As a business owner or marketer, you may be wondering if investing in LinkedIn is worth it. LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network with over 690 million users worldwide. With so many professionals on the platform, LinkedIn offers tremendous opportunities for businesses to connect with potential customers, generate leads, recruit employees, and build their brand. However, LinkedIn does require investment in the form of time, effort, and often money. So do businesses pay for LinkedIn and is it worth it? Let’s explore the pros, cons, options, and costs to find out.
The Benefits of LinkedIn for Business
There are many potential benefits for businesses using LinkedIn:
- Increased brand awareness and credibility – A complete and optimized LinkedIn company page helps showcase your brand and products/services to a large professional audience. It establishes credibility as a real, reputable business.
- Lead generation – LinkedIn is a prime platform to generate B2B leads organically through content sharing or paid advertising. You can turn LinkedIn connections into potential customers.
- Recruitment – LinkedIn is the top channel for recruitment with extensive targeting options. You can source, connect with and recruit top talent more easily.
- Thought leadership – Position employees as industry experts by publishing insightful content. This boosts brand authority and inbound interest.
- Customer insights – Monitor conversations and feedback about your brand. LinkedIn’s depth of professional data provides rich customer insights to improve marketing.
- Competitive research – Analyze competitor company pages and employee profiles for useful intel. Identify their positioning, content strategy and more.
- Partnerships – Discover and connect with prospective strategic partners through shared connections and groups.
- Employee advocacy – Motivate your employees to be brand advocates by sharing company content with their networks.
In summary, LinkedIn opens up tremendous opportunities for brands in terms of lead generation, recruitment, market research, branding and positioning themselves as leaders. Investing time and resources into LinkedIn as a business can yield a significant return.
LinkedIn’s Premium Business Options
While creating a company page and engaging organically on LinkedIn is free, LinkedIn does offer various paid subscriptions and services for businesses to further amplify their presence and access additional features. LinkedIn’s premium options for businesses include:
LinkedIn Sales Navigator
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is LinkedIn’s flagship sales tool. It allows businesses to identify the right decision makers to target, access contact info, get notified of the best times to contact leads, and more. Pricing starts at $79.99 per month for an individual user license.
Key features include:
- Lead recommendations – See recommended leads based on ideal customer profiles.
- Advanced search – Find and filter prospects with boolean searches and filters.
- Contact insights – View connections, interests and preferences of prospects before reaching out.
- Team Link – Enable collaboration between sales teammates.
- InMail messages – Send direct customized emails to any LinkedIn member without a connection.
- Analytics – Track prospect engagement and sales productivity.
Recruiter Lite or Recruiter Corporate
LinkedIn Recruiter allows businesses to manage their hiring and talent pipelines. Recruiter Lite starts at $99.95 per month, while Recruiter Corporate starts at $200.95 per month with more features like analytics.
Highlights include:
- Search LinkedIn candidates with filters like skills, locations and years of experience.
- Send InMail messages to prospective candidates.
- Track candidate pipeline and activity.
- Post jobs and source candidates from LinkedIn feed.
- Integration with ATS like Greenhouse.
LinkedIn Marketing Solutions
LinkedIn Marketing Solutions offers LinkedIn ad targeting and campaign management capabilities. Businesses can create Sponsored Content, Sponsored InMail, Text Ads and more. Ad spend minimums start at $50 per day.
Popular features include:
- Audience targeting – Target by location, job title, company, interests, profile data and more.
- Content promotion – Sponsor organic content to reach more of your audience.
- Insight tag – Track website visits driven by your LinkedIn ads.
- Lead gen forms – Generate and collect leads from ads.
- Account-based advertising – Engage key accounts with personalized campaigns.
LinkedIn Elevate
Elevate helps businesses engage with LinkedIn users through employees and social amplification. It’s priced on a custom quote basis.
Elevate offers:
- Content suggestions – Curated content recommendations for employees to share.
- Shared library – Centralized management of your LinkedIn content.
- Social monitoring – Monitor brand mentions and sentiment.
- Team tracking – Track your team’s LinkedIn engagement impact.
- Auto-sharing to employee profiles.
