Back in early April, LinkedIn (which is worth approximately $30 billion) acquired Lynda for $1.5 billion. It was the largest acquisition in LinkedIn’s 12-year history (which includes 15 acquisitions). The move was arguably one of the most talked about acquisitions in the past 10 years, almost as sensational as Facebook’s valuation and acquisition of Instagram back in 2012.
If you really think about the implications, however, it becomes obvious that LinkedIn and Lynda is far more important than the much-ballyhooed Facebook/Instagram acquisition. By acquiring Lynda, LinkedIn has taken a firm stance on ed-tech in general and revealed its forecast for what it believes to be the future of content marketing.
Specifically, it seems that LinkedIn believes 3 major content marketing trends will continue well into the 2020s.
1. Video marketing will continue gaining in popularity
The most obvious implication of the acquisition is that LinkedIn believes very strongly in the allure of video.
Video marketing has been growing unabated for several years now, and it wouldn’t have taken a wizard to forecast that it would continue to do so. But the drawback of video marketing has always been singular: cost. Written content and even infographics will always be much easier, and faster, to produce. As of 2014, listicles were still the most shared type of business content as well — not videos, commercials, or YouTube ads.
So it speaks volumes that LinkedIn, already well-regarded for its massively popular and widely read Influencer posts, still feels the need to have a strong video marketing brand producing its videos (which we can expect to drastically increase in volume soon).
2. Vlogs and webcasts are no longer going to cut it
Even more telling is the fact that, despite the relatively high costs of video, LinkedIn has acquired the “Hollywood” producer of ed tech videos. Lynda is popular, especially among college students entering the job market, precisely because it makes high quality, high production value videos that are a ton of fun to watch and learn from.
This means that smaller brands already straining their resources to enter the competitive video marketing landscape will have a big problem on their hands very soon. With such a huge investment into high quality video marketing and education, LinkedIn has set a standard that other household brands will eventually follow. It may very well be the case that, in 10 years time, YouTube vlogs and webinars won’t have a significant audience anymore.
Not if they can’t compete with the levels of quality Lynda is offering for $25/month.
3. Ed-tech will drive a new kind of smart advertising
Analysts estimate that the corporate training market is currently worth $130 billion, and that corporate content is about $20 billion. That’s over $150 billion dollars worth of real estate that no brand has ever come close to cornering.
LinkedIn is deadset on changing that by 2020. With 347 million users and a year-over-year growth rate of 43%, LinkedIn could have over 2 billion users by 2020. Such meteoric growth probably won’t be sustained, but the point is that LinkedIn is uniquely positioned to completely swallow the corporate training market with top-of-the-line training videos, courtesy of Lynda.
This means that ed tech advertising will actually be a thing. Not only will it be a thing, it will be LinkedIn’s thing.
4. Marketing will be increasingly based on the acquisition and curation of consumer data
We all knew this already (marketing automation has known it since before the industry was called “marketing automation”), but we must remind ourselves that data is everything these days.
One of the biggest benefits LinkedIn will reap from acquiring Lynda is the acquisition of a hugely useful data set that tells the parent company exactly what Lynda users are watching, and how they want to develop their careers. This will lead to highly targeted advertising and marketing that LinkedIn has had to rely on old data for in the past. It’s the type of influential, user-friendly marketing that Facebook can only dream of.
How do you think LinkedIn’s acquisition of Lynda will affect marketing, ed tech, and business in general?
