Tartle attended a Secrets of Successful Content Masterclass at LinkedIn London - and got the stash to prove it. Turns out you’re never too old for a free biro and a sheet of stickers.
Here are some interesting reminders, hints, and tricks for any startup businesses exploring B2B (business to business) content marketing as a way to raise brand awareness or generate new sales leads:
1. Customers make it through 90% the purchase process before contacting you, consuming 10 pieces of content in the process.
2. What content best drives engagement on LinkedIn? The stuff that a) gets straight to the point and b) inspires.
3. Don't use content marketing for the hard sell. Your job is to create useful content for the reader. It should: be helpful, tell stories, be human.
4. Talk to people, not businesses. This is still SOCIAL media.
5. It’s not all about paid content, you can get reach organically by simply reminding colleagues and employees to share your content. Not only is this completely free of charge, employees have 10 times more reach than companies do. They are trusted and influential in their own networks. How many times have you read / liked / engaged with a post that a connection of yours has shared?
6. The smallest change can make a campaign successful - even the angle of a person's head in a photo image (this is why A/B testing is so important).
Spot the difference: The ad on the left performed 89% better (Pic: LinkedIn)
7. In sponsored posts, address your audience directly e.g. if you're targeting personal trainers, you could introduce your content as: 10 things all personal trainers have learnt the hard way
8. Add a 'call to action' button to your image to drive more clicks. Just like this:
9. Videos are a big deal (although still new to LinkedIn) they have a 28% completion rate on LinkedIn. The prediction is that, by 2020, 82% of all content will be video. Don’t forget to add subtitles.
10. If you're a micro business, £2,000 per month is a small but realistic budget which would give you statistically significant data.
11. Sponsored Inmail should only be used to drive sign ups for an event (or similar), never for a hard sell.
For more useful tips, visit business.linkedin.com