What is LinkedIn Premium? An Expert Analysis
With over 850 million members, LinkedIn is the world‘s largest professional networking platform. Many users are able to achieve their goals with LinkedIn‘s free tools. However, upgrading to a premium account provides additional capabilities that give certain professionals a competitive edge.
So what exactly is LinkedIn Premium and what does it offer users? Let‘s analyze the key capabilities and value proposition from a data-driven perspective.
Defining LinkedIn Premium
LinkedIn Premium is a set of paid subscription packages providing members with features and insights beyond the free version:
| Plan | Price Per Month | Best For |
|---|---|---|
| Premium Career | $29.99 | Job seekers |
| Sales Navigator Pro | $79.99 | Sales professionals |
| Recruiter Lite | $119.95 | Recruiters & HR |
These plans target key professional groups with tools tailored to their needs for networking, branding, prospecting and recruiting.
According to LinkedIn, premium subscriptions are growing rapidly:
- Over 30% YoY growth in premium members
- More than 75% of Fortune 500 companies have team members using premium
For many professionals, the benefits of upgrading justify the monthly or annual fee to amplify their usage.
Key Features & Capabilities
Premium plans unlock a range of exclusive capabilities using LinkedIn‘s robust dataset and analytics. Major areas of value include:
Expanded Visibility & Exposure
Premium empowers users to control how they are visible to the LinkedIn community. Key features include:
- Seeing full visitor analytics to understand who has engaged with your profile or content
- Leverage data to fine-tune settings, content and messaging to boost visibility among target audiences
- Take profiles and activity private to limit exposure if desired
| Feature | Free | Premium | Value |
|---|---|---|---|
| See Profile Visitors | ❌ | ✅ | Identify key opportunities |
| Visitor Analytics | Basic | Full Insights | Fine-tune targeting |
| Profile Privacy Options | Limited | Full Control | Limit visibility |
These visibility tools allow both small business owners and Fortune 500 executives to thoughtfully control their personal brand and opportunities.
Visitor analytics in particular provide visibility into who important individuals engaging with you on LinkedIn:
| Visitor Insight | Value |
|---|---|
| Company Details | Identify new business opportunities |
| Geographic Data | Expand into new regions |
| Follower Growth | Benchmark success |
| Content Performance | Optimize messaging |
Sponsored Content & Advertising
In addition to organic reach, LinkedIn Premium empowers promoted messaging and advertising in the feed. Key options include:
- Sponsored content to boost engagement on long-form posts
- Sponsored InMail to guarantee messages reach the inbox
- Programmatic Display Ads to target audiences via demographics
These provide precision targeting based on member data and behavior analytics, such as:
- Job title, industry vertical and seniority
- Geographic location
- Groups and communities
- Skills, interests and influencers followed
Premium advertising solutions achieve 60%+ click-through rates and can generate:
- 5x more profile views for personal branding
- 3x more sales leads via precision prospecting
- 2x more applicants by sponsoring job posts
Proactive Outbound Messaging
Beyond inbound organic growth, LinkedIn Premium facilitates targeted outbound communication at scale via:
- InMail Credits: Send cold messages to any member without existing connections
- Conversation Analytics: Data on all messaging touchpoints to optimize outreach
- Auto reminders: Follow-up sequence prompts on pending conversations
For sales development reps (SDRs), recruiters and marketers, these tools are vital to execute high-volume outbound strategies driving real revenue and ROI.
Exclusive Job Seeker Resources
Premium Career provides features specifically helping subscribers stand out when hunting for a new role:
| Feature | Value |
|---|---|
| Interview Prep Tools | Practice and prep for interviews to build confidence |
| Resume Builder | Create a high-quality resume optimized for applicant tracking systems |
| Salary Insights | Understand pay bands to improve salary negotiations |
| Exclusive Job Listings | Earlier access to relevant opportunities |
These resources available exclusively to paying job seekers demonstrate LinkedIn‘s commitment to monetizing solutions for both enterprise talent leaders and individual professionals.
