by Marelise da Silva | Oct 24, 2020 | LinkedIn, Social Media Marketing
How do you get your social media marketing to work for you on LinkedIn in 2020? Times are uncertain across the world at the moment and LinkedIn has recently published a guide on how to reassess your business’s digital marketing strategy in the midst of COVID-19. The greatest concern marketers are facing at the moment, has been found to be budget cuts. So, let’s look at an optimised inbound marketing strategy that will decrease your spend and allow you to take advantage of connecting with the estimated 700 million users on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn social media marketing strategy in 2020
- Post visually appealing content
As with any digital marketing strategy, rich content is a distinguishing factor. But good visuals become great visuals when there is useful and engaging information attached to it. (Also, LinkedIn says that visual content can increase comments by up to 98%.)
Ensure your LinkedIn has all of your details and that it reflects your brand story. Impress people who are visiting your page.
- Don’t disregard the LinkedIn “search” feature
Apply filters in the advanced search section to find specific influential people or companies to target in your marketing
- Engage in LinkedIn Groups
This is an opportunity to interact with others in your sector and to get onto the radar of your target audience. Think about what other professionals might be interested in reading or hearing from you, and post relevant content. Be sure to participate in discussions and to be interactive.
Just as with other social media platforms, LinkedIn also has suggested times for peak performance of your posts.
If social media marketing budget cuts are not a concern
Look at sponsored content, sponsored InMail, or Text Ads. Sponsored content could be a good way to capitalise on content that is already performing well. The sponsored InMail option delivers your ad directly to your targeted audience’s inbox, resembling a message. Text Ads are more traditional, appearing to the side of a user’s news feed.
Lastly, if you have a company page and you’re one of the admins, remember to take advantage of LinkedIn Analytics. Here you can assess your page performance and keep track of post metrics to see what content is resonating with your audience.
Need help with your social media marketing strategy? WSI OMS is the perfect digital marketing agency for you! For more information, contact us today.
by Marianna Muscat | Sep 18, 2020 | LinkedIn, Social Media Marketing
In a previous post, we unpacked LinkedIn’s helpful guide for the marketing industry. In this second part, we’re delving deeper into the strategies, activities and information that has been proposed for business owners who want to grow and see a return on the investment they are spending on marketing during COVID-19.
LinkedIn’s key steps to showing the impact of your marketing activities: Part 2
1. Make measurement easier
Getting an accurate look at the ROI of your marketing spend is vital to understand where you are wasting money that could be better spent elsewhere. With economies declining worldwide, it is more important than ever to know what you’re getting for your investment to ensure growth even in the toughest times.
LinkedIn understands that this is a crucial aspect of business ownership and has made it even easier to measure and prove your ROI when spending your marketing budget on the platform. In this endeavour, LinkedIn has partnered with various providers such as Google, Moat and Acxiom to help you optimise your LinkedIn measurement strategy. The aim of this is to give you confidence in using the platform and proving outcomes based on brand, business and performance.
Whether you aim to educate your audience, generate more leads, or create awareness for your brand, LinkedIn’s performance is being showcased through a variety of partnerships, whether native or 3rd-party. When using these accurate measurements to make business decisions, you’ll have better information at your disposal to increase your decision-making abilities and drive your business into the post-COVID-19 era.
2. Implementing best practice
This section provides a valuable, easy to follow list of tips to help you measure the impact of your investment in ad campaigns on LinkedIn. It takes you through various stages from launch to A/B testing and provides links to helpful resources for each of the steps in the best practice section.
Let’s take a look at the tips:
- Be clear on your marketing goal and use it to identify your key metrics before you launch a campaign.
- Use the insight tag in LinkedIn to understand which actions your ads are driving (including sign-ups, downloads and sales).
- Create Lead Gen forms to accurately track the metrics at the end of the funnel (such as cost per lead) to ensure that you’re spending your budget on value-creating activities.
- Study your campaign results. The recommendation is to review your results after 7 days, but it’s always worthwhile to check in on your results as your campaign ages to determine performance over different periods.
- Take note of the audience demographics from your campaigns. This will help you to target audiences more accurately in future and customise your messaging to suit the audiences who respond best to your campaigns.
- Improve your bids to get the best for your budget by studying your performance insights. The campaign manager should become your virtual “war room” so you can adapt and improve your messaging across the various aspects of your campaigns.
- Test your messaging with A/B testing, so you understand how to better link messaging with audiences for improved results.
3. Goal alignment with LinkedIn
In the previous post, we mentioned different scenarios that you might be facing in terms of your marketing budget (eliminated, reduced or maintained). This section of the LinkedIn guide provides you with a low-down on how LinkedIn can help you reach your goals, the accountability process behind these activities, and the tools that will be implemented in the process whether your budget is more, less or the same as pre-COVID.
