What is “brand influence”? An analysis of over 1,000 advertising and about $80 million of LinkedIn ad spend might tell us.
TL;DR: test repeated firm activity against pre-set sales metrics.
B2B advertising practitioner Adam Holmgren set out to prove how pivotal LinkedIn posting can be for filling up the sales funnel, based on the frequency of engagement:
Companies reached in three or more separate months were about 1.5 times more likely to enter into a sales pipeline. Those that engaged with paid content five or more times were around 2.2 times more likely to do so.
Crucially, recent reach and engagement proved to be stronger predictors than activity measured over longer look-back periods. Engagement was a better signal than raw impressions, too.
So, what does this mean for fund marketers?
Such metrics are directly relevant for the practice of fund distribution. Allocation decisions made by institutional investors take place for far longer periods, and may involve several people on the buying side.
Fund salespeople and IRs tend to struggle justifying exactly why a strong, repeated online presence can lead to conversion. But this study looks to confirm that regularity (set against a defined set of marketing and sales targets) matters more than a single-burst fund launch or one-off quarterly updates.
This still does not mean that ‘impressions’ will be a solid-enough metric for a head of distribution or C-suite executive. Instead, account-level engagement over time will, especially if sales teams can actually act on it, including how many target allocators or DFMs interacted with content in each of the last three months.
For firms that do run account-based marketing against a known universe of target investors, this similarly provides the ground to build reporting around firm activity and not clicks.
Budgeting for a modest, ‘always-on’ social presence aimed at a target firm list helps you plan for continuity rather than centring marketing costs around singular launch campaigns – so long as the content pipeline can be approved quickly (rather than scrambling to put out half-baked pieces that are a compliance risk).
Then, tracking depths of engagement per firm across a number of months can determine where sales prioritisation should sit. Matching those engaged firms against pipeline and RFP activity helps test whether the pattern actually holds true for your own distribution.
Source
Adam Holmgren/Fibbler on LinkedIn (via TLDR Marketing)
