Affiliate Marketing on LinkedIn – The Best B2B Lead Generation Channel

Affiliate marketing on LinkedIn is one of the best ways to connect to business professionals, industry leaders, and C-level executives to promote B2B products and make money from commissions. 

However, when it comes to affiliate marketing, LinkedIn is quite different from other social media channels. It’s the only well-known B2B-focused platform out there, so the marketing strategies you’re using on other social media will require tweaking at least, if not a complete overhaul.

So let’s uncover how you can bring it home with affiliate marketing on LinkedIn.

Here Is Why LinkedIn Is Different from Other Social Media

LinkedIn is great for promoting B2B and SaaS products, including high-ticket affiliate niches like finance and insurance, but the audience there likes in-depth content like market research, case studies, and other hard evidence. 

Target Audience	LinkedIn offers access to a highly targeted audience of professionals, allowing affiliates to reach decision-makers, industry experts, and potential clients within their niche.
Credibility Building	Affiliates can establish credibility and authority within their industry by sharing valuable content, participating in relevant discussions, and showcasing their expertise.
Analytics and Insights	LinkedIn offers robust analytics tools that allow affiliates to track performance, measure engagement, and gain valuable insights into their audience.

Benefits of Affiliate Marketing on LinkedIn

While LinkedIn is less popular than other mainstream social media, it has a unique professional environment, solvent audience, and potential for search engine optimization.

“As an affiliate, you’re helping your audience to find the right product while giving them the ability to sort through a lot of things they may not know much about. But, as an expert, you can help people see through the weeds to choose the best product for their needs. At the same time, providing more options creates more monetization opportunities for you.”  – Talar Malakian, CMO at Phonexa

Thousands of B2B and SaaS Leads

With over 67 million companies registered on LinkedIn, the platform is proving especially effective for B2B marketing in industries like software, technology, business consulting, entrepreneurship, finance, insurance, and legal services.

Purchase-Ready Audience

An average LinkedIn user is an educated, grown-up person well before retirement age with a higher-than-average income:

• Most LinkedIn users are between 24 and 35
• LinkedIn has the highest-educated audience of all social media, with 53% of LinkedIn users from the United States having at least a bachelor’s degree
• 53% of respondents make over $100,000 yearly use LinkedIn

SEO-Driven Lead Generation

LinkedIn articles can also rank on Google and appear on LinkedIn’s /pulse/ directory. This feature used to be a separate LinkedIn platform called Pulse, but now it’s integrated into the main dashboard, so you can get it done by clicking the “Write article” button.

With SEO-optimized articles on LinkedIn, you can boost your search rankings and add links on top of the links you use in regular posts. Moreover, LinkedIn articles appear on Google search pages even for people without LinkedIn accounts.

Limitations to Affiliate Marketing on LinkedIn

On average, LinkedIn ads cost $2 – $3 per click and $5 – $8 per 1000 impressions, which is quite costly compared to  other social media:

LinkedIn users spend 7 minutes and 38 seconds on average on the platform daily, while Facebook users spend around 10 minutes. But then again, LinkedIn is rarely used to spend time senselessly – instead, most users are looking for specific information or business connections.

LinkedIn Affiliate Marketing Examples

LinkedIn’s “Articles” section is the best place for in-depth, long-form reviews with a promotional component. For example, you can write an educational article on the subject in question while organically promoting the advertiser’s product.

On LinkedIn, you may not be able to use all the bells and whistles to make your content visually appealing, but users aren’t necessarily looking for that. More often than not, they search for data-driven content, paying more attention to the essence of what is written than the form.

Source: LinkedIn

Apply Cross-Channel Affiliate Marketing on LinkedIn

More often than not, you will find established LinkedIn influencers and new users posting links to their websites or YouTube channel. 

With LinkedIn influencer marketing, you can increase exposure by combining audiences from several different channels and running affiliate campaigns without directly adding links to LinkedIn posts.

Source: LinkedIn

Link Tracking for LinkedIn Affiliate Marketing Campaigns

Whether you are an affiliate or advertiser, you need proper link tracking so all generated and converted leads are attributed correctly. But it would be even better to get a detailed lowdown on the customer journey, from the first click on your ad to the lead’s ultimate destination, be it your own sales reps or an external advertiser.

Phonexa does it all, with Lynx being our link-focused software. With Lynx, you can unlock exhaustive insights on affiliate clicks across social channels like LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, as well as Google Ads and many other channels.

 

Like any other Phonexa product, Lynx integrates with the other seven software pieces so you get a comprehensive performance marketing ecosystem that tracks, distributes, and analyzes not only clicks and conversions but every trackable user action.

“Whenever we see a client using a tooling system that makes them have to do something manual, we try and build a solution for them – that’s how we’ve ended up with eight pieces of software under one roof. Our perfect customers are media buyers, performance marketers, advertisers, carriers – anyone in the affiliate marketing or the lead generation space that’s looking to optimize their journeys, media buying budgets, spend and make sure they are delivering the best service to consumers while also optimizing their ROI at all times.” – David Pickard, CEO at Phonexa

Take a product tour with Phonexa to explore how eight performance marketing solutions work together to help you generate and convert more web and call leads.