From understanding insights from the market and applying strategies used in recession economies, LinkedIn can help you to use organic methods and free tools on the platform to reach your goals if your budget has shrunk to zero. Suppose your budgets have reduced, but you still have some funds to apply. In that case, LinkedIn can help you to understand where your potential customers are consuming content, and how to match up with your ideal audience to improve performance with a mixture of free and paid tools on the platform.
For the business owners who have maintained their marketing budgets, LinkedIn provides an array of organic and paid strategies to reach a larger target market, generate leads, drive sales and awareness and build authentic brand messaging. This level of spend on LinkedIn gives you (as business owner) more options and also gives you access to weekly check-ins to determine your progress across the tools on the platform.
The fantastic news about goal alignment with LinkedIn is that there are many options for every budget, so no business owner is prohibited from participating on the platform.
If you’re ready to focus on your digital strategy and improve your ROI on marketing activities, download the eBook now.
If you want to revitalise your marketing, digital marketing strategy, or LinkedIn content, contact WSI OMS for assistance during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
by Francois Muscat | Sep 16, 2020 | Digital Media Marketing, LinkedIn, Social Media Marketing
LinkedIn recently published an incredibly helpful guide for the marketing industry. It aims to help businesses create growth in this challenging time and prove their ROI from marketing spend. There are six key areas in the guide, and each area contains strategies, tips, and information that could help your business get on track post-COVID-19. This post will focus on the first three areas, so be sure to subscribe to our blog so you don’t miss part 2.
LinkedIn’s key steps to showing the impact of your marketing activities: Part 1
1. Understand the role of marketing in the organisation
Marketing covers a range of aspects within the organisation. As a business owner, you need to be well versed in the role that marketing plays and the impact it can make in building the brand, creating a strategic plan, and managing change in the organisation, as well as the media and message planning that needs to be undertaken in the business.
The LinkedIn guide has a run-down of each of these aspects that were just mentioned. If you want to learn more about activities you should be paying attention to (such as creating human connections through your brand) and potential pitfalls you need to be aware of (such as restructuring without losing key employees in your department), it would be a good exercise to work through the guide. It will help you to understand how to use data for brand building and strategic planning. There are actionable tips for the immediate changes you can implement to protect your business, and explain how to apply the latest media findings to tailor your media strategy for the current circumstances.
Understanding the current market situation (through the findings mentioned in the guide) can help you to pivot your digital strategy to be more effective, especially if you have been neglecting your strategy recently.
2. Assess your business position
If you’re creating a strategy for the way forward, you need to be fully informed about the current state of the business before heading off in a specific direction. Whether your budget has been eliminated, reduced, or maintained, there are steps you should be taking to move your marketing activities forward as best as possible.
The guide has recommendations based on each of these scenarios (eliminated, reduced, or maintained budgets) that will help you to aim your post-COVID-19 planning in the right direction for your organisation. The recommendations are aimed at understanding how to strengthen your organic strategy by posting organic content consistently; how to follow best practices for paid campaigns (especially in lead-building,) and how to effectively create new brand campaigns if your budget has not shrunk over the last few months.
Implementing drastic changes may not even be necessary, but it is important to understand the data from your operations and to use this information to make accurate decisions that are suited to your current business position. Being flexible and proactive is key in surviving the COVID-19 era in business and learning from previous recessions may help business owners to prepare for the possible financial hardships that could be down the road.
3. Assess your customer base
As business owners who want to connect with our target audiences and grow our brands online, we believe in studying your customers continuously. If you have neglected this, you need to find out what your customers want and how the market has changed. Shifting priorities might provide you with new opportunities to serve your market, but you need to understand any new tendencies and assess if there are viable opportunities to pursue.
Check out the eBook now to start refocusing your digital strategy, and remember to keep an eye out for part two of this post, where we will unpack more of LinkedIn’s marketing strategy for post-COVID-19 recovery.
If you need help with your marketing, digital marketing strategy, or LinkedIn content, contact WSI OMS for assistance during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
by Marelise da Silva | Sep 4, 2020 | LinkedIn, Social Media Marketing
The ultimate goal of your social media marketing strategy is your bottom line. So who better to take advice from that Warren Buffet: “An idiot with a plan can beat a genius without a plan!” LinkedIn themselves share that marketing with a documented plan results in greater overall content marketing success than working from a verbal plan only or even no strategy at all.
LinkedIn marketing is no different despite 43% of marketers agreeing that they have sourced a client from LinkedIn. Can you imagine how much higher that percentage would be with proper planning?
