When successfully executed, LinkedIn can become a powerful social media marketing tool.
Cathay Pacific Airways is a nonstop premium airline service focused on the business class market. When they are looking for a way to expand their business accounts for the Asia and China market, they choose LinkedIn as their main marketing tool.
Reaching the target audience
Cathay Pacific faces the same challenges that all businesses face. They need to cut through the noise in the marketplace and reach their target audience with a compelling message.
Through a creative LinkedIn marketing campaign, they were able to achieve both of these goals.
Why should you use LinkedIn?
LinkedIn offers a truly unique prospecting and marketing platform for B2B businesses like Cathay Pacific. By using LinkedIn as the main marketing tool, Cathay Pacific was able to target prospects via user profile data based on a number of key criteria:
- Seniority
- Function
- Company Size
- Group Affiliations
Targeting prospects via LinkedIn Groups
Given the company’s goal to expand business flights into the Asian market, Cathay Pacific targeted Asia-focused business groups within LinkedIn. Leveraging LinkedIn marketing solutions, the company was able to target members of these groups wherever they were on LinkedIn.
These prospects were targeted in a number of ways including:
- Graphical banner ads and sidebar ads
- Sponsored polls
- Recommendation ads
To understand the effectiveness of these tactics, it’s important to consider how they work in real time. When a person recommends a product or service on a LinkedIn company page, that action triggers an update that goes out to this person’s entire LinkedIn network. This promotes even broader interest. Furthermore, being that it is consistent with the normal look and feel of LinkedIn, it promotes better click through rates than standard ads.
Working alongside LinkedIn, Cathay Pacific was also able to obtain user data every time somebody clicked on a recommendation ad. This offers the company an extremely warm, prequalified lead.
“Where we advertise is where the business person is going to be. And on the social media side, where is the business person? They’re on LinkedIn.” – Dennis Owen, VP Marketing Americas at Cathay Pacific Airways
By utilizing LinkedIn for this campaign, Cathay Pacific gained brand exposure with thousands of additional businesses that were already prequalified. The campaign undoubtedly will provide long-term value for years to come.