LinkedIn enters into a partnership with Adobe that will improve advertising results

LinkedIn continues to expand its audience targeting capabilities, this time through a new partnership with Adobe that will expand its marketing and targeting capabilities to get better results. Adobe said in an official statement: “Adobe and Microsoft are working to align key data sources to populate account-based profiles in Adobe Experience Cloud, including Marketo Engage and Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales, and this will enable B2B marketers and sellers to identify customers and target groups.”

The deal will essentially enable marketing and sales teams to leverage data from LinkedIn, Marketo Engage, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 to gain a clearer view of the audiences they need to reach, and target them more effectively. For example, an Adobe client sells office supplies and this means they will now be able to use LinkedIn audience data and ad targeting tools to show ads to specific decision makers, based on job roles, locations, etc., which increases their results. The main goal of this new partnership appears to be to compete with Salesforce, which offers similar targeting and capabilities, although without LinkedIn's complete and professional data set.

It is noteworthy that in 2016, when Microsoft’s acquisition of LinkedIn was announced, Salesforce expressed its opposition to the merger, which it indicated by saying: “Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of LinkedIn threatens the future of innovation and competition. By obtaining ownership of LinkedIn’s unique data set, which includes more than 450 million users in more than 200 countries, Microsoft will be able to deprive competitors of access to that data, and thus obtain an unfair competitive advantage.” This new deal, in which Adobe's tools merge with LinkedIn's insights and analytics, will certainly expand the scope of its combined offering, and with LinkedIn now serving more than 610 million members and seeing “record levels” of engagement this data resource is growing daily. The platform recently launched a new integration with Microsoft Search Data

ping, based on its targeting ability. Each of these steps has significant implications for advertisers, making LinkedIn an even more effective tool for reaching the right people.