Web Lead Tracking with LMS Sync – Key to Successful Affiliate Marketing on LinkedIn

While Lynx is mostly focused on links and clicks, LMS Sync helps track the entire customer journey as well as distribute leads to the destination point – an internal sales or customer support department or external advertiser – and analyze them in real-time and strategically against the historical data. 

Long story short, LMS Sync unlocks every single piece of data on web leads:

 

Paired with Phonexa’s ping tree technology, LMS Lync guarantees you can sell your leads at the highest price to the best-fitting company. You can cherry-pick the advertisers you’re selling specific leads to based on their demographics and also sell unsold or non-qualified leads on the open market.

 

Build your plan now, or book a demo to learn about how Phonexa can optimize the distribution of your LinkedIn leads.

On-Site User Behavior Insights with HitMetrix

Not all clicks turn out profitable, so it’s crucial to know why some LinkedIn clicks do not convert and how users who convert and who don’t usually behave. With HitMetrix, you can unlock all these details and get session replays that allow you to track the on-site journey at a granular level.

For example, you can identify how users scroll down your LinkedIn articles, where they stop, what elements they focus attention on, and what makes them click or leave the page. Then you can turn these insights into tangible adjustments like, for instance, CTA repositioning.

 

LinkedIn Phone Call Tracking with Call Logic

What LMS Sync unlocks for web leads, Call Logic unlocks for phone calls, collecting exhaustive insights on inbound phone calls from LinkedIn and elsewhere. In practice, this means you can pave the optimal path for every inbound call and continuously improve your call campaigns.

“As long as you’re tracking your calls in the same way that you track your web leads in terms of attributing value back to all of your media buying platform, whether it be your social media platforms or Google or wherever you’re doing, let the algorithm do its thing and go away.  Allowing the algorithm to target customers is valuable for you. A lot of people will track every little last thing out of their web leads to make sure they’re optimizing their advertising spend, but they don’t do it for calls. So I think calls are getting treated maybe unfairly, not being tracked to the same level. You’re just not letting the platforms do their thing.” – David Pickard, CEO at Phonexa:

 

Here’s how you can improve your affiliate marketing on LinkedIn with Call Logic:

Custom Call Tracking Numbers

Attributing a unique call tracking number to your LinkedIn affiliate marketing campaigns allows you to separate all traffic coming from LinkedIn from other traffic. Moreover, by using local, international, or vanity call tracking numbers, you can increase engagement (for example, customers tend to dial local phone numbers) or imprint your brand’s name or purpose into the caller’s mind (for example, 844-Phonexa).

Custom Call Distribution

You can employ any imaginable call distribution algorithms within Phonexa’s IVR to match LinkedIn leads with the right live operators. Likewise, you can transfer the collected caller insights to the live operator in charge of the call to give them a head start in the conversation.

Simulating Your LinkedIn Affiliate Marketing Campaigns with Predictive Modeling Software

One of the best things you can do before unrolling your LinkedIn affiliate marketing campaigns is to simulate them with Predictive Modeling software. Then you can focus on the winning scenarios and avoid wasting resources on campaigns that are likely to underperform.

Here’s how predictive modeling software works:

 

Want to learn more about Phonexa’s eight-in-one affiliate marketing software suite? Book a demo to explore how Phonexa can help you squeeze the most out of your affiliate campaigns.

Ensuring FCC Compliance with Consent Branches

Now that businesses are obliged to receive prior express written consent before contacting consumers with marketing messages, it’s crucial to use consent-ready technologies. So if you sell or buy leads, you are likely in transition to post-FCC-update consent management practices.

 

In this context, Consent Branches can ensure proper consent collection and record-keeping for all your leads, including those generated on LinkedIn. As an affiliate, you can collect and transfer consent records to advertisers; as an advertiser, you can be sure the incoming leads are legitimate.

Get Your All-in-One Affiliate Marketing Software Suite at a Reasonable Price

While every Phonexa solution is great on its own, the best results are achieved when all eight products work in sync, enabling free data exchange between integrated systems. For example, web lead insights can be used in call processing, and vice versa.

 

Here are the eight proprietary solutions you get at a single price (online price calculator):

Build your plan now, or book a demo to learn more about Phonexa.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is LinkedIn affiliate marketing?

LinkedIn allows various methods for affiliate marketing, including promoting products through affiliate links and driving traffic to content on other social media platforms with product ads.

Is 1000 impressions on LinkedIn good?

A thousand impressions on LinkedIn are not many, and you can easily get them shortly after posting to the feed or publishing an article. For example, if the CTR rate is 1%, then you get 10 clicks from 1,00 impressions. Then, if 10% of clicks convert into sales, which is a higher-than-average conversion rate, you get one sale.

But then again, the actual sales you can make out of 1,000 impressions depend on the nature of your affiliate campaign, your target audience, the quality of content, the strengths of your brand, and multiple other factors.

Can you post affiliate links on Linkedin?

Yes, you can promote sponsored products by adding links to LinkedIn posts. However, it’s important to comply with the specific rules of LinkedIn affiliate programs and pages, such as including a disclaimer. Additionally, excessive use of affiliate links may degrade the quality of the content, deter readers, and lower the publisher’s trustworthiness.

How to create an affiliate page on LinkedIn

The LinkedIn support team can only create a LinkedIn affiliate page for companies with active business accounts. Such pages represent a related or subsidiary organization and act as other business pages. However, inserting affiliate links is possible with all types of LinkedIn pages unless the rules specify otherwise.