LinkedIn Learning
LinkedIn Learning (formerly Lynda) is LinkedIn’s e-learning platform for businesses. It provides 7,000+ expert-led courses for employees. Pricing starts at $360 per user for annual plan.
Course topics include:
- Leadership & management
- Project management
- Sales & marketing
- Web design, coding & development
- Finance & accounting
- Creative skills
Cost Considerations for Paid LinkedIn
The cost for paid LinkedIn services depends on the specific solution, features needed and number of users. Here are some key considerations:
- For Sales Navigator, an individual license starts at $79.99/month. Team pricing is customized based on needs.
- Recruiter Lite costs a minimum of $99.95/month, while Recruiter Corporate is $200.95/month minimum.
- Marketing Solutions has minimum ad spend requirements starting at $50/day based on targeting and campaigns.
- Elevate is priced on a custom quote basis accounting for services and team size.
- LinkedIn Learning access starts at $360 per user for an annual plan billed monthly.
- Most premium solutions offer discounts for annual vs. monthly commitments.
- Nonprofits can request eligibility for donated products through the LinkedIn for Nonprofits program.
- The more users, features and level of access needed, the greater the overall investment.
- Consider potential ROI – the revenue opportunity LinkedIn provides for lead gen, recruiting, etc. based on your business goals.
Which LinkedIn Products Are Worth the Investment?
Determining which LinkedIn products are worth paying for depends on your specific business priorities and budget. Here are some scenarios for investing in paid LinkedIn:
- For B2B lead generation – Sales Navigator to identify prospects, promote content and send InMails.
- To improve recruiting – Upgrade to Recruiter to tap into LinkedIn’s candidate database.
- If marketing and brand-building are priorities – Invest in LinkedIn ad campaigns and Elevate for amplification.
- To train employees with e-learning – Purchase LinkedIn Learning licenses.
- For limited budget – Start with free tools, or a small Sales Navigator team.
- For max ROI – Combine Sales Navigator, Recruiter and Marketing Solutions.
Evaluate where your business struggles most – lead generation, hiring, branding? Then explore the LinkedIn products that can make the biggest impact on those pain points.
Tips for Success with Paid LinkedIn Services
Here are some best practices to get the most value from paid LinkedIn products and services:
- Outline clear goals and KPIs – What issues do you want LinkedIn to help solve? How will you measure success?
- Prioritize integrations – Connect Sales Navigator with your CRM, Recruiter with your ATS, etc. to create workflows.
- Leverage LinkedIn support – Ask reps for pointers to optimize your setup, campaigns and product usage.
- Commit to regular use – Occasional use won’t provide ROI. Make it part of daily workflows.
- Train your team – Conduct internal training on how to fully utilize LinkedIn tools.
- Review insights regularly – Check campaign reports and analytics. Iterate and improve.
- Combine products for amplified results – i.e. Recruiter + Sales Navigator.
- Focus on quality over quantity – Target prospects wisely. Prioritize valuable employees.
Should You Pay for LinkedIn?
Here are some key considerations when deciding whether to invest in paid LinkedIn services:
The Pros of Paying for LinkedIn
- Advanced targeting for sales and recruiting
- Uncovering contact info and insights on prospects
- More direct communication through InMail
- Expanded brand awareness through promoted content
- Detailed campaign insights and analytics
- Centralized tools to manage hiring and content
- Employee training through LinkedIn Learning
The Cons of Paying for LinkedIn
- Can require significant budget investment
- Long-term commitment often required for ROI
- Learning curve to use tools effectively
- Still need to create quality content and build organic presence
- Reporting and data ownership concerns
- Many operations like posting content still require time investment
Conclusion
In summary, LinkedIn does provide powerful paid products and services for businesses but they require budget and time invested. For companies focused heavily on sales, recruiting or branding on LinkedIn, the premium tools can provide major benefits from increased efficiency, data insights, and higher engagement. But the free tools alone can still be very valuable for getting started.
Determine your business goals for LinkedIn and whether premium features like Sales Navigator or job postings could help accelerate them. Review premium options like Recruiter or ad campaigns and estimate potential ROI. Start with the affordable packages or free tools first then evaluate expanding from there. With the right investment and strategy, LinkedIn can become an invaluable asset for reaching professionals and growing your business.