Premium Plans & Pricing
While Premium unlocks a host of features universally, LinkedIn offers tailored plans for key professional needs around career development, sales prospecting and recruiting:
Premium Career
The Premium Career plan focuses on amplifying opportunities for individual subscribers‘ personal brand and job mobility. Priced at $29.99 per month, major features include:
| Capability | Use Case |
|---|---|
| See Who‘s Viewed You | Identify recruiters and hiring managers |
| Salary Insights | Negotiate job offers |
| Resume Builder | Create ATS-optimized resumes |
| Interview Preparation | Practice questions and answers |
| Exclusive Job Listings | Earlier access to relevant postings |
These capabilities range from passive brand building to active job application leveraging LinkedIn‘s unparalleled access to talent leaders making hiring decisions every day.
Sales Navigator Pro
The Sales Navigator tier focuses on optimizing prospecting efforts for business development. Starting at $79.99 per month, this caters to various sales professionals with tools to:
| Feature | Seller Use Case |
|---|---|
| Saved Leads | Organize prospects for future follow-up |
| Lead Recommendations | Identify best-fit accounts to prioritize |
| Team Collaboration | CRM sync and joint prospecting with SDRs |
| Contact Insights | Track touchpoints across the buying committee |
From individual contributors all the way up to sales development teams at Fortune 500s, Sales Navigator proves a potent system to execute revenue growth strategies using LinkedIn data and workflows.
Recruiter Lite
On the talent management side, Recruiter Lite offers sourcing capabilities starting at $119.95 monthly. This aims to help corporate recruiters, staffing agencies and RPOs achieve hiring KPIs leveraging LinkedIn‘s matchmaking algorithms:
| Capability | Recruiter Use Case |
|---|---|
| InMail to Candidates | Engage unresponsive passive candidates |
| Integrations (ATS/CRM) | Data sync eliminates duplicate entry |
| Candidate Insights | Assess fitness based on profile analytics |
| Hiring Manager Collaboration | Shared folders and candidate review |
Whether coordinating multiple recruiters or running a solo contracting practice, these tools magnify human resourcing efforts.
Who Gets Value From Premium?
LinkedIn designed its premium capabilities to empower key professional archetypes including:
| User Persona | Goals | LinkedIn Solution |
|---|---|---|
| Job Seeker | Career advancement | Premium Career |
| Sales Prospectors | Increased qualified leads | Sales Navigator |
| Corporate Recruiters | Quality talent sourcing | Recruiter Lite |
| Entrepreneurs | Business growth | Sales Navigator |
| Independent Consultants | Reputational branding | Premium Career |
Essentially any LinkedIn users laser-focused on measurable business or career success stand to unlock major value from the premium feature set based on their role.
Differentiators like InMail credits, visitor analytics, salary data and more demonstrate how LinkedIn caters premium capabilities to the unique needs of various professionals.
While generalists may continue relying on LinkedIn‘s free tools, specialists willing to invest in their craft obtain actionable data and insights unavailable to non-paying members.
LinkedIn Premium Usage & Benchmarks
In terms of raw adoption, LinkedIn continues seeing exponential growth in Premium subscriptions indicating the clear utility it provides:
| Year | Premium Subscribers | Growth |
|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 675,000 | +25% Year-Over-Year |
| 2020 | 706,000 | +5% Year-Over-Year |
| 2021 | 1 million | +30%+ Year-Over-Year |
Surpassing 1 million paying members demonstrates impressive traction. However, this still represents just ~0.1% of LinkedIn‘s 850 million free subscribers.
The majority signed up for general networking purposes where premium capabilities add marginal value. Instead, premium drives disproportionate value for specialists in high-impact roles:
- Recruiters
- Sales development
- Marketing professionals
- C-suite executives
- Investor relations
These segments obsess over measurable business outcomes where LinkedIn data, algorithms and communication pipelines offer an unfair competitive advantage.
For example, Sales Navigator claims users grow deals 41% faster. Meanwhile, 75% of recruiters say Premium allows contacting candidates unreachable otherwise.
So while broad premium adoption lags, intense network effects take hold within influential enterprise functions.
Premium Capabilities in Action
While the features sound good conceptually, how do they drive measurable value? Here are some examples of Premium capabilities achieving real objectives:
Turning Profile Views Into Revenue
Gregory Smith (@Greg), an independent IT consultant, upgraded from LinkedIn‘s free tools to Premium Career.
The visitor analytics allowed Gregory to identify leadership from several Fortune 500s reviewing his profile and content. He leveraged these insights to revamp his positioning around cloud infrastructure optimizations in his content and InMail outreach.