Let The Planning Begin – 4 Easy Steps
- Set up an editorial calendar. Based on your ideal target audience, create a list of topics, events, product launches that will help them reach their goals or overcome their struggle. Organise your content into categories or themes and start filling in the dates with content.
- Create and adhere to brand guidelines. To maintain a consistent look, voice, and tone, use content guidelines and communicate them to your team.
- Delegate. Assign someone (or a group of people) to be responsible for each of your channels. Using the standards set above, empower them to monitor and respond to engagement from your readers.
- Look further afield to source content.With a dedicated curator of content, you can encourage the regions and verticals in your organisation to submit content.
Consider enlisting the services of a digital marketing agency to add credibility to your profile with powerful content, craft strong headlines and a summary that motivates people to read your entire profile, and include visuals and multimedia to illustrate your expertise.
Award-Winning Solutions
Leveraging LinkedIn for business purposes is easy once you have a compelling and bullet-proof content. For more information on how WSIOMS can help you, contact us today.
by Francois Muscat | Sep 2, 2020 | LinkedIn, Social Media Marketing
As a social media marketing platform, LinkedIn is not necessarily the first to come to mind. It has a reputation (unfairly assigned) as a tad stuffy and conservative. However, LinkedIn marketing is a powerful means of driving awareness of your brand and increasing your revenue precisely because the content on LinkedIn is more professional and industry-related. When it comes to digital marketing, 80% of B2B leads come from LinkedIn.
LinkedIn’s Seven Marketing Opportunities
Whether your goal is to increase your brand awareness or to generate fruitful leads, there is a range of features built into LinkedIn to drive these results.
- Pages– Engage with prospects and existing customers using text, links, videos, and images relating to company news, blogs and vlogs, industry news, research, case studies, etc.
For every promotional-type post, you should share four pieces of relevant content.
- SlideShare– Presentations such as webinars, product how-tos and tips, and infographics can be shared with over 70 million monthly unique visitors to SlideShare.
Link your SlideShare presentations to your website to create credible inbound links.
- Groups– Network and boost your standing as a thought leader in your industry by contributing to conversations in Groups.
- Publishing– Stand out as a trustworthy source in your field by publishing your expertise, experiences, and lessons learned as well as pieces on industry trends.
Publishing is available in 20 languages!
- Sponsored Content and Direct Sponsored Content– While both types of ads may be a single image, carousel, or video formats which appear in the feed of targeted LinkedIn members, Sponsored Content Created is visible on your organization’s LinkedIn Page or Showcase Page; and Direct Sponsored Content is not.
- Sponsored InMail– Used to send personalised content marketing material to your target audiences via LinkedIn Messenger.
- Text Ads– These ads appear on the right-hand side or top of the LinkedIn desktop feed and are charged as PPC (pay per click) or CPM (cost per impression).
WSIOMS
Contact WSI OMS for more information on how to use LinkedIn in your networking and marketing campaigns.
by Francois Muscat | Aug 28, 2020 | Social Media Marketing, LinkedIn
LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional network, offers a variety of features to help you reach your ideal customers – LinkedIn Pages, LinkedIn SlideShare, LinkedIn Groups, Publishing on LinkedIn, LinkedIn Sponsored Content and Direct Sponsored Content, LinkedIn Sponsored InMail, LinkedIn Text Ads. But, as with all social media marketing aimed to drive brand awareness and revenue, you need to test and measure your results. Only through actively testing, measuring, and refining can you reach the level of success your input deserves.
LinkedIn has built-in features that are designed to filter your audience, measure campaign results, and help improve your ROI.
LinkedIn Website Demographics
To maximise the impact of your LinkedIn marketing efforts, target your strongest prospects. Use the free Website Demographics tool for useful audience insights – industry, job title and seniority company name, size, and location. Use this data to customise and share content which resonates with those most likely to become leads and customers.
LinkedIn Audience Network
You want your Sponsored content and ads to reach more professionals on LinkedIn and all over the web, right?
Get in front of the right people, block the bad matches, and still stay on budget using the LinkedIn Audience Network (LAN – not to be confused with the lawn dressing or a local area network!)
LinkedIn Conversion Tracking
Having used the tools above to make sure you reach your ideal prospects and influencers, you will want to measure the impact of your LinkedIn Sponsored Content and Text Ads.
LinkedIn Conversion Tracking – part of Campaign Manager:
- Records conversions on your website or landing page.
- Measures leads and sign-ups, purchases and page views, installs and content downloads.
- Identifies the demographics (industry, company location and size, job function and seniority) of people who are becoming leads.
WSI
WSI OMS offers award-winning solutions to all your digital marketing challenges. Contact us for more information on how to use LinkedIn in your networking and marketing campaigns.
