Leveraging the Power of Linkedin for Marketing/Sales Professionals

By John Holdridge On Sep 12, 2019

Social Fatigue. It’s becoming very real. In the B2C and B2B world, both consumers and marketers are at a point of exhaustion. There is currently more content than eyeballs across every major social platform and we have all seen those crazy statistics about how much video is uploaded to YouTube per day. How can anyone realistically keep up with that? Outside of savvy audiences knowing exactly how to opt-in to the right cadence and clients for intel, the rest of the public needs the platform to curate and/or algorithmically place the right message in front of the right audience. I am not trying to sound negative…in fact, I think now (given the state of social) there is more opportunity than ever before to positively disrupt the norm and seek out new ways to connect with the right audiences. Enter LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is one of the fastest-growing social media platforms. In the last 12-18 months, LinkedIn has come out on top as one of the more powerful, consistent, and pure platforms to get your video, blog post, and content seen, engaged, and discovered. It is the opportunity. In the last year alone, LinkedIn grew at a faster rate than any other social platform, now with 303 million active monthly users. Within that, 61 million LinkedIn users are senior-level influencers and 40 million hold decision-making positions. LinkedIn’s own research also states that the platform accounts for up to half of all brand website homepage traffic.

The power of LinkedIn is so real. It has proven to not only be a driver of both B2B and B2C engagement, but it also has become a secret weapon to both the Marketing and Sales messages — especially as they are wrapped up and delivered by key C-Suite and senior executives broadly known in their respective verticals.

So what does that mean in lay terms? If you have a Marketing agenda or Sales initiative, you can casually wrap it into the voice of key stakeholders and create a more genuine message with legitimacy and authenticity to the discerning consumer. This is not to discredit the incredible work that marketers have to do to break through the noise today, but actually helps create a new avenue for them to deliver key messages in a more personal way. Furthermore, messages are targeted to a more business focus consumer, who can take the message and disperse it into their own ecosystem not only just on LinkedIn, but into adjacent social platforms where they might have larger presences.

Take for example GE’s former Vice Chair turned author, Beth Comstock. During her time at GE she wasn’t only an executive – she was a real thought leader. Beyond hosting panels and many curated appearances, she was (and still is) very active on LinkedIn. She wrote articles such as “Welcome to the Era of the Hardware Startup” where she discussed how GE was embracing the digital age. She eventually moved on to cover the market shift directly, in articles such as “Why Our Machines’ Inner Lives Are the Key to the Next Economic Revolution” and “Trend Watch: New Power v. Old Power.” Was Beth directly pushing anything that GE was doing? No, but her industry expertise from working at GE was legitimized because her point of view was uniquely LinkedIn — and benefited the underlying brand where all that wealth of experience was coming from: GE.

Read more: Getting Started with LinkedIn Live

A multidimensional approach, LinkedIn is allowing more of us to check off multiple KPI and performance boxes right out of the gate. We can hit reach, engagement, multi-platform, conversion, and advocacy all at once. While it’s not a silver bullet by any means, it’s clear that LinkedIn can tackle multiple challenges at once.

For example, Kaggle, a Data Science solutions company (now owned by Google), tapped Fullscreen to help with their annual CareerCon — a digital event all about landing your first Data Science job. Fullscreen supported theira three-day livestream event, with LinkedIn as a major component of the campaign earning over one hundred and forty six thousand impressions on CareerCon videos. What Kaggle was able to achieve through this event — unique to the LinkedIn platform — was exposure to a targeted talent pool as well as transparency into how their business functions, in addition to the people and culture at the core of their company.

Video has only been available for a year on the LinkedIn platform, but it’s quickly becoming the shining star (eyerolls, because it’s that way everywhere and on every platform). However, because LinkedIn so smartly chose to curate user experiences via organic engagement, it allows them to follow similar user behaviors and stick to a video schema that works and is trusted. In our own analysis, we’ve seen that video drives more than 4X the engagement than images — the second most successful format. We’ve also seen that the formats are easily produced and replicable. LinkedIn’s bread and butter is thought leadership content. Talking heads tend to work, as long as the content is engaging and naturally fits in the professional ecosystem of those in the videos.

The future is fairly bright for LinkedIn. They don’t have it nailed by any means, but we are very bullish in what can be done and how we can help brands and advertisers optimize their Marketing roadmap to include this key platform all while helping to build the ability to attract more key talent to their institutions and set a proper tone across their organization.