The social channel LinkedIn just transformed for B2C marketers thanks to two content friendly insights to make your content work smarter. We can now investigate the numbers that matter and fine-tune our efforts on the business-networking site to make the most of our marketing dollars. Better yet, we can see examples of companies already hitting these numbers and compare success. LinkedIn content marketing is taking center stage.
According to the recent B2C Content Marketing 2014: Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends survey from CMI, 71% of B2C marketers in North America are using LinkedIn (up from 51% last year). However, only 42% of users find this channel to be effective for their brands. LinkedIn took these numbers to heart, and as a result, this is all about to change.
LinkedIn introduced Content Marketing Score and Trending Content. One tool will help you measure your company’s success, while the other will give you insight into what successful content looks like. These additions will provide much better insight into being successful on LinkedIn than was previously available on the platform. LinkedIn content marketing has real numbers to back it up and even show users how to increase their efforts for success.
Content Marketing Score
LinkedIn’s new Content Marketing Score will supply necessary data to help grow your company’s presence on LinkedIn. The Content Marketing Score is an analytics resource that offers insight into the impact of your paid and organic content on LinkedIn. Your “score” is calculated by dividing the number of users who’ve engaged with your content over a one-month period, by the number of users who have been active over the same period. To see where your content stacks up, request your score here.
LinkedIn’s announcement post described this new feature as a tool that “measures member engagement with your Sponsored Updates, Company Pages, LinkedIn Groups, employee updates, and Influencer posts.” Additionally, Content Marketing Score ranks you against your competitors on those same traits. You define what a “competitor” means to your brand—filtering your score against others in the same region, seniority, company size, job function and industry. The best part is that LinkedIn can now provide recommendations to improve your score over time.
Trending Content
Knowing what’s trending in your industry is crucial when developing an inbound marketing strategy. This is how you create compelling content to generate promising leads. Add LinkedIn’s Trending Content tool to your list of industry monitoring tools and pay close attention.
The Content Trending tool surfaces the most popular content on LinkedIn for different audience and topic segments broken down into the following: automotive, executive, financial services, health and pharmaceuticals, high-tech, IT, marketing, small businesses, students and venture capitalists. Choose the segment most relevant to your brand and it will find the top shared articles and topics on LinkedIn from around the web.
What Does This Mean?
The LinkedIn content marketing tools have been developed with the user in mind to help you better understand the reach, frequency and engagement of your content with specific audiences. Combined, they aim to equip us with a solid, quantifiable measure of compelling, relevant content.
As amazing as all of this sounds, there is one small catch. At the moment, these LinkedIn content marketing tools are only available to companies with a LinkedIn account representative, perhaps because these customers are more likely to spend on sponsored ads once they have identified what content is resonating well with their target audience. There is reason to believe that these tools will be rolled out to all companies in the near future, and eventually individual profiles.
Seeing examples of high-performing content on LinkedIn can go a long way to help you create your own engaging content for LinkedIn’s audience. How do you plan to use these new LinkedIn tools for your content marketing efforts?
