Sunjay Singh, Life Media UK’s Creative Director and Sales Manager, reveals how LinkedIn can replicate one of your most valuable lead generation tools, and why video is the perfect way to do achieve this.
Why is LinkedIn so valuable? The answer is fairly straightforward: ROI, ROI, ROI. It’s very normal for businesses and marketers to have these three letters circling their brains day and night. And for good reason – what gets measured, gets improved.
But there are some things that aren’t as tangible as click-through rates, downloads and money in the bank. One of those things is brand presence; and not just the visibility of your brand, but the weight it carries. How revered is your brand right now? In the case of LinkedIn, how highly regarded is your personal brand right now?
For me personally, LinkedIn is a valuable source of new video marketing clients. I post consistently on LinkedIn, I engage with my connections and I frequently receive referrals from the platform. Referrals are very different to your average lead. Lots of people use LinkedIn for standard lead generation, which is fine, but referrals are the real jackpot. When someone posts on LinkedIn looking for video production, I get tagged multiple times by my existing connections, which usually ends in a conversation and a pre-qualified sales opportunity – all from the pure value of the referral. LinkedIn allows you to replicate good old fashioned word-of-mouth business, with all of the benefits of digital communication.
Who should be using LinkedIn as a marketing channel?
LinkedIn can – and should – be used by all business professionals. It’s a place to grow your professional network, market yourself, promote your business and stay up to date with what’s going on.
But LinkedIn is really effective for building a personal brand. There are 2 types of people who should want to build a personal brand:
1) those looking for a promotion or a new job, and
2) those looking to increase their sales
Building a personal brand is about getting more people to know, like, trust and respect you. It’s about building an audience that understands you are a trusted expert within your field. This means you become a person of influence. The kind of person people want to meet, to connect with, to work with… and most importantly, the kind of person people want to buy from.
Building your personal brand on LinkedIn harks back to the old adage of ‘people do business with people’, which is now truer than ever. But the beauty of LinkedIn is that you can use consistency to stay top of mind, remain relevant and build relationships at a velocity that simply cannot be achieved in person.
This is why I love LinkedIn – and with over 500 million members, it seems like I’m not the only one. Furthermore, 61 million LinkedIn users are senior-level influencers, and 40 million are in decision-making positions (source: Marketing Solutions Blog). This makes LinkedIn a veritable hotbed of potential new customers, just waiting to connect with you. But how do you cut through the noise and reach the right people, with the right message, at the right time?
7 killer LinkedIn video strategies
1. Education
Use your niche knowledge to educate your followers, and answer the questions that your prospects ask as they go through the buyer’s journey. Provide insight on your process, your product, your company, your impact. Educating your audience adds value to their day, and builds their trust in your expertise. However, when sharing your knowledge, be cautious of coming across as patronising! Don’t try to force an idea that isn’t fully developed, but avoid being too vanilla or unremarkable. Be clear with your message, and confident in your delivery. Using LinkedIn as a personal platform allows you to say something new; forget the cliches, as no one sees the world exactly how you see it, so don’t be afraid to express yourself! This could include writing a LinkedIn article on your specialist subject, myth-busting a common misconception, or putting together a brief explainer video to educate your audience. Remember to create content that is unexpected, engaging and shareable.
2. Celebration
Celebrate wins: your wins, your clients’ wins, award wins, office wins and staff wins. Celebrate new product launches, new services, new partnerships. Celebrate because it’s good to be positive! Everyone loves a good news story, and engagement always flocks to positive emotions that everyone can relate to. Being emotive is a great way to add a personal side to your LinkedIn content – and avoids flooding the timeline with pointless posts, which can numb your audience and desensitise them to your content. A celebration could come in the form of an award win, a new team member, or a standout result you’ve achieved for a client. Celebrating these wins with real-life stories, photos and video content humanises your brand, and is a sure-fire way to build engagement – who doesn’t love good news?!
