LinkedIn Business Manager is advertised as a tool to group your organization’s Ad Accounts, Pages, and staff and 3^rd parties under a single umbrella. But is it worth it? There are many companies that happily manage their LinkedIn company pages and advertising tasks without it. So, if this is true, why should you consider using it?

Let’s explore if the business manager is the key to unlocking the potential of LinkedIn!

This post is available as a podcast:

Business manager is key to unlocking the potential of LinkedIn

Here are my top 3 reasons for considering the use of LinkedIn business manager.

Reason 1 – Easier to manage all accounts in one place

You can link your Ad Accounts, LinkedIn Pages, and Matched Audiences to a single dashboard, that is a good bit of functionality. And by the way, if an audience is later updated for whatever reason, that change is inherited to all the campaigns that are using it.

Reason 2 – Efficient management of staff and 3rd parties who have access to your accounts

My second reason to consider implementing LinkedIn’s business manager for your organization is a simple one. Managing the people! Let me explain by looking back in history..

Who has experience of managing Facebook ad account access and Facebook pages for a medium to large organization? Well I did, and I did it before Facebook business manager was launched and it was not easy. Facebook business manager took me almost 6 months to set up because I had over 60 Facebook pages to add in. I also had to make a Facebook global pages structure.

What issues did I encounter bringing all these separate pages into business manager with myself added as an admin on all of them? I list five below. How many of these do you recognize?

• Everyone added as an admin when many were really content editors
• Removing people who had left the company
• Removing people who asked for access but did not need it (that is a security risk)
• Company accounts being taken over and owned by 3rd parties
• Sometimes it was hard to identify who the current owner actually is!

I see that LinkedIn have adopted best practice from all these historic Facebook business manager issues. Adding the facility in LinkedIn business manager to give access and take it away easily. That’s a good start.  But LinkedIn have gone the extra mile. LinkedIn gives solid advice on how to avoid all that pain and hard work by simply planning ahead! Doing the hard work offline before tying to set it up online. Sounds simple but is very good advice.

LinkedIn suggests 3 stages: Prepare, onboard, adopt.

Each stage is described in detail in their online best practice guide to ensure that you avoid all those issues that people like me had many years ago with implementing Facebook business manager. Essentially the two tools are almost identical, so this guidance helps a lot.
You can also view the guide as a PDF and download it.

Reason 3 – The possibility to demonstrate the true business value of your LinkedIn marketing

My 3rd reason to implement LinkedIn business manager is my most important one. It is a financial one. The possibility to demonstrate the true business value of your LinkedIn marketing setup by enabling the LinkedIn “Revenue Attribution Report”

You cannot do this just by setting up the LinkedIn business manager. You have to go one step further and enable the revenue attribution report when you connect the LinkedIn business manager to your CRM. Supported CRM systems include Salesforce, Dynamics 365, or HubSpot CRM.

You can use the revenue attribution report to help you better understand the impact of your LinkedIn to sales. Metrics include

• Revenue won
• ROAS (Return on ad spend)
• Pipeline amount
• Opportunity win rate
• And more..

Implementing LinkedIn Business Manager

Now we can get going with setting up a business manager account. From this LinkedIn marketing solutions page, click the create business manager button

From this point follow the instructions to fill in your details and then once you confirm your email address you can start adding your LinkedIn pages and Ad accounts.

Key Takeaway for adopting the LinkedIn’s business manager

Let me go back to the question I asked at the beginning of the podcast.. “is it worth implementing LinkedIn business manager and should you do it? My answers are YES and most certainly YES.

However, be mindful of the advice LinkedIn gives you to “Prepare, onboard, adopt” – Download the advice document and follow what it says about Identifying an onboarding lead or expert, and establishing business manager partnerships. I add in my learned lesson here which is to always check that everyone is clear on alignment with your global or central business principles and strategy when you set up those partnerships.

So, what are you waiting for? GO do it.

Onboarding LinkedIn business manager infographic