LinkedIn is offering businesses two outlets for using video on the platform. Companies can now run native video ad campaigns and include video within their Company Pages, LinkedIn announced early Thursday.
The platform rolled out native video uploading to users last August. As expected, Thursday’s announcements mark the first roll out of video capabilities designed for businesses.
“We have seen a lot of demand from people looking to use video as a tool to drive results for their businesses,” Abhishek Shrivastava, director of product for LinkedIn Marketing Solutions told me. LinkedIn says more than 46 percent of B2B advertisers it surveyed said that finding the right environment for videos was a top challenge when considering video campaigns.
Video for Sponsored Content
According to LinkedIn, more than 700 advertisers have been beta testing Video for Sponsored Content, the new native video advertising offering, since October. Shrivastava said that, during that time, LinkedIn members have spent an average of almost three times the amount of time watching ads embedded with video versus static ones.
The native video ads appear in the news feed as standalone, sponsored posts and auto-play on mute when in view, just like user-uploaded video on the platform. Here’s an example of the new unit, which expands to a full-screen interstitial after a user clicks on it.
The Video for Sponsored Content ads can use any of the targeting already available to advertisers, such as job title, seniority, company name, industry, skills targeting as well as Matched Audiences targeting for running account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns.
The ads can help businesses generate leads by driving site traffic or through LinkedIn’s Lead Gen Forms product, as shown in the example above.
With the LinkedIn tracking pixel implemented, advertisers can measure the number of leads, sign-ups, website visits, and other actions that the video ads generate.
Video for Company Pages
Additionally, businesses and publishers can now place video on their Company Pages.
LinkedIn says, during the beta program, it found Company Page video five times more likely than other types of content to start a conversation among members.
“B2B marketers and professional audiences and professional contacts — they can use the video [tool] we’re launching across their funnels. Whether they’re looking to generate brand awareness, sending people to websites to take an action or connecting leads, they can showcase the video and if the member watching is interested, they can collect the leads right away,” Shrivastava said.
Both video products are rolling out now and will be available to all businesses in the coming weeks.
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