August 9, 2017
By Sam Del Rowe, contributing writer

LinkedIn Expands Its Marketing Partner Program

LinkedIn recently expanded its Marketing Partner program by enlisting 19 new partners in three new specialization categories—media buying, marketing analytics, and audience management—bringing the total number of categories to six.

Established three years ago, the program is a community of technology and service providers that marketers can leverage with the goal of improving ROI on LinkedIn. Prior to this announcement, the program included partners representing the categories of ad technology (scaling ad campaigns), content marketing (creating better content), and community management (brand building).

“We want to make it easy for a marketer to find a vendor, find a third party to work with, someone who already knows how to work with LinkedIn, already knows how to get the best out of our platform, and we want to make it easy for them once they’ve selected that partner to develop campaigns, to get insights, to work with us in a way that’s going to drive results for them,” says Mike Romoff, head of global agency and channel sales at LinkedIn.

The media buying category aims to help marketers leverage campaign management experts. “We’re looking at partners that have a great expertise in not only the LinkedIn platform but optimizing media buying and how to take a campaign and a budget that a marketer has and really getting the right ROI from the platform and really having our clients tap into the expertise of these partners,” Romoff says. The partners in this category include AdParlor, B2Linke, and SocialCode.

The marketing analytics category aims to help marketers gain performance insights. “[There are] lots of really unique insights that we can pull out from LinkedIn experience, we want to be able to seamlessly plug that in to the dashboards and to the workflows around analytics that marketers are already using. The marketing analytics partners really help to bridge the gap,” Romoff says. The partners in this category include Bizible, DashThis, Datorama, Hootsuite, Nugit, SocialBakers, and Falcon.io.

The audience management category aims to help marketers target more effectively. “Audience management is really allowing a marketer to look at the audiences that they have in their own platform or CRM, the leads or information that they’re getting from LinkedIn, and make those things very seamlessly operable so that we’re plugging in the experience that they’re having through LinkedIn into their existing audience management capabilities,” Romoff says. The partners in this category include Acxiom, LiveRamp, Oracle Eloqua, Marketo, Microsoft Dynamics, Driftrock, and Zapier.

The expansion also sees the addition of two partners to the content marketing category, FrogIdeas and Text100.

“When we think about LinkedIn’s marketing solutions business, we’re really looking at helping marketers be more successful both on our platform and how they also approach their customers and their media buying across the web,” Romoff says. “As we’re developing lots of new features through the LinkedIn platform itself, we know that there’s a big ecosystem of other platforms, other technologies, lots of things that marketers are either testing or using. So increasingly we want to be part of their overall ecosystem and part of a marketer’s overall solution for reaching their audience.”