We want user connections on our platform to be more productive: Penry Price

Interview with Penry Price, vice-president, marketing solutions (LMS), LinkedIn

We have just started thinking about video and we expect it to drive a lot more engagement, Penry Price tells Sangeeta Tanwar.

WPP CEO Martin Sorrell recently suggested that social and professional platforms need to embrace their roles as media companies and should be subjected to regulation accordingly. What’s your take on this?

What I do think Martin Sorrel is talking about and which I think is very valuable is that whoever you are, if you have a relationship with customers, members, users, readers — you treat them well, service them properly and you should as a brand be able to have a relationship with your customers that is powerful and transformative.

Most of us have probably different definitions of who we are. We think we are a platform focused on professionals, helping them learn as much as they can about their career and helping them discover things that they need to do to advance their career. As a company, we would like to offer you content based on your profile, help you interact with more companies, new people, find jobs, and as a professional platform enable those connections to happen. We take this part of our job very seriously. We want these connections to be more productive for you. We are not conflicted in what we are trying to do at all.

How important a market is India to LinkedIn? What are the marketing solutions that you are offering to clients here?

Globally, we have 530 million professionals covering 200 countries on our platform. India is the second largest market for us behind the US. The business-to-business (B2B) market globally is worth $20 billion and includes events, lead generation and traffic coming from website and webinar. B2B presents enormous opportunity to a company like ours which aims to be the most effective platform to reach out to professionals. The top categories driving revenues for us in India include technology, financial services and education.

We do have a marketing solutions business. We are helping our customers find meaning, we try and figure out what their objectives are and then propose the right solution. So we do not have specific products as such. However, we do offer branded content services to our partners. It is our global advertising unit which primarily runs on desktop. Now, a majority of revenue and traffic is on mobile. This service is working well in India and other markets. Every market would like to have the ability to understand and want to know about the return on investment. For that, we offer conversion tracking. Brands, marketing agencies that we work with want to understand the measurable impact of sponsored content. And conversion tracking helps them do that. In April this year, we launched what is called matched audiences. It is an important programme for many of our brands as it helps them retarget website visitors, market to contacts from company databases and marketing automation platforms, and reach decision makers at target companies for account-based marketing programmes.

What are the cornerstones of innovation at marketing solutions (LMS), LinkedIn?

We want to get to a place where we can understand the business impact our clients had flowing from specific marketing activities. The innovation we want to work on is, how to measure business impact with LinkedIn. We are leveraging customer relationship solutions and market automation to enable brands to track business impact that LinkedIn makes. The second area of innovation we are thinking of is the ways in which we can offer more engagement to our members (professionals on the platform). We are working towards offering members relevant content targeting their profile. We have just started thinking about video and we expect it to drive a lot more engagement on the platform.

Another interesting trend relates to selling and marketing functions. Specifically in the technology space, traditionally marketing and sales functions have not been connected. They are largely led by different people and enabled by different technology. The reality now is that the sales and marketing functions need to work closely due to advancements in technology and businesses that we are dealing in. There is a growing need to connect those two workflows so as to know what is it that the sales team is doing and what is the marketing team doing to connect targets.

How can businesses go beyond a transactional relationship with users as they look for selling opportunities?

The reality is that we are seeing a growing need for having more nurturing experiences in places where you are building relationships with people online not socially but professionally. The notion of nurturing relationships for businesses today is much more important than ever because of our expectations of who we are doing our business with is much higher. If you are in a service or product business that is serving professionals, you need to build long-term relationships with users. Because users want to know what the company stands for, what the processes are and what kind of a company it is. Organisations are active on various social platforms and reaching out to targeted audience with relevant content. We see them talking about issues or things that they are proud of in the market.