In 2012, Content Marketing was the leading tactic for 18.9% of marketers worldwide. In 2013, that percentage has grown to 34.8%. It’s growing because buyers are getting savvier and they’re not persuaded by advertising alone. They’re using the web, search and social networks to educate themselves on potential purchases. They’re 60% through the buyer’s journey before reaching out to brands for help on the options available. And they’re forming perceptions about brands – and eliminating brands from their consideration set – without those brands having an opportunity to share their perspective.
On Tuesday, July 16th, LinkedIn Marketing Solutions hosted "Getting Started With Content Marketing On LinkedIn," an exclusive conversation with Marc Bishop, Head of Global Product Marketing and Sudeep Cherian, Global Product Marketing Manager on How Your Content Marketing Can Create Meaningful Connections.
19. Accelerate Advocacy
19
“In just two weeks,
over 2,000 LinkedIn
professionals recommended
HP products and services.”
Kari Holman, Worldwide Social
Media Manager, HP
Advocate
Content Marketing isn’t new. One of the first practitioners of content marketing was Mr. John Deere in the 1800s. John Deere was the founder of the company that bears his name. They make tractors, and combines, and all kinds of farming equipment. And back in the 1800s, John Deere was the disruptive CEO of his time, introducing a new technology into farming. And that was steel plow blades. At the time, plow blades were made of iron and the mud would stick to those iron plow blades. So John Deere did something innovative with how he sold farming equipment – in this case, steel plow blades. He went out into the country and taught people how to be better farmers. He didn’t try to sell plows and he didn’t try to sell them farming equipment. Instead, he taught them how to plow and seed fields and everything else related to farming. As John Deere started to teach people how to be better farmers, they started to follow him to understand how they could buy his equipment and become better farmers using his new technology. It was so successful that as the company grew, John Deere kept this form of relationship-building as a core part of what they do. Key takeaway: Mr. John Deere exemplifies our definition of content marketing. Content Marketing is using content to forge a long-term relationship with the customer, geared toward becoming a trusted advisor and influencing decisions.
Even to this day, John Deere publishes a print magazine called “The Furrow.” The earliest one I could find was from 1931 online, but they published from 1875 onward. So for over a hundred years, John Deere has been producing content that helps farmers be better farmers. It doesn’t mention farming equipment or John Deere or how they sell stuff or the features and benefits of John Deere equipment. The Furrow only teaches farmers how to be better at what they do. To this day, it is the #1 farming magazine out there. It has 1.5million subscribers and is translated into 14 languages. Content Marketing is an approach John Deere embraces to this day and remains a big reason why it remainssuch a beloved brand, consistently earns high Net Promoter Scores – a measure of customers’ willingness to repurchase, and has a market cap of $36 billion nearly 200 years after its founding.Key takeaway: For over a hundred years, John Deere has been publishing content that helps farmers be better farmers.
In 2012, Content Marketing was the leading tactic for 18.9% of marketers worldwide. In 2013, that percentage has grown to 34.8%. Why is it growing?
It’s growing because buyers are getting savvier and they’re not persuaded by advertising alone. They’re using the web, search, social networks, etc. to educate themselves on potential purchases. They’re 60% through the buyer’s journey before reaching out to brands for help on the options available. And they’re forming perceptions about brands – and eliminating brands from their consideration set – without those brands having an opportunity to share their perspective.Marketers are responding to this new reality by making sure their perspective – articulated through content – is found by buyers in that first 60%. The best way to find customers is to get them to find you. This is more important than ever as research finds that 87% of b2b buyers say online content has either a major or moderate impact on vendor preference and selection. (Source: “Better Lead Yield in the Content Marketing Field,” based on an online survey of more than 400 b2b buyers, April 2013.) Key takeaway: It’s growing because marketers are responding to the reality that buyers are forming perceptions about brands without those brands having an opportunity to share their perspective.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Google’s update to its Panda search algorithm favors content that is often shared and often linkedto by others. Marketers realize that by creating relevant and engaging content and widely distributing it, they will improve SEO – making it easier for buyers to discover and explore their brand and products through Search. Source: Brent Adamson, Matthew Dixon, and Nicholas Toman, “The End of Solution Sales,” Harvard Business Review, July-August 2012 (http://hbr.org/2012/07/the-end-of-solution-sales/ar/1).