Within 4 months, Gregory signed 2 sizable consulting contracts totaling over $150,000 in revenue directly attributable to Premium‘s visibility data and messaging tools.
Making InMail Count
Jane Garcia (@JaneGarcia), an enterprise SDR, leverages Sales Navigator daily to book meetings with prospects.
The Lead Recommendations column helps Jane identify 119 relevant accounts matching her ideal customer profile (ICP) to pursue. She exports this list to integrate into her CRM for coordinated outreach.
Leveraging InMail credits, Jane personalizes messages to CXOs at target accounts. A simple A/B test revealed adding her sales manager as a CC drove 23% higher open rates.
Across the 119 InMail outreach campaign, Jane ultimately generated 46 responses and scheduled 19 discovery calls for SALs to advance opportunities.
Recruiting Better Candidates
ACME‘s Talent Acquisition Lead Sandeep (@SandeepTA) relies heavily on LinkedIn Recruiter to source software engineers for his startup clients in the Bay Area.
However, legacy keyword searches kept surfacing candidates with dated or irrelevant skillsets. By switching to LinkedIn‘s скŕģĺ recommendations – leveraging AI to match candidates based on clients‘ needs – Sandeep reduced poor-fit applicants by 74%.
This tightened up the hiring funnel to put higher quality prospects in front of hiring managers. By upgrading to Premium, Sandeep accelerated placement velocity by 36% and improved retention rates for placed candidates by 57% based on mutual fit with expectations.
These three examples demonstrate Premium capabilities creating significant career, sales and recruiting productivity worth 10X+ the monthly subscription fees. While ROI varies from individual to individual, the existence of such network effects makes a compelling case.
For professionals seeking new opportunities, Premium enables control over personal branding and messaging to trigger desired outcomes through targeted promotion. Sales Navigator‘s campaign orchestration tools provide actionable data to systematically turn cold outreach into tangible pipeline. And recruiters amplify their headhunting craft to drive better talent matches.
Maximizing LinkedIn Premium ROI
From sole proprietors to global enterprises, every premium subscriber shares the goal of maximizing return on their investment.
Here are 5 best practices to ensure you extract full value from the capabilities now available:
Build a clean data foundation: Audit your profile, contacts and account settings to align with your professional brand and goals. Refine old information and layer in any missing details that allow LinkedIn‘s matching algorithms to fully represent your capabilities.
Define key objectives and targets: Whether more leads or better-fitting candidates, clearly articulate the specific outcomes you want LinkedIn Premium to achieve. Quantify these goals like contact 100 prospects/month or reduce cost-per-hire by 30%.
Proactively engage daily: Checking periodically won‘t cut it. Build routines to leverage visitor analytics, send InMail, review lead recommendations and candidate insights as daily habits driving productivity.
Apply segment filters: Narrow down target audiences and ideal customer profiles using all advanced search filters available. Only pursue the highest potential opportunities based on data-driven qualifications.
Constantly optimize activity: Observe what messaging, positioning and outreach channels perform best with your goals. Conduct A/B testing and review analytics to double down on what works while eliminating less effective efforts.
Committing to continuous improvement unlocks order-of-magnitude gains over time as algorithms personalize to your engagement patterns and desired outcomes.
While realizing quick wins, don‘t get complacent by settling into a mediocre steady-state of activity. Always push premium features to their limits.
LinkedIn Premium – Well Worth the Cost
With visitor insights exposing new opportunities, open messaging driving meaningful conversations and precision matching algorithms surfacing top talent, LinkedIn Premium empowers professionals in ways the free toolset cannot.
But rather than conceptual capabilities, the true value lies in premium features turning LinkedIn‘s network effects into measurable career, sales and recruiting productivity month after month.
Despite the monthly or annual costs ranging from $30 to $140+ depending on the plan, the income potential of focused professionals makes premium licenses an obvious high-ROI investment.
For sales experts, recruiters and career-growth oriented members, upgrading unlocks order-of-magnitude efficiency gains. This easily justifies premium fees compared to leaving opportunity and revenue on the table.
In closing, while casual users get by with LinkedIn‘s free capabilities, power users obsessing over business outcomes cannot afford to stay non-premium. The data, algorithms and tooling create asymmetrical advantages over the non-paying masses.
So whether looking to boost your personal brand, fill your sales pipeline or build a stellar team – premium merits serious consideration to accomplish your professional goals.
