LinkedIn's Greatest Secret

This month, Jon Lombardo and I celebrate our 10-year anniversary.

No, we’re not celebrating our marital anniversary.

We’re celebrating our work anniversary.

10 years ago, we started working at a cute little company called…LinkedIn. And LinkedIn itself is celebrating its 20-year anniversary this month.

After a decade at LinkedIn, many marketers assume we must have some kind of insider information. We must know some secrets, revealed only to some of LinkedIn’s longest tenured employees. And that’s a wise assumption. We do know lots of sweet secrets!

And today, we’re going to reveal LinkedIn’s greatest secret.

That secret is a free tool called…The LinkedIn Insights Tag.

The Secret Solution To Pointless Personas

Professor Mark Ritson taught us that strategy starts with segmentation. Before you can address the market, you need to understand the market. B2B marketers need to identify the differences and commonalities between segments before making targeting and positioning decisions.

In contrast, Professor Jenni Romaniuk taught us that most segmentation is unnecessary. B2B marketers tend to focus on meaningless differences, when we ought to focus on meaningful similarities instead. Segmenting the market too finely increases costs and reduces value. 

Over time, we’ve learned that both Ritson and Romaniuk are right. Segmentation is the foundation of every effective B2B marketing (and sales) strategy. But most B2B marketers get segmentation wrong. And the root of the problem is a goofy idea called…personas.

What’s so pointless about personas, you ask?

First, there’s an empirical problem. Personas aren’t real. B2B marketers make up personas after talking with sales or a small sample of customers. We invent fake segments with whimsical nicknames like “rain-makers” “deal-breakers” “meeting-takers” and “ass-shakers.” Then we proudly introduce our imaginary friends to the sales teams that deal with real customers, the finance teams that count real revenues, and the product teams that produce real inventions. Nobody takes personas seriously, and for good reason --- personas look and sound ridiculous. 

Second, there’s a practical problem. Fake personas cannot be used to size markets or target customers. The Bureau of Labor Statistics does not track the number of “rain makers” in the United States. From a tactical perspective, you simply cannot target “rain makers” on any media channel. And here’s a useful rule-of-thumb we learned from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute: if the segmentation criteria cannot be accurately targeted, then it’s a useless detail.

And finally, there’s a commercial problem. B2B marketers pay far too much money for far too many personas. There is a viral story on LinkedIn about a senior marketer paying a market research firm a million dollars to torture survey data until it revealed every nuance about every customer. The result? Pointless complexity. The truth is that most nuances are unimportant, and too much information can be just as dangerous as no information. Developing six different marketing campaigns for six “different” personas is six times more difficult (and expensive!) than developing one campaign that speaks to the most common needs of all buyers. The smaller the segment, the smaller the value. Simple segmentation gives you economies of scale. Complex personas make B2B researchers richer and B2B marketers poorer.

So, what’s the solution to our persona problem?

Put your trust in pixels over personas.

For Segmentation, Choose Pixels Over Personas

The evidence suggests that your “ideal customer profile” is anyone who buys the category.

Determining who buys the category is relatively easy in B2C. Who buys Coca Cola? People with mouths. Who buys Colgate? People with teeth, as our client Mindel liked to say.

But who buys ERP? Who buys infrastructure-as-a-service? Who buys business analytics software? That’s relatively difficult to determine. It’s a complex, dynamic network of professionals, with varying degrees of influence and information. 

Enter the LinkedIn Insights Tag.

How does the Insights Tag work? It’s simple. Place the pixel on your website. Now sit back and let the pixel collect anonymized data on the firmographic characteristics of your website visitors. The pixel will reveal the real titles, real companies, real industries, and real seniorities of the real buyers who visit your real website (like your product and pricing pages).

 And that will give you real insights to power your segmentation.

You can cut the data in several ways – job function, industry, company size, seniority, and geography – to learn more about your website visitors. For example, you can see if your website visitors work in finance, marketing, or sales. And you can see if those website visitors come from functions, industries, companies, and seniorities that you are actually targeting. Our clients generally find that roughly 40% of the visitors to their company website are not included in their target audience. That means the Insights Tag can provide evidence to broaden your targeting. And as we know from the research, broader targeting leads to bigger revenues.

 The pixel can power your entire marketing strategy, from segmentation to targeting to positioning. The use cases are almost infinite. You can create a single, addressable segment for your product or service, based on 1st party data. You can use the pixel to measure the effectiveness of different media channels, by determining which media buys deliver on-target traffic. You could use the pixel to identify gaps in your funnel, if you discover that different pages (thought leadership vs. product features) attract different audiences.

 Given its value, you might assume that LinkedIn charges a pretty penny for access to its magical pixel dust. But guess what? The Insights Tag is available for free. As in…$0.00.

 So, you can spend millions of dollars on segmentation surveys that take six months to field and confuse and complicate your B2B marketing. Or you can spend nothing on a free tool that takes five minutes to implement and gives you real-time results, forever.

 Seems like a sweet deal for all the “rain maker” personas out there…

 The Pixel Is LinkedIn’s Best Kept Secret

 In our 10 years at LinkedIn, we’ve learned that most B2B marketers don’t know about the Insights Tag. Most clients haven’t implemented the pixel on their site. And even those that do use it solely for conversion tracking, even though it has half a dozen more important use cases.

 So, in honor of our 10-year work anniversary, and LinkedIn’s 20th anniversary, we offer this column as a “thank you” gift to our beloved employer and our beloved clients. May these words increase the mental availability of the LinkedIn Insights Tag. And may that powerful little pixel bring simplicity and success to every B2B segmentation study.

Here’s to looking at you, LinkedIn.