I was reading two brilliant whitepapers about Content Marketing and Content Strategy shared by NewsCred and the Content Marketing Institute. The first whitepaper called “The Content Marketing Playbook: 9 Actionable Strategies To Get You Started” is an amazing writing piece; and the second is the “How to Create a Documented Content Marketing Strategy: 36 Questions”. This reading made me to think about how Social Media is changing Marketing forever.
To develop an engaging and relevant Content Strategy, you need to identify your best Social Media channels, and thinking like a Data-Driven Marketing pro, you must analyze your critical Marketing KPIs and to see how these channels are affecting or helping to your brand. In this post, I will talk about one of these channels: LinkedIn, and why you should embrace to your Content Marketing pros to use it.
Why LinkedIn
This amazing platform, which have become in the home page in my browser for the last 4 years, have had an amazing growth in these years; and I’ve seen the evolution from a simple job search tool to a Content-based network. LinkedIn have had an awesome growth in the last two years, mostly for four of my favorite features: LinkedIn’s Influencers iniative, LinkedIn’s Company Pages redesign and LinkedIn’s Sponsored Updates. I will try to get you inside the LinkedIn’s world and why you should be aware of it.
LinkedIn’s Influencers
Influencers program at LinkedIn is a brilliant and bold Marketing move for the platform with a single objective in mind:
To increase the traffic to the site delivering engaging and useful content written for well known leaders and experts on these respective fields.
There are many leaders that I follow today but I will put my favorite writings here from several of them:
- Offer Collectors Don’t Get Good Jobs by Andy Rachleff, Chief Executive Officer at Wealthfront
- The Importance of Scheduling Nothing by Jeff Weiner, Chief Executive Officer at LinkedIn
- Deciding Between Two Job Offers by James Caan, Chief Executive Officer at Hamilton Bradshaw Ltd
- Forget Exit Strategy, Think Success Strategy by Joseph Ansanelli, Partner at Greylock Partners
- How I Hire: There Is No Lone Genius; Hire a Team With these Four Types by Beth Comstock, Chief Marketing Officer at GE
- Immigration and the Statue of Liberty by Reid Hoffman, Partner at Greylock Partners
- How I Hire: Focus On Personality by Sir Richard Branson, Founder at Virgin Group
LinkedIn’s Company Pages
This awesome feature allows to every company in the world to connect with current and future employees, prospective clients, fans and business executives; so, every Marketing should be aware of the power of this in the platform. Great examples? A lot, but I will give you my favorite company pages list which are doing an outstanding work with Content Marketing in the platform here:
If you have pickup your favorite LinkedIn’s company page; read here and nominate it. I did it in my Twitter:
But, united to this feature; LinkedIn gave the last month another awesome step: the possibility to include in your company page another pages for your core services and products . This feature is called LinkedIn’s Showcases, and Aviad Pinkovezky, the Monetization Product Manager at LinkedIn who wrote the post described in this way:
Showcase Pages are dedicated pages that allow companies to highlight different aspects of their business and build relationships with the right community. Whether it’s a brand, a business unit, or an initiative, following a Showcase Page will provide you the updates you are most interested in
If you are looking for awesome examples, you can see three of my favorite showcases pages:
LinkedIn’s Sponsored Updates
I think that I don’t enough words to emphasize why this is a rock star feature for the platform. It allow to companies to potentially touch millions of professionals around the world. Here, you can launch targeted marketing campaigns by location, sector, industry, group names, interests, skills. HubSpot and Adobe are (again !!!) great examples how a company can reach obtain a lot of followers and make key leads generation. But my favorite example using this feature is Citi with its Connect: Professional Women’s Network, Powered by Citi:
You can learn more about LinkedIn’s Sponsored Updates here:
And if you need inspiration for your own company, you can see these slides about the best practices using it:
LinkedIn’s Professional gallery for Profiles
And I let this feature for the last topic, because this have allowed me to show many of my best skills in a great visual way. If you look in my profile, you can see some of my popular posts here in the blog:
I think that your every employee’s LinkedIn profile is one of the best Marketing resource that you should encourage them today to keep it updated. I have been a LinkedIn’s user for a long time, and I have learned the power that every of your connections has, not just for job searching, but to spread the world about your company, a new service, a new product, etc; so, you, Marketing executive; you should become in a LinkedIn’s advocate inside your company, explaining to your team the value of the platform itself.
Conclusions
Just a few words: Use LinkedIn today for your Marketing campaigns focused in engaging content using targeted audience and you will thank me for a long time. I have used it for my own, and the results have been incredible; if you want to leverage your Marketing efforts at LinkedIn, just contact to Jason Miller and Deanna Lazzaroni, and they can help you more than me to do it. Best wishes and thanks a lot for reading.
