LinkedIn once criticized as a slow mover in networking space have been jumping leap and bounds grabbing more and more users and monetizing their user inventory. LinkedIn has been monetized as traditional brand ads, partnerships, payments for premium services and as many other innovative services like Direct Ads and LinkedIn Research Network.
Now LinkedIn has launched a new product to generate qualified and targeted leads for Whitepapers. Many individuals,companies produces whichpapers on specific research topics that can be of use to various other users. LinkedIn can easily target specific whitepaper and show whitepapers as ads to various people who have interest in that area thus helping them become customers and leads for the sponsors.
As per the definition of Whitepaper on wikipedia “A white paper is an authoritative report or guide that often addresses problems and how to solve them. White papers are used to educate readers and help people make decisions. They are often used in politics and business”. So basically whitepaper is a product that has some important information that can be of use to some organization or to people willing to shell out money for them. Whitepaper owners do find difficulty in finding relevant target audience and in most cases user tries to find the relevant whitepapers as per the need
LinkedIn has changed the model to push model in which whitepapers owners will push their whitepapers to the relevant audience giving access to more customers.LinkedIn has launched a new feature that turns whitepapers into ads targeted towards a specific audience based on their Job title ,interests etc whose possibility of reading them is much higher.LinkedIn members may read the whitepapers for free in return giving sponsors the specific lead. Before grabbing a whitepaper on LinkedIn users have to furnish information like email, whether they need to be contacted urgently, whether they have a targeted budget giving sponsors the information about the user and whether he is interested in paying for whitepaper and further related services.
How big can this be :
LinkedIn expects to get 40$ to 100$ per lead and will also publish a whitepaper directory where users can share their whitepapers and spread them to thousands of targetted users.
Neat idea.
I think $40 – $100 per lead is a lot.
Lead generation is not a secret and there are a lot of how-to’s out there on how to setup a lead generation process.
When you do your own lead capture including a bonus product like a whitepaper you can do this in a more affordable way and you can set and monitor the quality level of your generated leads by your self.
Yes I do agree that 40-100$ is a lot but that’s the figure LinkedIn quotes. Only time can tell what the real figures will be but one thing is for sure its a nice attempt to monetize its user base.