LinkedIn can be an excellent way for businesses and professionals to demonstrate subject matter expertise and stay in front of clients, partners and prospects. This is especially true for B2B organizations in complex industries where sales cycles are long, and decisions are often made at multiple levels.
Amidst this intricate buying process, personal relationships are still key to sales success. But even the best sales teams need marketing support that amplifies their message and makes the earliest stages of relationship-building (and pipeline-building) more scalable.
Sponsoring your organization’s content on LinkedIn can expose your brand to even more decision makers and drive new top-of-funnel relationships. In helping our clients incorporate LinkedIn into their content marketing mix, we’ve learned a lot along the way. So, if you’re planning to do the same, or just want to improve your results, consider these tips:
1. Create the right type of content.
LinkedIn is, first and foremost, about forging professional relationships. The platform’s algorithm is set up to reward relevant, professional information sharing, so it’s important to provide something of value when you’re sharing content organically.
This is even more important when you’re spending money to expand your reach. So, before you spend a dime on sponsoring posts, take an honest look at your content: Are you providing something of substance that is not a sales pitch? Think beyond your product or service to provide real value to your buyers. Providing context to a recent industry development, answering a frequently asked question, or sharing a relatable story are all great ways to engage your target audience.
From a mechanics perspective, I’d recommend keeping articles to around 1,000 words and intros under 150 characters. While longer posts can also perform well, in our experience, shorter pieces are more consumable for readers new to your brand and enable businesses to use the content as a first hook into a larger content marketing strategy. As LinkedIn puts it, find the sweet spot between making content “snackable and valuable.” And always use visuals to boost engagement: including images in posts can increase the comment rate by 98%. Better yet, include video, which earns roughly three times the engagement of text posts on LinkedIn.
2. Begin with the end in mind.
As with any marketing investment, you should know what you want to get out of it before you put resources into it. Lead gen may be your ultimate goal, but don’t overlook the opportunity to build top-of-funnel awareness or increase engagement among prospects or existing customers. The LinkedIn campaign manager actually forces the issue by funneling your campaign setup into one of several objectives, including:
• Consideration: This includes driving website or landing page traffic, increasing engagement or boosting video views.
• Lead Generation: This allows you to use LinkedIn’s lead gen form to capture opt-in contact information on the platform.
Alternatively, you can use a consideration objective to drive contacts back to your own lead gen form. LinkedIn also has several other objectives, including brand awareness and website conversions, which are coming soon.
3. Take advantage of the opportunity to target your audience precisely.
Knowing your audience should be a prerequisite for any marketing campaign, but far too many organizations fund campaigns that lack the audience-centric focus necessary for success. Inviting the wrong contacts to the party is the worst way you can spend your budget. You could literally be buying bad leads, so take the time to do this right.
The platform provides myriad targeting options — from company and industry types to individual buyer characteristics and interests. Be prepared to tinker with targeting options in the campaign manager for each piece of content. Too many filters can quickly shrink your audience size too drastically, while too few means your content will inevitably be served to the wrong people.
4. Compare cost per lead (CPL), not cost per click (CPC).
On the surface, LinkedIn can seem more expensive than other digital options. But we’ve found that it can be one of the most efficient ways for those in the B2B space to target specialized audiences. And for many business types, the cost per lead is consistently better. LinkedIn reported an average 6.1% conversion rate among its sponsored content user base, compared to 2.58% for B2B Google Ads. In a side-by-side comparison, CPL was $90 on LinkedIn and $125 on Google.
5. Be willing to run multiple campaigns and optimize your best performers.
One of the great things about digital advertising is the unmatched flexibility to learn and improve on the fly. Not sure if the LinkedIn lead gen form will work for you? Try it and run a separate campaign driving leads to your own form. You can quickly shut one down and move money to the more successful of the two after seeing data. Campaign trending lower than you expected? Maybe your creative needs a tweak or your buyer criteria is having an unintended effect that requires you to adjust your demographics. But if your team is not in the system regularly, your budget will be gone before you know there’s a problem.
It’s also imperative to understand that what works on LinkedIn may not mirror audience behavior on your website. For example, several of our clients still get the majority of their website traffic from desktop devices, for a variety of reasons. By contrast, a whopping 80% of LinkedIn sponsored content engagement comes from mobile devices, so you must ensure that your content is optimized for mobile and that your landing page design is responsive.
6. LinkedIn is always changing. Embrace it.
LinkedIn is constantly changing features and functionality, which is good news. This is a sign that it’s always innovating and improving. As new features become available, don’t be afraid to test them. Throw a small amount of budget at something and see what happens.
Even enterprise businesses with plenty of resources don’t always have those resources dialed into successful content marketing strategies on LinkedIn. So don’t be overwhelmed if you’re starting from scratch. It’s an easy way for businesses of every size to expose their brand to targeted decision makers.
