LinkedIn’s adding some new tools to help marketers maximize their lead generation and brand building efforts, including a new Business Manager dashboard, a new B2B aligned, LinkedIn-native consultancy, and updated CRM and API integrations.

The biggest update is its new Business Manager platform, which provides a central dashboard to manage ‘people, accounts, Pages’, and their associated marketing processes.

As outlined in the above video overview, Business Manager provides a simplified management platform for all of your LinkedIn business activities.

The new platform includes dedicated tabs for managing People, Partners, Ad Accounts and Company Pages, along with Matched Audiences.

It’s essentially a slimmed down version of LinkedIn’s paid Sales Navigator tool, with the idea being that by enticing more businesses with its basic brand management tools, that’ll get more marketers to sign up for a Sales Navigator subscription.

But even in basic form, there are some handy tools here, with the capacity to more centrally manage all of your various LinkedIn activities from a single space.

You can learn more about the new Business Manager platform, and its various functions, here.

For brands that want to go even further than this, LinkedIn’s also launching a new consultancy, called ‘B2B Edge’, which will provide dedicated marketing and brand building advice based on academic research and first-party data.

As per LinkedIn:

“This new service will provide resources and intelligence to improve segmentation, targeting and market position, as well as optimize creative and media investments. From Oracle to SAS to Workhuman, we’re helping some of the most respected enterprise brands in B2B think about how brand and performance advertising, together, produce the most impactful marketing campaigns.”

The main benefit, of course, will be that this consultancy is owned and operated by LinkedIn itself, which will afford it significant advantages in insight and platform knowledge. Which will no doubt be a welcome assistance option for many brands - you can learn more about B2B Edge here.

Finally, LinkedIn’s also expanding access to its updated new content and Marketing APIs, while it’s also launching a new CRM data validation feature and an integration with Gong. 

“Powered by our more than 830 million members, Sales Navigator provides real-time information about prospects and accounts. With our latest CRM features, your sales teams can easily validate that the data in their CRM (often viewed as the single-source-of-truth) is up-to-date. And when the time comes to get on the phone with a buyer, our new integration with Gong is there to make the feedback loop as easy as possible so your sales team can be the trusted advisor that buyers want.”

Gong enables advanced revenue tracking and projection, providing more ways to dig into your sales data. The added insights from LinkedIn will compliment those charts and notes, and facilitate more connection opportunities with relevant buyers and contacts.

These are some interesting updates - nothing ground breaking, given much of this functionality has been available in different form for some time. But they’re interesting, additional considerations for your strategic approach, which could improve your sales and marketing process.