Winning with LinkedIn content: tips from a paid social agency
If you are looking to invest in campaigns to grow your telco or IT marketing funnel, then make sure paid social is top of your list. According to FirstPageSEO, paid social has the third-highest conversion rate of any online business-to-business traffic source, at 2.1%.
This is not far behind the 2.8% you can achieve with email marketing, but there is an important distinction between the two sources of traffic. You can only carry out email marketing with customers and prospects who have already engaged with your brand and allowed you to contact them.
With paid social, on the other hand, you can put your marketing messages in front of complete strangers. Viewed through this lens, the 2.1% conversion rate you get with paid social is highly remarkable. That does not mean you can just queue up any old campaign and expect to get results, though. Any paid social agency will tell you that content creation services are an important part of the mix. You must work on your messages.
Read on to find out:
- What basics should you be aware of when creating paid social campaigns for LinkedIn, the best social platform for telco and IT business-to-business marketing.
- What kinds of asset a content creation agency would recommend you should use to drive engagement.
- What secrets a LinkedIn marketing agency will use to make sure paid social content stands out.
What basics should you be aware of with LinkedIn?
LinkedIn offers a range of paid social options for telco and IT business-to-business marketers. These include:
- Sponsored Messaging or Sponsored InMail, which allows you to reach LinkedIn members’ inboxes directly-but only with limited frequency.
- Dynamic Ads which are displayed to the right of a user’s feed and use the user’s personal data to create an immediate, direct connection.
- Sponsored Content or native ads, which show up as ‘promoted’ posts on LinkedIn user feeds.
- Text Ads which are displayed at the top of LinkedIn desktop feeds.
In addition, LinkedIn allows you to set specific ad objectives including:
- Awareness, which generally delivers impressions.
- Consideration, linked to website or landing page visits, video views, or likes, comments and shares.
- Conversion, which comes into play towards the bottom of the marketing funnel and involves signups, downloads, applications and so on.
Once you or your paid social media agency have defined your objectives, you can choose from 10 LinkedIn ad formats for your campaign. These include carousels, conversation ads, follower ads, spotlight ads, job ads, lead generation forms, message ads, single image ads, text ads and video ads. Your LinkedIn marketing agency will help you select the best format for your campaign.
What kinds of asset should you use to drive engagement?
Regardless of the ad formats you choose, you need to have something to promote in them. One option is to simply promote your brand, although a paid social agency would usually recommend you choose something more specific-even with little-known brands, engagement is higher if you can be seen to offer something of value.
LinkedIn paid social campaigns for telco and IT companies tend to work well if they are built around some of the following:
- Competitions and offers, for example relating to industry awards or special promotions.
- Educational opportunities such as training courses or video tutorials.
- Thought leadership content such as blogs and opinion pieces.
- Business tools such as return-on-investment calculators.
- Data-driven content such as infographics and charts.
- Giveaways such as free guides and reports.
- Webinars and similar online events.
- Podcasts and videos.
A paid social media agency should be able to advise what assets will work best for your campaign goals. And remember when budgeting for your paid social campaigns to include an allowance for content creation. If you are working with a content creation agency, then they may be able to advise you on how to maximise the return on your investment in assets.
Say you pay for some original market research, for example: your paid social agency should be able to build a campaign around it but could also suggest how it could be used in organic search or public relations.
What can you do to make sure paid social content stands out?
Regardless of the content or assets being promoted in your campaign, and of the types of paid social ads you are using, a good LinkedIn marketing agency will likely recommend the following tricks for ad engagement:
- Using action-oriented phrases such as sign up, download or register.
- Telling readers about the value they will get from the content.
- Phrasing headlines as questions and highlighting quotes.
- Keeping intro text short and getting straight to the point.
- Being clear about your offer, with a simple call to action.
- Specifying your target audience for the ad.
- Talking about ‘you’ rather than ‘us.’
- Highlighting key facts and figures.
Remember that, unlike other social media channels, LinkedIn is a platform where busy people come to do business. They will be grateful for materials that help them with their work and their careers, but they need to understand the benefit clearly and immediately.
Choosing the right content creation agency for your paid social campaigns
Running paid social media campaigns is simple: LinkedIn gives you plenty of powerful tools to build your campaign from scratch. But running paid social campaigns that rise above the chatter on LinkedIn and help drive direct engagement with your brand is a little harder.
It requires in-depth knowledge not only of the technical aspects of LinkedIn but also of a wide range of other variables, from which times a post will work best to what colours you should use to highlight your call to action. At VirtualROI, we have been helping telco and IT business-to-business clients solve their social media marketing challenges since 2009, working with companies across Europe, The Middle East and Africa.
We have amassed a vast store of knowledge about LinkedIn and can use it to make sure you get the best possible return on investment for your campaigns. For more information, speak to us now.