LinkedIn as a company is an innovator jumping into a new marketing automation market, leveraging their recent Bizo acquisition.   This is worthy of study.

Here are strengths of the LinkedIn offer relative to that of marketing automation:

• Their ability to target anonymous users with customized ad content relevant to the end user makes this a compelling offer

• Their ability to reach these users on the LinkedIn network and off of the network makes this very compelling

• Their autofill form capability which should in theory improve conversion (though few companies use this well today I find on marketing automation which major platforms have a similar capability)

• The fact that LinkedIn sits on a treasure trove of accurate user data is helpful for any enterprise struggling with data quality

As for the future, here are some questions that come up:

• Bizo integrates with marketing automation providers today such as Eloqua and Marketo, it will be interesting to see how LinkedIn develops their APIs on Bizo – will LinkedIn continue the open approach with APIs or like the rest of LinkedIn, will the APIs eventually be limited and those integrations get impacted?

• How global of an offer this is, will it work best in English speaking countries where IP addresses are more known (US, England, Canada, Australia, Singapore, etc.) vs. globally like all marketing automation has the ability to do?

• How does the data actually integrate with the CRM system when LinkedIn prides itself on owning its data and not selling it to others?

Pricing for enterprise is at least $25k/quarter.

Facebook is also dabbling in the marketing automation segment, although I’d expect that use case to be more B2C and commerce oriented vs. the enterprise approach LinkedIn is using.

We are in for an interesting new era in reaching prospects with relevant content facilitated by marketing automation!