Last week, I took the time to improve my knowledge of LinkedIn and watched a webinar discussing the rise of LinkedIn as both a social media networking site and a B2B marketing platform. The speakers outlined the basic principles of why LinkedIn works as a B2B marketing channel, what works and what doesn’t when marketing on LinkedIn, growth opportunities, and the ins and outs of live broadcasting. Here I share some of the insights and stats gained.

LinkedIn now boasts over 690 million members across 200 countries. The organic reach of LinkedIn is also higher than any other social platform. As a result, LinkedIn has quickly become the go-to hub for business activity, with 80% of B2B leads from social media coming from LinkedIn, and an impressive 4 out of 5 users driving business decisions.

Engaging Content – What is known to work and what should you avoid?

It was revealed that there are currently over 30 million business pages, with 94% of B2B marketers using LinkedIn as a content distribution channel. However, the type of content distributed often plays a determining factor in its success. When possible, it is important to use imagery or videos in your posts, as they receive a 2x higher comment rate and a 5x higher engagement rate overall. Readable infographics also perform well, but these must be specifically designed for use on LinkedIn and not just pulled straight from your business’s website, in order to ensure you are effectively capturing your audience. Finally, it was stated that business profiles with complete information will receive 30% more weekly views than those without, cementing the myth that on LinkedIn, the little details really do matter.

Broadcasting & Live Events

You can build up your audience by using LinkedIn advertising tools, ensuring your business correctly targets your relevant stakeholders. Remember to engage with your audience and promote your event on social channels – both before and post-event. This is largely due to over 75% of people watching broadcasts on-demand, and consumers have an awful habit of forgetting to watch something if they do not hear about it again. This ties in lastly with the final key point from this section of the webinar – once the event has finished, it is always a good idea to quickly trim the video into snippets that you can promote on your LinkedIn page, further encouraging your audience to watch on-demand.

Learn about your audience

If you have a limited budget for your marketing campaign, you must really consider where you want to invest it. Take the time to learn more about your audience demographic and match the campaign that is best suited to them. This is a guaranteed way to ensure growth within your business. It is also crucial to remember what you are marketing – not every business has a trendy new product or service to promote, so that product or service is allowed to be boring, but your advertising absolutely isn’t! Lastly, it was explained that to guarantee successful growth as a business, you will need to employ both Reason and Emotion marketing. This means that you will ideally need two separate campaigns – a corporate one with all the product ‘nitty gritty’ (Reason) and another more friendly one, from a relatable point of view (Emotion.)

For more information on our social media marketing campaigns, or if you want to learn more about how to use LinkedIn, we offer training packages too. Contact us today to find out more. digital@oraclepr.co.uk