3. Promotion
Use the platform to promote your brand. Make sure to share the content that you’re proudest of, and puts you in the best light. Upload your promotional film, your branding film, or a film about your company and the value you bring to your clients. With an ever-growing network, give your audience a chance to get a glimpse of what you’re all about. People connect on LinkedIn to do just that – make a connection! They’re interested in your content, so make sure you’re giving them the best of it. Putting this strategy into action involves making LinkedIn just another channel in your marketing activity, including LinkedIn content in your channel plan, and ensuring that the latest company news and launches are all captured in your LinkedIn newsfeed.
4. Culture
LinkedIn gives you the opportunity to communicate your values and the personality of your team, often to like-minded individuals who will really relate to your approach. Keep things professional, but don’t be afraid to humanise your brand. This will add warmth and character, making you more relatable and allowing your audience to see what kind of business (and person) you are. Establishing a strong brand voice will help add culture to your LinkedIn strategy – deciding how your brand speaks, what your values are and what you content looks like creates a strong sense of character, and using this consistently will develop real familiarity with your brand. For example, is your brand cheeky, or more corporate? Do you use jokes and slang, or stick to professional terminology? Are you speaking with the voice of a 20-something or a 50-something? All of these elements combine to create a true representation of your brand online. You’ll attract the right types of clients when you showcase this side of your business – clients with similar values, who you’ll do your best work for, and enjoy things in the process.
5. Customer stories
Social proof is incredibly powerful, and people are looking more and more to online reviews and testimonials when considering where to buy, simply because there are more online reviews available than ever before. Leverage your customer’s success stories to promote the great work you do and the impact you have on your clients, using your happiest customers to create a powerful sales tool. If you’re in a B2B service business, this is a great way to contextualise what you actually do, and how you can benefit many other businesses in the same way. Customer stories can be captured and shared in a variety of ways, but the video testimonial is arguably the most powerful – seeing real customers tell their story in an honest way is hard to beat when it comes to engaging and persuasive content.
6. Employee stories
Use video to let prospective customers meet your team – they’ll instantly feel more engaged with the people involved in making the magic happen. The most visited page of most websites is the ‘meet the team’ page, and for good reason – people want to know who they’re dealing with, and size them up before buying. Creating an employee showcase video means that when you get talking to a new lead, you’re already a friendly face, and one that your lead will be much more likely to buy from. As well as being highly engaging and personable content, these films are great recruitment tools, showing the skilled and welcoming team that any great employee would love to be a part of. Using employee stories on LinkedIn is generally highly engaging, as people like to see people who are ‘just like them’ – by adding an employee testimonial video to your LinkedIn page, you’re showing your prospective clients that your team are just like theirs… and everyone likes to do business with someone they feel aligned with.
7. Staying relevant
Lead the conversation by producing quick films that are topical and relevant. Keeping an eye on newsworthy or trending content is a smart way to engage with your audience and spark debate online, as well as positioning yourself as someone who’s got their finger on the pulse. This strategy works across all social media platforms, but just make sure you’ve timed it right – there’s nothing worse than an out-of-date meme. Topical content could include an opinion piece on a current news story, hopping on a trending topic or viral post, or opening up a debate around a common business or industry talking point. It’s hard to resist giving an opinion on a platform as career-centric as LinkedIn, as everyone wants to show their expertise – use this to your advantage, and encourage discussion around areas relevant to your profession. You’ll position yourself as a switched-on expert, and might make some new connections in the process.
The moral of the story is this: leverage LinkedIn to humanise your brand, grow your professional network, increase your referrals and generate more sales. As is typical for all digital platforms, video content on LinkedIn is working superbly. In fact, when you compare LinkedIn videos to text posts, videos earn three times the amount of engagement (source: Business Insider).
There’s no time like the present to take advantage of the power of video – get in touch with our team today, and we’d love to discuss how we can put you on the map.
Want more?
Don’t forget to add subtitles to your social media video, and create a solid video marketing strategy to complement your LinkedIn activity!
If you want your videos to show you a real ROI, download our free ebook containing 14 video strategies to make you money!
