Jim Habig, VP of Marketing, LinkedIn talks about today’s complex B2B cycle and what can enable better marketing and sales processes:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat, Jim, you’ve had an interesting journey through the B2B tech domain. Tell us about it and more about your route to your current role – our readers would love to hear more about your top learnings through your years in marketing.

I’ve been lucky enough to work with truly talented people throughout my career at YouTube, Google, Pinterest and now – LinkedIn. At each moment in time, we adapted to a changing landscape, worked through constant privacy changes, and saw these challenges as an opportunity to refine our strategy to bring the solutions that our customers wanted and needed to market.

The through line though, is that we can’t do it alone. It’s clear to me that you’re only as successful as the team you’re building in addition to the customers, agencies and partners you’re working with day in and day out. At LinkedIn, we mean it when we tell our customers and partners that we’re #InItTogether. We work side by side – especially during economic uncertainty– to help them better optimize their marketing budgets to adapt to the changes happening across the industry.

For digital marketers today; what do you feel they should do more of to optimize how they market through multiple channels with the aim of garnering better results/leads?

The B2B purchase cycle is long and innately complex. As global economic uncertainty looms, marketers       fight a constant battle to justify their budgets and map their campaigns to business results. We recently found that 77% of CMOs feel under pressure to prove greater short-term return on investment on their marketing campaigns. To help alleviate some of the pressures marketers face as budgets tighten, we introduced the Revenue Attribution Report, a new tool that can help them to better understand the impact of their results on the bottom line. Investing in full funnel strategies to maximize campaign performance in a downturn is critical, since customers that coupled organic strategies with paid saw a 14% lift in ad performance on LinkedIn.

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With privacy norms changing the game for modern-day digital marketers, how do you think trends in this segment will change: a few best practices marketers should keep in mind?

As privacy regulations evolve, it’s crucial for marketers to be aware of their surroundings and map their strategies to the changes they see in the marketplace. Our industry fundamentally changed when we knew third-party cookies would be phased out, and marketers have upended their strategies to accommodate this new norm ever since.

The industry is at a tipping point, and we’re actively working alongside our customers and partners to build the solutions they need with privacy front-and-center. We recently enabled Group Identity across our portfolio to help marketers harness first-party data from our 900 million members to target members based on shared professional attributes. Since we introduced the solution last year, we observed a 37% higher average clickthrough rate on group-delivered campaigns compared to those that targeted individual profile characteristics.

For marketers, it’s standard practice to implement patchwork solutions to adjust to the changing privacy landscape, which can seem like an uphill climb. There are bright spots to these regulatory changes, too. It’s an opportunity for marketers to go on the front foot by investing in a multitude of solutions, like alternative signals, to help them achieve future success.

How can marketers today work towards creating a more differentiated experience for their brands?

It has become more difficult than ever for brands to cut through the noise. Staying top of mind for potential buyers is crucial, so it’s no surprise that 67% of marketing leaders across the globe are planning to increase or maintain their spend on brand building to stay relevant. Since only 5% of B2B buyers are in the market to purchase at any given time, marketers should humanize their campaigns to deepen the connection with potential buyers, which can move them down the funnel and support long term growth.

Timing is everything in this industry, and marketers should rely on buyer intent and other alternative signals to spot in-market buyers. By using intent and first- and zero-party data to better advise their strategies, marketers can create more effective campaigns by delivering the right message to the right buyer at the right time.

What do you feel about the future of the B2B martech/B2B marketing industry?  

There is an app to buy groceries instantly, yet we can’t visit a store to talk to experts and discover, learn and test drive the latest tools built specifically for B2B buyers. There’s a void in the industry, and we’re focused on activating the products, brands and knowledge on LinkedIn to create a new kind of marketplace that will transform the way we buy and sell B2B products. But we can’t do it alone – the entire ecosystem needs to mobilize, learn and teach as we chart a new course for B2B together.

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