Unified Social is a Certified LinkedIn Ads partner that provides major global brands real-time expertise to help manage their paid campaigns across social networks. Unified Social is also a thriving tech startup, motivated to drive more B2B leads to its own sales team to expand its growing business. We partnered with Unified’s client services team to hone their B2B expertise on LinkedIn. Leveraging LinkedIn’s targeting capabilities to engage senior marketing decision makers with Sponsored Updates, Unified layered on its multi-generational tracking technology to track the earned media of its campaign -- including the resulting activity from Dark Social. The resulting campaigns drove impressive results for Unified: - 36% under eCPA goal for leads - 19% conversion rate—2X Unified’s benchmark - 143 leads from Senior Marketers in a two week period The next step is to revisit these leads over the long-term to measure the positive impact on actual sales and ROI.

1. C A S E S T U D Y
HOW WE USED LINKEDIN SPONSORED UPDATES AND DARK
SOCIAL TRACKING TO MAKE B2B CONVERSIONS SKYROCKET
Sponsore d
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Sponsore d
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Sponsore d
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“As an Certified Ad Partner, we’ve seen firsthand how LinkedIn ads achieve excellent results for client advertising
initiatives. Therefore, when we decided to run our own campaign focused on generating high quality B2B leads,
combining the power of Sponsored Updates with our own multi-generational tracking technology was an obvious
big win for us.”
-Rick Martira
Vice President, Marketing at Unified
For quite some time, content and engagement have been presented to B2B brands as a one-dimensional
social media reincarnation of the “if you build it, they will come” scenario. In other words, if you publish
great content, then presto—leads are guaranteed to follow. However, while enticing digital marketers
to download useful social research might sound like a walk in the park, it doesn’t come without careful
strategic planning supported by dynamic technology. Our marketing team was faced with determining
the best way to reach our best audience in the best context to get the best leads.
To achieve our goal, we devised a strategy to merge the power of LinkedIn’s proven Sponsored
Updates and Audience Expansion targeting with our own unmatched social attribution technology.
This approach enabled us to not only reach business-minded professionals interested in social media
advertising, but also track generational sharing and conversions that extended beyond interactions with
our original post.
C H A L L E N G E

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S T R A T E G Y
The campaign featured a guide to social advertising which users could download for free. We sought
to reach senior level executives who had an interest and/or skills in social media, with the explicit
purpose of encouraging them to click through to our website and download exclusive research. To
achieve desired results, the following four tactics were implemented:
• Testing Creative Was Crucial: Leveraging LinkedIn’s direct sponsored content feature to
launch ads as unpublished posts, we were able to test 8 ad units to quickly optimize to the best
performing posts.
• Well-Rounded Targeting: We used LinkedIn’s premium professional targeting to identify and
reach 5 unique groups focused on social marketing, and LinkedIn’s Audience Expansion targeting
to find look-a-likes of those individuals to exponentially increase our reach.
• More Than Mobile: To reach users wherever they access LinkedIn, we deployed our ads across
both mobile and desktop devices.
• Multi-generational Earned Tracking: We incorporated attribution shortlinks in our ad copy to
track multi-generational activity (beyond the first generation ad click) and Dark Social sharing (i.e.
copying and pasting links into emails, chats or other social sites) sharing and conversions.

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R E S U L T S
36%
Under CPA Goal
19%
Conversion Rate
Source: LinkedIn & Unified Data,
This strategy proved effective, delivering results that exceeded all campaign goals:
143
Conversions Tracked
Across All Generations
*Benchmark based on Unified, Twitter and Honda historical data
Senior Marketers
Clicks Tracked Across All Generations
C O N C L U S I O N
To truly turn quality content into desired leads, B2B brands must also have access to a premium, relevant
audience to which creative can be tested (and retested). Attribution is also an important factor, giving
marketers the opportunity to measure the virality of their ads, and how it translates to the conversions
they receive. The combination of both of these elements is a significant win for B2B marketers.

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Unified is an award-winning marketing and analytics technology company. Unified provides professional
marketers with powerful advertising, data, and intelligence tools built on the industry’s most advanced
data platform. Unified serves over 600 customers, including Global 2000 enterprises and their advertising
agencies, from its offices in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and New Orleans. For more
information, visit www.UnifiedSocial.com.
A B O U T
C O N T A C T U S
F I N D U S O N
S I G N U P F O R A L I V E D E M O
sales@unifiedsocial.com
www.UnifiedSocial.com