Most of us know LinkedIn as the world’s most comprehensive professional networking platform. You’ve probably used it to job search or recruit for your department, but the platform has a multitude of unparalleled features built to help brands revenue-driven success.
LinkedIn’s unique focus on professional connections has shaped its evolution towards monetized marketing solutions for its users. Since its inception in 2003, LinkedIn has expanded to become the world’s digital hub for B2B marketing. Because of this, your company’s presence on LinkedIn is no longer optional if you want to maintain credibility and support your website with qualified traffic. In fact, 46% of social media traffic to B2B company sites comes from LinkedIn. It’s a key platform to influence your industry and generate conversions from a network of engaged professionals.
LinkedIn’s marketing resources offer helpful data-driven advice on how to capitalize on the platform’s marketing features. Some of these are already familiar to seasoned digital marketers, what’s less obvious is exactly what content is impactful to would-be buyers. Especially on a unique business-focused platform like ThumbStopper.
According to LinkedIn, only 20% of content creators believe that thought leadership content helps them close deals. Yet 49% of C-suite executives agree that thought leadership content has led them to do business with a company.
Furthermore, LinkedIn claims to reach over 65 million business decision-makers in over 200 countries and territories. With a large portion of them vetting other businesses for products and services. It’s clear that there is an opportunity to utilize LinkedIn to establish your brand as an industry authority and ultimately build new revenue.
So what exactly does thought leadership mean in the context of a B2B social media platform?
In truth, it’s not radically different from the content most companies are posting on LinkedIn. Much of it already falls under the types of thought leadership, which includes content that shares the business’ perspective on news, explains the company’s vision, or provides information on the type of product. The difference is that quality thought leadership content doesn’t just inform, it also offers guidance to solve a prospect’s problems.
The great thing about LinkedIn – and why thought leadership is so effective on the platform – is that people come to the platform specifically looking for professional advice or recommendations. If you take advantage of the robust targeting available in LinkedIn’s campaign manager, the right combination of thought leadership content and ad spend can result in a successful lead generation campaign for any brand.
We don’t advise that you dive right into advertising on LinkedIn. There are a few ways you can prepare before you begin to ensure that you’re getting the most out of LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager. First, be sure your company page is completed. That includes your logo, overview, URL, organization info, and an easy-to-access call-to-action button to your primary landing page or products. Having this information and building a sleek call-to-action legitimizes your company to users interested in converting – pages with complete information get 30% more weekly views.
When you’re ready to start posting, be deliberate about content type and length. Concise text-based updates of around 150 characters are ideal. But rich visual media like custom-made images and videos perform even better than text updates.
Exactly how much better do they perform?
Of course, post consistency is important too. LinkedIn suggests posting at least 2x per week to see improvements in engagement.
Brands that have found success building an audience on LinkedIn clearly utilized this advice. For example, the company page for software development company SAP features bright, eye-catching graphics with short captions, brief informational videos, and article links. This large company is closing in on 3 million LinkedIn followers. That’s partially due to the company’s size: with over 125,000 employees globally, even if they only reached their employee’s networks they would garner an impressive follower count. Regardless, they’ve curated a company page that consists of high-quality content to drive new engagement from their target audience – professionals and decision-makers.
Once you’re comfortable on the platform you might look to improve your campaign performance by expanding your organic reach. LinkedIn has some great options for this, like their Audience Network to extend your ads to active users, but these features can only get a brand so far. You can get a better ROI for your content by distributing it straight to your retailer’s pages with a content distribution solution like ThumbStopper. That’s why LinkedIn support is coming to ThumbStopper in 2022. With LinkedIn’s campaign manager and ThumbStopper amplifying your content, your brand can realize its true potential by leveraging your retailer’s existing social media followers Book a demo to learn more about ThumbStopper and upcoming LinkedIn support.
Book a demo to learn more about what ThumbStopper can do for you.