Content Marketing is also growing because social and mobile now deliver unprecedented scale for branded content at a lower cost. SocialIn the recent past, if a marketer wanted a large-scale audience to see its content, it had to spend on paid media on the hundreds of relevant publisher sites to drive traffic to it. Today, marketers can get massive distribution by focusing on the 4 primary social platforms where the large-scale audiences are aggregating organically. Furthermore, the social sharing on these platforms extends the reach and relevance of content. And potential customers are more receptive to content carrying the implied endorsement of people they know and trust, promoting conversation and engagement. We’ve seen this latter point in Sponsored Updates campaigns. When we first started testing Sponsored Updates, we did not show the social proof (i.e., # of likes, # of shares, and the comments). When we turned on social proof, we saw an 80% increase in CTR on average. When you add social proof to your content it increases impact. MobileMobile devices provide access to content from everywhere. A large portion of mobile consumers fill downtime moments throughout the day by tapping into content on their phones. These snack-time moments are ideal times and places for content marketers to deliver short-form content.And the news feeds from the primary social platforms offer content marketers seamless access to mobile without needing to customize content for mobile ad formats.Key takeaway: It’s growing because social and mobile now deliver unprecedented scale for branded content at a lower cost.
The personal social networks were the first to get scale, allowing brands to publish to a mass audience.
But now LinkedIn has emerged as the world’s largest professional network, enabling brands to reach a premium audience. One-third of the 600 million professionals on the planet are LinkedIn. This represents the largest group anywhere of influential, affluent and educated people. Our audience has 2x more buying power than average internet sites.171% are either college grads or post grads.2 93% more likely to have a college degree compared to average Internet user. 4 out of 5 members drive business decisionsFor marketers currently deploying budget on a personal social network, the research has convinced them they need to be on multiple social networks. One of those studies referenced in Mike Lewis’s book, “Stand Out Social Marketing”, showed that content published on 2 or 3 channels had a 24% increase in engagement over content published to a single channel. When more than 3 channels are used, the number increases to 30%. 3Key takeaway: LinkedIn has emerged as the world’s largest professional network, enabling brands to reach a premium audience. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Here are some data to support premium nature of our audience:1 Our audience has 2x more buying power than average internet sites (Comscore US Media Metrix Data, September 2012) 2 71.48% of members are either college grads or post grads (per 2012 Fall GfK MRI)3 “Stand Out Social Marketing”, Mike Lewis
Not only are the audiences different on personal networks and professional networks, but these networks also have very different contexts and mindsets. When it comes to content marketing, having great content is not sufficient. Marketers must also consider the context in which audiences will find and engage with that content. It’s why you may be doing psychographic targeting.Personal vs. professional persona.Because it’s a place where audiences are investing time in improving their decision making, LinkedIn is well-suited to high-consideration marketingand brands using content to influence buying decisions.Key takeaway: Not only are the audiences different on personal networks and professional networks, but these networks also have very different contexts and mindsets. A professional context is well-suited to high consideration marketing.
As members invest time on LinkedIn, they’re leaning in. They’re actively engaging with content from primarily 4 sources of inspiration, insights, and information on LinkedIn:News Sources (publishers)PeersThought LeadersBrandsNews – Members get news from the 1.3M publishers on LinkedIn Today.Peers - Members visit their homepage and read their news feed to see what their connections are sharing. They look to peers as sounding boards in the more than 1.5 million Groups on LinkedIn. (Q4 2012) Thought Leaders – Members are getting unique content that they can’t get anywhere else by following Influencers. The Influencers program includes over 220 of the most influential thought leaders, from Richard Branson to President Obama, and has generated north of 2,300 original posts, and hundreds of thousands of comments (Jan 29, 2013). Richard Branson has over 1.3 million followers on LinkedIn. Brands have the same opportunity on LinkedIn. Brands -- Members follow the brands behind the more than 2.8M company pages on LinkedIn. (March 4, 2012) They follow brands to get news, insights, and product informationdirectly from the brand itself. (Source: LinkedIn Follower Analysis, Jan 2012)This gives brands an opportunity to build relationships directly with members who want to receive their content.
For brands to ensure the relevance of their content marketing, it’s important to account for the information needs of buyers as they proceed along their buyer’s journey. And it’s important that brands map their marketing objectives in each phase of the buyer’s journey to the type of content that the buyer needs at that time.The research shows that buyers of high consideration products and services go through four distinct phases in the buying journey: Discover, Explore, Select, and Advocate. In the Discover phase, the buyer has just started to ask himself: “Is there a solution to my need?” In the Explore phase, buyers further along in their journey are asking themselves: “How does your solution solve my need?” In the Select phase, buyers are asking themselves: “How do I buy your product?”Not every buyer is going to get to the Advocate phase with every brand – only with those in which a long-term relationship is forgedthrough great post-purchase product and service experiences and communication. Social media, and LinkedIn specifically, can serve as the channel for marketers to create those long-term relationships by keeping buyers informed of what they need to know post-purchase to remain happy customers and potential advocates. Let’s talk about how our products can be used to deliver against all your key objectives in each phase of the buyer’s journey, starting with the Discover phase.
