LinkedIn has become a necessary marketing channel for all types of business. It provides the opportunity to build professional relationships and share content that can cut through and resonate not only with existing networks, but wider target audiences.
LinkedIn has focused on improving the networking opportunities on a professional level with a range of marketing lead updates. These updates help to ensure that connections turn into real relationships – whether it’s supporting individual relationships or starting conversations between a prospective employee or customer. We have reviewed these key updates below to help you to include them into your marketing comms.
New LinkedIn Pages
Sharing professional work – LinkedIn company pages now allow you to share documents, PowerPoint presentations and PDF’s enabling you to host a range of accessible content without having to click out of the platform. This is great for creds, telling engaging stories and sharing reports and thought leadership pieces.
Page hashtags – As part of the new business page design, you can now associate hashtags relevant to your business or industry to join conversations and automatically improve your visibility.
Content Suggestions – To encourage increased sharing and posting, LinkedIn has started suggesting articles and news items relevant to your industry based on the type of content you’ve posted. Whilst it might not be in your social strategy to share other party content, it’s a great insight tool into what content is trending online and influencing your own content generation.
Improved Targeting for Sponsored and Paid Activity
To help improve engagement and ROI, LinkedIn have rolled out three new options for improving targeting within their Campaign Manager:
Lookalike audiences – This enables you to target new audiences who are similar to your ideal customer, likely to be highly engaged and more likely to convert and grow your business. You can create these audiences by creating a Matched Audience in LinkedIn Campaign Manager from a list of target accounts, CRM contacts or visitors to your website.
Audience templates – Creating audiences based on LinkedIn’s professional data is good for A/B testing new audiences or markets and measuring engagement.
Interest targeting – Reach audiences with ads that match their personal interests listed on their LinkedIn profiles. Partnered with Microsoft to access Bing searches as well, you can easily access audiences based on skills, job titles and groups.
The launch of Live Video
Still in beta, this is something that will become more available in coming months but is an exciting development for the platform. Facebook launched their Live video service in 2015, so its taken a while for LinkedIn to catch up, but LinkedIn Live looks to be a smoother and more professional offering than other platforms. It’s currently limited to invite only and broadcast through 3rd party tools, but when this becomes more widely accessible it will be a fantastic tool to add to the marketing mix.
How or why would you use it? The plan is to cover live events like conferences, product announcements and other events led in a more polished format, in line with the professional format that users engage with the site. Viewers will be able to ask questions in real time, but importantly hosts can moderate comments in real time too, removing inappropriate messages.
Make sure you follow us on LinkedIn to stay up to date on all future developments.