Why businesses are seeing success using LinkedIn ads

A strong organic social media strategy has been the basis of successful marketing campaigns since the inception of social media. Organic content has always been the first step as it allows businesses to showcase their authentic selves by publishing content that aligns with their brand attributes, the foundation for their social marketing. But it’s not all about pushing content out, as we all know, the key to social is the engagement factor. Organic content on social channels creates a forum for businesses to interact and engage with customers in a very real way. A paid social strategy, in the absence of an organic presence, doesn’t lend the same level of validity to a brand, nor create that connection with customers. 

But where an organic strategy connects you with your audience, a paid strategy expands the audience. That’s why the ability to promote organic content is a perfect hybrid of the two -- content that reveals the authenticity of your brand, but ad dollars that extend the reach to audiences beyond your followers. I sat down with Andrew Kaplan, Director of Product Marketing from LinkedIn Marketing Solutions to get a sense of why he thinks the two work so well together on LinkedIn specifically, and to get some insight into the kind of content he sees members promote successfully through the platform.

Q: How have organizations used organic content successfully on your platform?

A: As the starting place for organizations to build a presence on the LinkedIn professional community, LinkedIn Pages enable marketers to use the organic content to accomplish many objectives such as keeping their audience informed, establishing their organizations as thought leaders, and humanizing their brand through sharing workplace culture.

Q: Why do you think organic and paid content work so well together?

A: We find that not only does an organic content marketing strategy provide a low-risk testing ground for determining your paid strategy, it can also optimize the reach and engagement of your paid strategy, thereby increasing the efficiency of any given campaign by helping lower the overall CPMs and CPLs.

Q: What is unique about organic and paid on LinkedIn specifically?

A: One of the biggest differentiators about LinkedIn is our focus on organic reach. Some platforms will limit the organic reach you can attain before you must convert to paid tactics, but LinkedIn doesn’t limit organizations in this way. We focus on educating business owners and marketers from organizations of all sizes, all over the world, on how they can find organic success on LinkedIn, before suggesting expanding reach and refining targeting through paid. 

Our professional targeting is another key platform differentiator. No other platform allows a brand to target content, both organic and paid, by their audiences’ industry, seniority, company size, location, language, etc. and no other platform allows a brand to engage their employees to help broaden the reach of key marketing messages through features like Employee Notifications and Content Suggestions.

Q: What kind of organic content are organizations on LinkedIn promoting?

A: We’re seeing the following themes emerge as types of organic content that organizations are promoting:

• Content that helps humanize the brand, such as posts highlighting the great work their employees or team recently completed, or simply highlighting an employee him or herself and their passions outside of work.
• Content that helps demonstrate thought leadership, such as long-form posts, attachments, or articles written by an organization’s executive team.
• And finally, content that helps showcase innovation, such as videos featuring new products or services, or infographics on enhancements.

Q: What kind of organic content do you recommend organizations create, and promote?

A: The themes we’re seeing above are great starts. 

We’d also recommend creating and promoting content that helps you create a dialogue with your community. With each post, you should aim to create a conversation. Ask questions, get people’s opinions, and respond to comments. 

A great way to start a conversation with LinkedIn Pages posts is asking questions in the post. Another great way to do this is with LinkedIn Live, LinkedIn’s new live-streaming feature. It’s 24x more likely to generate engagement than other media types on the platform, and it’s an incredible way to bring your professional community together in real-time. The key is to treat your audience as a voice in the room, and interact with them throughout your stream.

Q: How would an organization know when to move from organic to paid?

A: There is no “right time.” The key to getting started with paid is to first invest in organic. You’ll learn the types of audiences who are coming to your LinkedIn Page and what kind of content is resonating with them. After you’ve gathered these valuable insights on your organic audience, you’ll have everything you need to transition to paid confidently. 

Moving to paid, you will realize that you can move a lot faster and drive more immediate results. For example, you can take your target demographic profile and use Matched Audiences to get in front of even more professionals that meet this profile. You can also leverage Sponsored Content in combination with Lead Gen Forms, to generate high-quality leads at scale.

Q: How would you characterize LinkedIn’s advertising audience?

A: LinkedIn advertisers are enterprises such as high-tech companies, financial services firms, and educational institutions — as well as small business owners, who are looking to expand their customer base among a professional audience. We provide an array of tools that can be used by more experienced advertisers as well as the novice digital marketer.

Q: How does LinkedIn allow businesses to reach their ideal audience?

A: LinkedIn has the world’s largest network of professionals— more than 645 million of them as of this conversation. This means you can target your ads to millions of people using information based on their professional profiles — like job title, company name, or professional skills and interests — retarget your website visitors, or target ads to contacts from your sales team’s CRM system. We offer a number of ad formats to help you generate website traffic, collect quality leads, and build your brand — including video, Lead Gen Forms, and Sponsored InMail. We also offer many free marketing tools, like Pages, to help you build your organization’s community on LinkedIn. 

Q: Why is targeting so important?

A: It’s important to generate high-quality results from your campaigns, not simply a high quantity. Being able to target your content to the right influencers and decision-makers can help you get better results from your advertising budget in the form of higher-quality website traffic, leads, and conversions.

I really enjoyed speaking with Andrew and allowing our customers to further understand the benefits of the LinkedIn platform. Furthermore this week, Hootsuite announced a deeper collaboration with LinkedIn. Customers can now promote their best organic LinkedIn Page posts as Sponsored Content directly from Hootsuite.

Our 2019 Social Trends Report talks about "Closing the Ads Gap", and in particular --

“...at the end of the day, brands that respect and engage their customers as individuals and add value to their audiences via content will see real ROI in social ads. The ongoing challenge will be finding cost-effective ways to do so at scale.”

I couldn’t agree more and functionality such as that offered by LinkedIn will definitely help businesses drive more value through to their customers!