In the Discover phase, our clients want the buyer to know they have a solution to his need. They want to positively shape customer brand perception – something that needs to happen typically before a purchase will occur.A great new way to do this with LinkedIn is to promote your branded thought leadership content to the newsfeeds of ALL (not just Company Followers) your targeted audiences using sponsored company updates. Because company updates appear in the feed, your content will flow seamlessly across devices – enabling you to reach mobile audiences without having to produce device-specific ad units. And the member engagement with your content – comments, likes, clicks, and shares -- further extends your content’s reach and supports passive discovery of your brand and products. As opposed to a display ad, which is served to a single member and then disappears, the impact of a Sponsored Update is often extended through social sharing. This member engagement long after the first impression. Sponsored Updates are an option to boost the reach of your organic content to more of your Company Followers – and to your non-Followers. If you’re just relying solely on organic, it has to be an amazing video -- or other piece of content – for it truly to get massive distribution. We always recommend clients start with a small seeding budget originally, seeing if content catches fire organically through free Company Updates. Then you can put more fuel on the fire to make it go even wider in terms of the distribution.
Content Ads enable you to distribute branded rich media, video, blog content, and SlideShare presentations to all of your target audiences – not only Company Followers. These interactive 300x250 and 160x600 ad formats enable engagement and social sharing without leaving the page. GE recently used Content Ads as part of campaigns targeting Metals & Mining and Oil & Energy industries. It delivered video case studies, whitepapers, infographics, and news articles directly within the ad experience. The member didn’t have to leave the page – resulting in average interaction rates of 5.75% across multiple campaigns targeting different geos. To boost content marketing results, GE used paid media in its campaign. It used Sponsored InMails personalized for specific recipients and display ads offering content downloads discussing GE-powered initiatives by the company’s customers. Key takeaway: Content Ads enable engagement and social sharing at scale without the member needing to leave the page.-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------This campaign, which targeted industry professionals in select nations, achieved an average interaction rate of 5.75% for its Content Ads, generating over 1,300 unique content downloads. Note how GE used paid display + InMail to boost content marketing efforts.
Buyers in the Discover phase are also interested in community, especially communities that deliver thought leadership on relevant topics. The LinkedIn Groups platform is flexible enough to advance marketing objectives throughout the buyer’s journey. What differentiates a thought leadership group in the Discover phase from a group tailored to the Explore phase is the type of content and conversations a brand has in them. With its “Innovations in ….” series of groups, Philips created a forum where professionals gather to share, develop, and foster innovation in subject areas that have a logical connection to Philips’ brand. Philips doesn’t talk about its products in these thought leadership groups. Instead, they sponsor professional conversations and gather customer insights from polls that are then fed back into their business. In return, Philips is converting affinity for certain topics into affinity for Philips brand, as demonstrated by Net Promoter scores for Philips of over 50 (extremely high-valued) from members of these “Innovation” groups. Key takeaway: Creating community with Groups enables you to convert topic affinity into affinity for your brand, moving the member down-funnel toward consideration.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------When members join, post, or comment in the Group, all those events are shared out to the feeds of LinkedIn and indexed by search engines. This increases awareness for the client’s Group and gets people to join or return themselves. Recommend that your client uses paid targeted Join Group/View Group ads to attract certain segments as members and return visitors.
On the other hand, SAP’s groups are tailored to buyers in the Explore phase. SAP has its subject matter experts highlight new SAP events, introduce new SAP products and videos, and generally answer questions new and existing customers have when exploring product options from SAP. SAP says its gets value from these communities because happier customers have shorter sales cycles, buy more, and are more loyal. SAP’s groups on LinkedIn are basic groups. The opportunity for the rep is to sell traffic-driving media and even upsell clients to enhanced and custom groups. Company PageSAP’s company page serves as its central hub for buyers in the Explore phase. SAP provides one-stop access to SAP’s product overviews and recommendations. SAP’s most recent updates can be found here. And SAP cross-promotes its most important groups here.
