Case Study about Qwest Business on LinkedIn: Attracting 1,400 IT professionals in award-winning campaign Visit marketing.linkedin.com for more success stories.

1. Marketing Solutions
Qwest
Case Study
Award-winning campaign
attracts 1,400 IT professionals
“
Challenge
• Create an active online community for IT professionals
in the SMB space
• Engage target audience in select geographies
• Quickly build a critical mass of members
Solution
• Establish LinkedIn Group, ‘SMB IT Connection‘
• Drive membership through targeted display
advertising and LinkedIn Partner Messages
Qwest Business delivers a comprehensive portfolio of
national data and voice networking communications • Engage members with thought-leadership discussions
solutions to Fortune 500 companies and other enterprises, and surround the group with educational, interactive
government agencies, and educational institutions. content
Reaching their target audience with LinkedIn Why LinkedIn?
In order to establish themselves as a resource to IT decision • Large, active IT and SMB audiences
makers in the small and medium-sized business (SMB) space, • Targeted reach, both in geography and company size
Qwest wanted to create an online forum where those IT • Ability to create a tailored campaign combining online
decision makers could share and discuss their technology community, display advertising, targeted content,
problems and solutions. With thousands of IT decision email, and polling
makers already active on LinkedIn, Qwest decided to
establish their community within the larger LinkedIn network
by creating a ‘Custom Group.’ Results
• Achieved 18% open rate on membership invitations
• Built
1,400-member community from the ground up
• Gained audience insights from discussions and polls
• Won IAB MIXX award honoring best B2B campaigns
LinkedIn ads earned up to a 3% CTR

2. A Custom Group is an online, facilitated community on By year-end 2010, SMB IT Connection boasted more than
LinkedIn where like-minded professionals gather to 1,400 members and continues to grow. The group has a high
collaborate and connect around a shared interest. Custom engagement rate, with 10% more members actively commenting
Groups provide marketers the opportunity to foster long- in discussions than participants in comparable groups.
term interaction with customers and prospects, and engage
them with targeted content such as video, whitepapers, Cindy Humphrey, vice president of marketing for Qwest
Twitter and RSS feeds. Business explains, “This campaign was a success because we
were able to engage IT decision makers with targeted
Qwest Business and its agency, McKinney, partnered with information that is useful to them. By tapping the LinkedIn
LinkedIn to create ‘SMB IT Connection,’ a Custom Group resources, we exceeded our goal of attracting 1,000 members
specifically for IT leaders in the SMB space, and launched an by year-end.”
integrated campaign around it, called ‘Listening Not Talking.’
Group activity grows
Engaging with educational content 1000
As the sponsor of SMB IT Connection, Qwest leveraged
821
customizable media space on the group page to provide 791
800
interaction opportunities for members – including educational
626
videos, topical white papers, and a live RSS feed from the
600
Qwest Business blog.
400
Qwest exercised the 'listening' element of its campaign with a
mix of open-ended discussion posts, pointed questions, and
several LinkedIn polls. Qwest invited group members to weigh 200
in on hot topics such as preferred IT solutions, telecomm 27
partnerships, and social media tools – which increased member 0
participation and yielded valuable audience insights. Start Month 1 Month 2 Month 3 Month 4
Monthly Unique Visitors to Qwest’s LinkedIn Group, ‘SMB IT
Connection’ increased rapidly
Industry accolades
At the sixth annual MIXX Awards, the Interactive Advertising
Bureau (IAB) awarded Qwest Business’ Listening Not Talking
campaign a bronze MIXX Award in the business-to-business (B2B)
category. The MIXX Awards are the only juried advertising
competition that evaluates all critical components of the
interactive marketing mix, including strategy, creative, execution
and results.
Through SMB IT Connection and the Listening Not Talking
Qwest ran LinkedIn polls to learn about members’ opinions campaign, Qwest Business has started to establish a valuable, and
and priorities hopefully long-lasting relationship with a group that is otherwise
hard to reach: the SMB IT decision-maker.
Integrated campaign yields rapid results
To increase membership in the group, Qwest Business worked
with McKinney to fully integrate the campaign into Qwest’s
overall marketing efforts. Qwest combined display advertising Reach the world’s largest audience of business professionals
with regional print media, and used LinkedIn Partner with LinkedIn.
Messaging to communicate directly with LinkedIn members in
LinkedIn Marketing Solutions
specific audience segments using targeted emails in their http://marketing.linkedin.com/contact
LinkedIn inbox.
In the first month of SMB IT Connection, Qwest Business’
custom content ads earned a nearly 3% click-through rate and
produced useful information about what topics interested IT
professionals the most. LinkedIn Partner Messages, which
invited select IT professionals to join the group, earned an 18%
open rate.
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