LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network with over 800 million members. As a business, having a presence on LinkedIn is practically a requirement in order to connect with potential customers, clients, and partners. But is paying for LinkedIn’s premium features worth the investment for businesses?
What is LinkedIn Premium?
LinkedIn offers several tiers of premium accounts for businesses and individuals. The premium options for businesses include:
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator: For sales professionals, provides advanced search, saved leads, contact insights, and customized alerts.
- Recruiter Lite: Enables targeted searching, messaging, and tracking of candidates.
- Recruiter Corporate: Adds ability to search within company pages, see stats on hiring funnel, and post jobs.
- Business Plus: Lets you post long-form content, see more profile analytics, use additional search filters, and message anyone.
Pricing ranges from around $60-$120 per user per month depending on the plan. All the premium options provide more robust analytics and insights compared to the free version.
Benefits of LinkedIn Premium for business
Here are some of the key benefits that LinkedIn Premium offers businesses:
Expanded search capabilities
LinkedIn Premium allows you to use advanced filters, boolean search, and save advanced searches to quickly discover and connect with relevant prospects and candidates.
Additional insights on prospects
Premium accounts provide more information on who’s looking at your company page and employee profiles as well as analytics on post engagement. This helps you identify leads and determine content resonance.
Ability to message anyone
Having a Premium account enables you to send messages to any LinkedIn member without connecting first. This makes it easier to reach out to prospects.
More profile visits and contact options
Depending on the premium tier, you can see expanded profiles on prospects with full work experience and skill details. Premium also allows more InMail messages to facilitate outreach.
Customized prospecting alerts
Premium enables you to set up real-time alerts to be notified when prospects that match your ideal customer profile enter your target accounts or regions, change jobs, post content, and more.
Talent and recruiting capabilities
LinkedIn Recruiter and Recruiter Corporate provide powerful tools to search for qualified candidates, communicate with applicants, post jobs, and track hiring metrics.
Lead and company list building
With saved searches and lead builder tools, Premium makes it easy to curate targeted lists of prospects and accounts that you can organize and export for sales campaigns.
Potential drawbacks of LinkedIn Premium
While LinkedIn Premium provides some compelling features, there are a few potential disadvantages for businesses to be aware of:
High cost for multiple users
For larger teams, the per user pricing of Premium accounts can get very expensive. Small businesses may struggle to justify the cost.
Steep learning curve
LinkedIn Premium provides deep functionality, but fully utilizing all the features and customizing settings requires time and training. The tools may seem overwhelming initially.
Hard to measure ROI
While Premium provides more insights and capabilities, precisely measuring the return on investment can be tricky compared to advertising and other platforms.
Easy to get spammy
Sending lots of cold outreach messages and connection requests through Premium tools may come across as spammy and negatively impact your brand reputation.
Not a replacement for organic networking
Even with the expanded reach of Premium, meaningful relationships still require ongoing engagement and relationship building that tools alone cannot provide.
Who gets the most value from LinkedIn Premium?
Certain teams and roles tend to benefit most from upgrading to LinkedIn Premium:
- Sales: Lead generation, prospecting, messaging capabilities.
- Recruiting: Talent search, pipeline management, applicant tracking.
- Marketing: Audience analysis, content performance, increased reach.
- Business development: Contact lookup, list building, expanded network.
Companies that actively leverage LinkedIn for lead gen, hiring, and building awareness see the most ROI from Premium’s expanded capabilities. Less LinkedIn-reliant teams may not need or use the advanced features.
Tips for getting value from LinkedIn Premium
To maximize the impact of LinkedIn Premium for your business, here are some best practices:
Provide thorough training
Invest time upfront with your teams to configure settings, explore features, and learn best practices to utilize the tools effectively.
Set specific objectives
Define what success looks like from a sales, recruiting, etc. perspective and track progress toward goals enabled by Premium tools.
Keep tactics personalized
Balance automation with personal touches in outreach. Targeted, individualized communication earns more engagement than spamming every prospect.
Create shareable company & employee content
Leverage Premium’s expanded content features and analytics to craft engaging posts, articles, and multimedia that attracts your audience.
Conduct regular audits & optimization
Audit Premium features and settings quarterly. Eliminate unused tools, adjust targeting, optimize content mix, etc. to improve over time.
Conclusions
For businesses investing significant time and resources into leveraging LinkedIn for marketing, sales, and recruiting, upgrading to a Premium account provides tools that can deliver meaningful return on investment through increased efficiency, wider reach, and richer analytics.
However, to maximize the value of LinkedIn Premium it takes commitment across the organization to utilize the features thoughtfully and extensively. Without buy-in from teams and taking the time to personalize outreach, premium tools alone will not automatically generate leads and hires.
For businesses just testing the waters on LinkedIn or with limited resources, Premium may be overkill. The free account plus some minimal advertising may be sufficient. But aggressive, growing organizations can benefit from Premium capabilities if applied strategically.
Overall, evaluate whether your sales, recruiting, and marketing teams are ready to take full advantage of Premium on an ongoing basis. If LinkedIn is core to your strategy in attracting talent and customers, the elevated capabilities can provide a worthwhile boost but require concerted effort to use effectively.
| LinkedIn Premium Option | Key Features | Price per User/Month* |
|---|---|---|
| Sales Navigator | Advanced search, lead recommendations, custom alerts | $64.99 |
| Recruiter Lite | Candidate searching, messaging, pipeline tracking | $99.95 |
| Recruiter Corporate | Team collaboration, job posting, hiring analytics | $119.95 |
| Business Plus | Long-form posts, expanded profiles, advanced messaging | $49.99 |
*Based on annual subscription, billed monthly. Rates as of October 2023.