Similar to its company page, SAP’s SlideShare Channel hosts SAP’s presentations, whitepapers, and videos. SAP seeks to extend the reach of this products and services content by leveraging the built-in social sharing of SlideShare.SlideShare has more than 50M visitors per month and more than 100M PVs. Everything posted on SlideShare can be consumed and shared out to connections not only on LinkedIn, but also on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, and WordPress. You can also embed your SlideShare content directly into your company blog or website where prospects are performing research. Our clients embedding their products- and services-related SlideShare presentations and videos on their web sites are doing so because of the 60% research I referenced up front. The buyer’s journey is 60% complete by the time they’re ready to engage with a live sales person. And no complex sale happens today without significant engagement by the consumer/account on your web site. You want all your best content to be easily found by these consumers/accounts. And in the next slide, I’ll show you how SlideShare content can also further your lead collection efforts.Finally, because company updates support rich media, SAP can share SlideShare content with Company Followers to drive consideration and preference.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Access via SearchBecause of the SEO of SlideShare content, your content is more likely to rank highly in Google search results. In fact, the number one driver of traffic to SlideShare content is through Google search. SlideShare transcribes presentation content into text, which improves SEO. Additionally, several companies strategically choose keywords for their content's title and description to improve SEO. Examples of companies doing this well include: ExactTarget (pg 2 of results), Hubspot (pg 2 , Eloqua (pg 1), NetApp (pg 2), Pfizer (pg 2)
What you see on this slide is how our clients are getting the widest distribution possible for their SlideShare content. This is an example of a Content Ad used by ExactTarget to broadly distribute professionally-relevant SlideShare presentations. Not only does this ad format provide ExactTarget with Display-like reach. But it also enables ExactTarget to collects leads via the ad format directly – no extra steps involved in driving the member somewhere to a lead collection form. Members can read ExactTarget’s presentations and easily submit their contact information through lead collection forms without leaving their current page. ET’s sales people can then guide these warm prospects down the latter stages of the funnel to selecting and buying ET’s products.ET tells us that leads generated through this ad format are of higher quality compared to leads generated in other channels. (Katie Smith, Global Advertising Manager, ExactTarget) Lead quality is of utmost importance to ExactTarget. Focusing on quantity of leads without also measuring quality can lead to programs that look good initially, but don’t deliver profits. (To take this idea to the extreme, the phone book is an abundant source of “leads” if you only measure quantity, not quality.)Your content uploaded to SlideShareChannels has these same lead collection capabilities. And we’ll continue to invest in new lead generation capabilities across our portfolio (e.g., Sponsored InMail) as time goes on.
How do you use LinkedIn to keep happy customers informed and up-to-date so they can advocate on your behalf? HP is using followers as its channel to keep 1 million potential brand advocates informed and up-to-date on its products and services. HP is driving increased likelihood to recommend amongst its followers, as its Followers are 2 times more likely to recommend HP than are non-HP followers. And our research into that behavior indicates that HP followers are more likely to recommend HP in part because they feel informed about HP. They trust the information they’re receiving and want to pass it on to their networks.What happens when HP’s 1M followers share, comment on, or like HP’s company updates as they advocate on HP’s behalf? HP’s content is shared to its followers’ professional networks, extending HP’s reach from 1 million to a potential 138 million -- potentially producing millions of dollars in free brand exposure.Let’s talk about HP’s followers for a second: 68% of HP’s followers are business decision makers. And when these decision-makers share content with their networks, who are they reaching? Other decision-makers. In fact, nearly 20% of the viral reach generated by HP’s followers was with other business decision makers. (Source: HP Follower Case Study, 2013)
How can you drive similar levels of advocacy to HP? It starts with attracting as many followers as possible and getting members to recommend your products.FollowersFirst, publishing great content that is shared in the network will encourage members to follow you. Second, place inFollow buttons on your conversion pages to encourage new customers to follow you on LinkedIn so that you can continue to engage them after the sale. Third, activate your employees as advocates. In HP’s “Make it Matter” campaign, it targeted FollowerAds to its employees so that employees could easily follow HP and share relevant content with their respective networks. LinkedIn research finds that employees are 70% more likely to take action on your updates and spread your message to their networks by liking, sharing, or commenting on your posts.Many marketers (e.g., Cisco, Oracle, IBM, Aon) are relying on their employees to amplify their content marketing. Cisco reported that in one campaign last year, employee-driven updates accounted for 14% of Cisco-branded updates, but 41% of total social reach, including viral amplification.Recommendation Ads Finally, let’s talk about Recommendations. The research firm, Aberdeen, found that a stunning 59% of customers seek their peers’ opinions before making technology purchases. LinkedIn enables its users to recommend a product on its Products & Services page The recommendations you acquire are not only visible on your company page, but they are broadcasted to the networks of the recommender via the newsfeed. HP accelerated the organic rate with which it was acquiring recommendations by advertising the recommendations they’d received to-date – and asking for more of them. This quote from HP proves this strategy works. These recommendations in turn generated over 500,000 viral updates for HP. And traffic to HP’s products and services pages more than doubled. By the end of the month, HP had 2,900 new recommendations from business professionals and 20,000 new followers on the HP Company Page.
Thanks for listening! If you’d like more information, you can visit our resource center for content marketing on LinkedIn (that first link) and you can also learn more about our new product Sponsored Updates with that second link. On the Sponsored Updates page, you can request an invitation to use the product in the limited release period before we launch it publicly. Thanks again! And now we’ll open it up to Q&A.