The ‘Secret Sauce’ to PR & Marketing on LinkedIn

Integrating organic (nonpaid) and paid strategies may be the secret sauce for more effective PR and marketing on LinkedIn. That’s the main message in LinkedIn’s new ebook The Secret Sauce that contains a wealth of best practices for improving PR, marketing and advertising on the network.

The greater your organic reach, the more it can amplify your paid efforts, the ebook explains. PR and marketing can test and optimize organic content to select their best-performing paid campaigns. Although the guide focuses on advertising, PR and marketing professionals who oversee nonpaid strategies can also benefit from its recommendations.

PR and marketing professionals can also use sponsored content to determine the most effective organic posts. Direct sponsored content, sponsored posts that do not appear on company pages, can be used to conduct A/B tests.

LinkedIn Becomes More Attractive

Business professionals spend more time viewing and interacting with content on the LinkedIn newsfeed, according to the platform. Membership engagement with the newsfeed is growing more than 50 percent a year. Members like, comment and share almost twice as much as last year, and views of the feed are up 60 percent from last year.

More marketers may begin to prefer LinkedIn over Facebook due to Facebook’s algorithm changes that severely constrain organic reach of brands, some observers predict. Facebook now prioritizes posts of users’ personal contacts and shows fewer posts from publishers and other businesses in newsfeeds. LinkedIn’s numerous changes make it more attractive for content marketing.

Readership and engagement of the top 100 best performing articles on LinkedIn quadrupled over the past two years, according to a NewsWhip analysis.

“If nothing else, this proves that LinkedIn is becoming a genuine force as a platform where people read and engage with content, and as such it is worth paying attention to which publishers’ content is having the most success on LinkedIn,” writes Benedict Nicholson, a NewsWhip editorial researcher. LinkedIn is now owned by Microsoft.

Tips for Better LinkedIn Promotions

LinkedIn offers these tips:

Test ad creatives. For sponsored content, run at least four different creatives against one target audience to optimize for highest performance.

Viewers love stats. LinkedIn says sponsored content updates that include a statistic saw a 37% higher CTR and 162% more impressions.

Bid aggressively. In one test, bids 10% higher than the maximum suggested bid saw a 15% lift in CTR and 27% lift in conversions. (Obviously, this recommendation results in more advertising revenue for LinkedIn.)

Consider rich media. Rich media images have 38% higher CTR than share updates with a thumbnail image preview.

Combine sponsored email and content.  When LinkedIn used Sponsored Content and InMail together, it saw a 25% increase in Sponsored InMail open rates and a 95% increase in CTRs.

Work on images. Eye-catching imagery that matches the content’s message helps capture audience attention. Keep the text on imagery to a minimum. Because a large percentage of engagement on LinkedIn ads comes from mobile devices, it’s important to examine how it appears on small screens.

Consider affordable image options. Creativity doesn’t have to be a costly venture. While organizations with sufficient budgets can turn to Photoshop and platforms like Visage to find and edit images, many sites like Canva offer free resources.

It’s undeniably best if companies run their own tests of content marketing and paid advertising to validate results and determine most effective approaches.

Bottom Line: More companies place greater emphasis on LinkedIn as a PR and marketing venue as the platform continues to add and tweak its features. Companies find that PR and marketing work best on LinkedIn when they work together.