LinkedIn ads earned up to a 3% CTR

Marketing Solutions

Challenge • Create an active online community for IT professionals in the SMB space

• Engage target audience in select geographies

• Quickly build a critical mass of members

Solution• Establish LinkedIn Group, ‘SMB IT Connection‘

• Drive membership through targeted display advertising and LinkedIn Partner Messages

• Engage members with thought-leadership discussions and surround the group with educational, interactive content

Why LinkedIn? • Large, active IT and SMB audiences

• Targeted reach, both in geography and company size

• Ability to create a tailored campaign combining online community, display advertising, targeted content, email, and polling

Results • Achieved 18% open rate on membership invitations

• Built 1,400-member community from the ground up

• Gained audience insights from discussions and polls

• Won IAB MIXX award honoring best B2B campaigns

Qwest Business delivers a comprehensive portfolio of national data and voice networking communications solutions to Fortune 500 companies and other enterprises, government agencies, and educational institutions.

Reaching their target audience with LinkedIn In order to establish themselves as a resource to IT decision makers in the small and medium-sized business (SMB) space, Qwest wanted to create an online forum where those IT decision makers could share and discuss their technology problems and solutions. With thousands of IT decision makers already active on LinkedIn, Qwest decided to establish their community within the larger LinkedIn network by creating a ‘Custom Group.’

QwestCase StudyAward-winning campaign attracts 1,400 IT professionals

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Engaging with educational content As the sponsor of SMB IT Connection, Qwest leveraged customizable media space on the group page to provide interaction opportunities for members – including educational videos, topical white papers, and a live RSS feed from the Qwest Business blog.

Qwest exercised the 'listening' element of its campaign with a mix of open-ended discussion posts, pointed questions, and several LinkedIn polls. Qwest invited group members to weigh in on hot topics such as preferred IT solutions, telecomm partnerships, and social media tools – which increased member participation and yielded valuable audience insights.

Integrated campaign yields rapid results To increase membership in the group, Qwest Business worked with McKinney to fully integrate the campaign into Qwest’s overall marketing efforts. Qwest combined display advertising with regional print media, and used LinkedIn Partner Messaging to communicate directly with LinkedIn members in speci�c audience segments using targeted emails in their LinkedIn inbox.

In the �rst month of SMB IT Connection, Qwest Business’ custom content ads earned a nearly 3% click-through rate and produced useful information about what topics interested IT professionals the most. LinkedIn Partner Messages, which invited select IT professionals to join the group, earned an 18% open rate.

By year-end 2010, SMB IT Connection boasted more than 1,400 members and continues to grow. The group has a high engagement rate, with 10% more members actively commenting in discussions than participants in comparable groups.

Cindy Humphrey, vice president of marketing for Qwest Business explains, “This campaign was a success because we were able to engage IT decision makers with targeted information that is useful to them. By tapping the LinkedIn resources, we exceeded our goal of attracting 1,000 members by year-end.”

Industry accolades At the sixth annual MIXX Awards, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) awarded Qwest Business’ Listening Not Talking campaign a bronze MIXX Award in the business-to-business (B2B) category. The MIXX Awards are the only juried advertising competition that evaluates all critical components of the interactive marketing mix, including strategy, creative, execution and results.

Through SMB IT Connection and the Listening Not Talking campaign, Qwest Business has started to establish a valuable, and hopefully long-lasting relationship with a group that is otherwise hard to reach: the SMB IT decision-maker.

Reach the world’s largest audience of business professionals with LinkedIn.

LinkedIn Marketing Solutionshttp://marketing.linkedin.com/contact

Monthly Unique Visitors to Qwest’s LinkedIn Group, ‘SMB IT Connection’ increased rapidly

Qwest ran LinkedIn polls to learn about members’ opinions and priorities

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A Custom Group is an online, facilitated community on LinkedIn where like-minded professionals gather to collaborate and connect around a shared interest. Custom Groups provide marketers the opportunity to foster long-term interaction with customers and prospects, and engage them with targeted content such as video, whitepapers, Twitter and RSS feeds.

Qwest Business and its agency, McKinney, partnered with LinkedIn to create ‘SMB IT Connection,’ a Custom Group speci�cally for IT leaders in the SMB space, and launched an integrated campaign around it, called ‘Listening Not Talking.’