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Posting on LinkedIn has been a journey into the unknown for many organisations in the wealth and asset management world. Often bearing some scars from previous campaigns that did not live up to expectations, but with considerable peer group pressure to do ‘something’ on the platform, we receive many enquiries from organisations to provide a more sustainable strategy for execution and management.
In this post we reveal some of our key ingredients to a successful corporate approach to LinkedIn marketing.
LinkedIn is a grave-yard of company time and money and in most cases it’s because the platform hasn’t been well understood.
One of the most important considerations is that like all social media platforms, the line between professional and personal has become increasingly blurred. So play that to your advantage.
It’s important to have individuals in your company being active on LinkedIn, and after all LinkedIn’s foundations are built for individuals not companies so make sure your team are sharing, reacting to and reposting whatever the company is posting on the platform. Equally, avoid too many formal posts on the company account. Even for the most professional of organisations it’s important to create a palette of post types that include real team faces, as well as your corporate visuals and updates. Your peers, future colleagues, clients who are referencing you, want to see your personality come through – that’s going to instil trust and positive reinforcement of your brand – and that’s what social media is all about.
Robbie Wilson Marketing Partner at WAM Digital
Our industry isn’t the best when it comes to creativity. There are many structural reasons for that but today to win the attention of our target audience, to stave off competition and for mere survival we need to up our game (in fact that’s a core reason that WAM Digital was founded! Read our story here).
This is where design comes in. The user experience (UX) of a social media platform like LinkedIn is similar to Facebook, Instagram, WeChat moments and more…in other words it’s a very common experience. It’s conducive to a user scrolling through a large quantity of content in a feed. So how does a user choose what to dwell on? Well it can be because of the post’s author who is perhaps a friend or respected connection…but more often than not it’s the first few words and the visual.
Be warned. Design is a profession. It doesn’t have to be complicated but there is expertise involved. We caution against trying to do post visuals in-house where companies do not have the suitable design expertise. Firstly, it’s a waste of your time and money when it’s not an area of specialisation. But secondly, getting the design wrong and creating bad visuals can have the opposite effect on engagement, and in a world of increasingly higher standard on visual design, it can be very noticeable.
The key design tips for LinkedIn post visuals are:
Traction with LinkedIn marketing takes time to materialise, particularly in our industry which doesn’t naturally translate to highly visually stimulating content.
So make sure your strategy, resources and budgets can last.
Organisations in our wealth and asset management industries sometimes see Linkedin as an untapped channel for leads. “All of our audience are on there so we must be selling to them”. They therefore also think that a lead generation campaign can be a quick win.
This is a flawed approach and in particular our industry is not like selling a product on Instagram, it takes a lot longer to nurture trust.
We view LinkedIn as relationship reinforcement, both with clients, partners, and prospective employees, rather than a lead generation channel.
Tied to the topic of endurance, it’s important to set some realistic objectives. However this is where things get interesting. Our industry’s fields of expertise are typically rooted in academics. Marketing is often seen as ‘airy -fairy’ because results can’t always be easily extrapolated into a nice spreadsheet. LinkedIn marketing is no exception. Whilst followers and likes are positive indicators, they should be a by-product of success for long term campaigns rather than a short-term objective. In our opinion, what’s most important is that your content adds value. That can be at an emotional level as well as at service oriented one.
Which leads us on to the next point.
Your audience is often validating you on LinkedIn, personally as well as an organisation.
LinkedIn is one of the three important corporate digital footprints: 1) Website, 2) Google organic search and 3) LinkedIn. And the good news is that you can control what you post! (Unlike Google search which contains content about you that’s written by third parties).
So one of the most basic metrics of success that we ask our clients to judge their LinkedIn performance by after three months is to take a look at their company account feed and write down how it makes them feel.
Are you proud?
It is clear what solutions and services you offer?
As an outsider looking in to your shop window does it give credibility?
From that review we have a great basis on which to review the strategy.
We work with our wealth and asset management clients on a range of services, from bitesize parts of their LinkedIn strategy, like the design expertise to support their posting plans, through to full blown LinkedIn marketing account management. We create new company accounts, build strategic objectives, create and maintain post calendars, design and execute posts, and report back to optimise.
If you’re interested in making more of your LinkedIn company profile, drop us a line here.
