With every new update and acquisition, LinkedIn is moving further away from the social networking space and becoming a full fledged B2B marketing solution.
Yesterday, the company announced that it had acquired B2B marketing platform Bizo for $175 million. Bizo helps B2B marketers capture leads through a combination of targeted display ads, email, and social marketing.
By acquiring Bizo, LinkedIn is officially positioning itself as a lead prospecting and capturing platform. It had previously started the move towards this function by adding content publishing tools, and by acquiring Newsle, a media tracking service that allows users to monitor the presence of key executive/potential customers across blogs, forums and news articles.
Writing on the company blog LinkedIn’s VP of product David Thacker said:
Over the years, our Marketing Solutions offerings have distinguished us as a highly effective platform for B2B marketing. The introduction of Sponsored Updates last year dramatically advanced our platform, and it’s now our fastest-growing Marketing Solutions offering. It’s our goal to integrate Bizo’s offerings into our content marketing products to become a more powerful tool for brands that want to build stronger relationships with professionals.
LinkedIn will integrate its content publishing solutions and audience data with Bizo’s audience targeting, and lead-nurturing solutions. Put simply, LinkedIn sets up the prospects, while Bizo helps capture them.
However, not all of LinkedIn’s solutions will be available to existing Bizo customers:
Thacker writes in the blog post:
We plan to incorporate Bizo’s Media Solutions and Multi-Channel Nurturing products into our portfolio, but don’t plan to carry over their Data Solutions business. Bizo will honor their existing contracts, but LinkedIn data won’t be made available to their grandfathered customers.
Bizo was a long time text ads API partner for LinkedIn, which has been pretty selective about who it gives out its API access too. This acquisition raises an interesting question as to how LinkedIn will deal with its other API partners. By becoming a B2B marketing platform on its own, LinkedIn runs the risk of competing with the B2B marketing platforms that are already partnering with it.
It is also a move that will be watched very closely by the B2B marketing automation heavyweights of the world, such as Eloqua and Marketo, who don’t have open access to LinkedIn’s vast and valuable network of lead prospects.
Currently, LinkedIn provides API access to several marketing platforms, but only in limited ways. Some platforms can manage only Company Pages, while others can publish Sponsored Updates or text ads for their clients. Through Bizo, LinkedIn would be able to offer all of its API capabilities through a single, preferred marketing platform.
Here’s more from LinkedIn on the Bizo acquisition:
