Most consumer travel brands focus their social media marketing campaigns on Facebook or Twitter, but LinkedIn has a greater potential than most people realise.

NB This is a viewpoint by Raul Harman, a writer for BizzMarkBlog

More often than not,  travel brands disregard LinkedIn believing that it’s not really a B2C marketing asset.

But even the hardest working business people need a vacation, and now that LinkedIn has introduced its Matched Audiences feature, it has become a powerful platform for both B2B and B2C marketing.

Matched Audiences combines a set of targeting abilities with LinkedIn’s professional data, as well as your very own data, to assist you in engaging prospects, accounts and target audiences that are the most valuable to your business, by using capabilities such as contact targeting, account targeting and website retargeting.

Furthermore, Matched Audiences will help businesses increase their marketing ROI by allowing them to focus on accounts and audiences that will increase their revenue. Let’s have a look at some benefits this new feature.

B2C marketing using LinkedIn

Now is probably the best time to start using LinkedIn for B2C marketing, because LinkedIn has started to act like a publishing platform. This presents a great opportunity for travel suppliers and destinations to promote their product on LinkedIn using existing and new marketing assets

But why should travel brands focus on LinkedIn rather than Facebook or Twitter?

Let’s elaborate – Matched Audiences works in a way that allows you to upload the list of your existing customers’ email addresses, which helps the ad network match those people in its database with those addresses and serve ads to the right audience.

Now, the difference is that people usually sign up for B2B email newsletters using their business email addresses and not the personal ones they might use for Facebook and/or Twitter. LinkedIn users use their business email address which makes retargeting that much effective.

New Matched Audiences capabilities

The new features offer more flexibility in B2C marketing.

• Contact Targeting – Enables you to engage contacts and prospects on LinkedIn by allowing you to upload a CSV list of up to 300,000 email addresses and tailor marketing content, or to integrate your email address list with a contact management platform.
• Account Targeting – Allows you to market to decision makers and influencers at your target accounts and also upload your CSV list of company names and match it with nearly 12 million company pages on LinkedIn. This will help you reach decision makers at your target companies and assist you in endorsing your account-based marketing programs.
• Website Retargeting – Offers the ability to re-engage your website visitors and helps you create a target audience list based on every visitor that has visited your website. Also, it helps you nurture your newfound leads with always-on campaigns.

Increasing ROI

Return on investment (ROI) is of the utmost importance to marketers nowadays who are always looking for new ways to drive revenue.

Matched Audiences can help marketers do just that, and more.

In the past six months, LinkedIn has successfully run a pilot program for Matched Audiences that involved 370 advertisers and more than two thousand active campaigns that delivered the above-average performance when compared to product benchmarks.

Customers that were using Matched Audiences saw some interesting results:

• Website Retargeting  has increased CTR by 30% and has dropped in post-click cost-per-conversion by 14%
• Account Targeting has produced 32% increase in post-click conversion rates and has dropped post-click cost-per-conversion by 4.7%
• Contact Targeting managed to increase click rate (CTR) by 37%

That means that marketers who invest in LinkedIn’s Matched Audiences are likely to see an increase in ROI. However, as with many if not all digital channels, it can be costly if not done correctly.

LinkedIn is a new marketing option for travel suppliers, brands and destinations, with its new features offering greater flexibility and more focus on valuable audience.

And remember – LinkedIn’s users are business professionals but they also take vacations.

NB1: This is a viewpoint by Raul Harman, a writer for BizzMarkBlog
NB2: Image by BigStock.