LinkedIn announced today via its marketing blog that it has acquired B2B marketing platform Bizo for $175M, its second acquisition this year after acquiring data insights and technology company Bright back in February.
This acquisition marks yet another powerhouse move for LinkedIn as the company looks to continue growing its ads business.
Solidifying the enterprise
LinkedIn is the place to be if you’re a business looking to target high quality target markets, however, one ask of the marketing community over the years has always been in regards to data, analytics, and scale.
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Regardless of historical ad and tracking offerings, however, there’s a dedication to LinkedIn as companies are looking to reach their target market for branding and lead generation purposes. Earlier this month, LinkedIn released a report displaying the top 25 most socially engaged companies on LinkedIn and the results were quite heavily skewed towards enterprise adoption with the likes of Google, Facebook, Twitter and Cisco as a few notable mentions.
What does the enterprise like best?
Spending money.
While we’re certainly seeing an uptick within the inbound/content marketing movement, the enterprise still likes to spend budget for distribution purposes, and LinkedIn has become the ideal platform to take advantage of that trend (we’ve certainly all seen the increase in “content” and social sharing on LinkedIn over the past few weeks).
Marketo released its 2014 Benchmarks Report, partnering with MarketingProfs, and a few highlights from B2B enterprise marketers include:
- 70% plan to increase content creation
- 87% use LinkedIn to distribute content
- 64% say LinkedIn is the most effective social platform
- 52% plan to increase content marketing spend in the next 12 months
Where does BIZO come in?
BIZO is a top destination for B2B advertisers looking to increase their reach across the web. BIZO functionality includes:
- Display
- Re-targeting
- Social
- Video
- Multi-channel nurturing
- CRM and analytics
- B2B expertise
The company reported a $50M revenue run rate to enter 2014, noting customers such as DropBox, Volvo, Staples, and Starwood Hotels, to name a few.
LinkedIn is now poised to continue helping B2B advertisers — especially enterprise ones — establish the types of campaigns that deliver results at scale with enhanced data/analytics. LinkedIn appears to be looking to capitalize on a few trends within the B2B enterprise segment with this acquisition, including increasing budgets, distribution, quality, tracking and analytics needs.
LinkedIn + BIZO = better opportunities for B2B advertising.
Dan Slagen is currently the CMO of HourlyNerd, disrupting the consulting industry by offering a marketplace that connects specific, top MBA alumni and students directly to businesses all across the globe.
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