Exploring the Effectiveness of LinkedIn as a Tool for B2B Customer Acquisition in the Asia Pacific Region

This research aims to explore the use of LinkedIn as a tool for B2B customer acquisition, in order to tap into a timely issue faced by many sales and partnerships personnel working digitally in globally dispersed sales teams. The research problem and data are based on Organization X and signifies the bottleneck in the sales process lying in not receiving an initial response from the potential clients who are contacted through LinkedIn. Hence the research objective is to identify the factors affecting this low conversion rate, and to understand LinkedIn behavioural patterns and preferences of working professionals in the Asia Pacific region. The key variables explored are message length, message subject, prior knowledge, and LinkedIn usage frequency, which have been proved to have a weak relationship with the rate of responsiveness, whereas the preference for being approached through channels other than LinkedIn, such as email and through fellow employees have been recorded to be higher. Preference has also been observed for shorter, precise messages with informative message subjects, which would lead to higher tendency of replying to B2B related messages on LinkedIn. Keywords: LinkedIn sales, B2B marketing, Customer acquisition, Digital sales