now it is worth considering these questions prompted by the messenger rather than the message:
Are your marketing calls to action concise, clear and compelling?
Is the authorship/ownership of your communication obvious?
Is your data capture doing its job?
Have you given the most engaging label to your content?
Is your content designed for the devices it will be most viewed on?
