Give Your Brand’s Top Voices A Stage: The Power Of LinkedIn In Modern-Day Employee Branding
LinkedIn in a modern-day employee branding strategy
In the State of B2B Social Media Marketing report by Oktopost, 46 per cent of CMOs interviewed concluded that employee advocacy was their best-performing social initiative.
Employee advocacy is simply the promotion of an organisation by its employees. But I would take it further and say employee advocacy is empowering your ‘top thinkers’ to openly share their experience in non-sales or brand-specific ways.
In a world of constant advertising, a human-centred approach to brand growth that includes social selling, conversations, community-building, and personalised content creation can position your brand for the win. In the same report, a company called ACI Worldwide concluded that their employee advocacy program resulted in 40 per cent more converted leads.
Is it time to give your top voices a stage?
LinkedIn is the modern-day social media platform for B2B brands. With 830 million professionals on the network, it’s an ideal place for your brand to connect with specific and targeted audiences. Your employees can tap into specific niche networks of potential customers. They can use their expertise to start a conversation — one that gets your company brand in front of the right audience.
5 trends that will make or break your performance on LinkedIn
As with any marketing initiative, you need a strategy.
Telling your team to log in to LinkedIn once a week and share your company’s content isn’t a strategy! If you haven’t supported your employees with the right tools and consulting, they’re likely still posting content — but it might just be hurting your brand.
Learn the 5 trends to watch out for — and avoid on LinkedIn.
1. Posting with no established topics –
To begin, resharing company content to an individual’s profile isn’t a strategy. Your employees should be encouraged to share original, educational, and authentic content that is tailored to their voice. But likely, your top company voices aren’t marketers! They need support on what to write about, how to write the content, and the encouragement to get it done. If your employees are posting with no established topics tailored to their voice, then you’re missing out on a huge branding opportunity.
2. Content that reduces brand visibility –
LinkedIn thrives from having people visiting and staying on their platform. Because of this, it’s obvious that the algorithm reduces the reach of content that encourages a visitor to exit the platform. Even if your employees are sharing your company’s blog content, they’re likely sharing it wrong. Avoid adding the link to the article in the text of the LinkedIn post. Instead, add content and link to the article in the comment section.
3. Incohesive profile branding –
Imagine if every employee had a well-written profile and company branding banners. Imagine the impact that would have on your target audience! Avoid giving your team free rein to write and publish their profiles. Support them with regular team training on how to write, optimise, and publish a great profile!
4. Unoptimised profile for SEO –
Did you know that SEO has a large impact on LinkedIn profiles? That content is searchable within the platform and on SERP. Take advantage and optimise your team’s profiles for important brand keywords relevant to your greater content strategy. This will help to extend your reach!
5. Spammy LinkedIn messages –
If you’ve recently been on LinkedIn, you’ve likely noticed the increase in spam and irrelevant messages in your inbox. LinkedIn is in the process of stopping this type of content, meaning you need to curate the message content for your employees. Likely, they’re sending no messages or poorly written messages. Training them on how to write the message and when to send them will protect your company’s brand.
LinkedIn is a great platform for your employees to leverage. If done correctly, they can use the tool to elevate their voices, engage in unique conversations, and build connections with key customers. LinkedIn has a pivotal role to play in your modern-day employee branding program, so there’s no better time than now to set up your team for success!
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This article is written by MartechSeries and originally published here
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