Etsy fmr CPO on Growth Products (Part 2)
Every business has different goals in mind when they launch growth products. At LinkedIn, we explored opportunities to drive new revenue through advertising on the platform. Through the years, LinkedIn has always been a mission-driven company. They want to make professionals more productive and successful.
With this in mind, how do you introduce ads into an ecosystem that’s all about professional development? Most people don’t click on ads to begin with – and on LinkedIn, the chances of this happening are even lower. As a result, we had to come up with a new approach to engage users with brands through social advertising.
First, we looked at company profile pages and found that they were underleveraged. Furthermore, the combination of all these companies and 100 million+ users on LinkedIn represented billions of potential followers. As a result, we built a business model around turning these company pages into actively-managed accounts.
Before we could launch this new model, we talked to LinkedIn users to see if they would respond well to this new content. What we discovered is that LinkedIn users cared most about finding jobs. However, we also learned that they care about the products that companies are selling. Furthermore, they enjoy the insights that companies share about their business landscape.
We also took learnings from brand affinity studies to personalize the ad content. Simply put, people identify with brands in which they see themselves. The ads that we created for LinkedIn took this concept literally by including user’s profile picture into the template. In addition, the copy was tailored to match what the user’s interests. Instead of saying “follow this company,” the copy said “find jobs” or “learn about products.”
In the process, we created new revenue for LinkedIn while introducing users to more content that they genuinely care about.
About the speaker
About the host
Randhir Vieira is the VP of Product at Headspace - leading the product team to achieve the organization’s mission of improving health and happiness around the world. Prior to Headspace, Randhir was the Chief Customer Officer at Mindflash, a leading cloud-based Learning Management System. He was also the VP of Product and Customer Care at Eyefi - and Senior Product Director at Yahoo.