Influencer Marketing on LinkedIn
Built for business professionals, the platform was for a long time used purely as a recruitment tool. Today LinkedIn is a major professional social network where experts in every field share their thinking, grow their networks and, above all, make money.
As LinkedIn has evolved, plenty of professionals have become influencers. They have large followings, generate genuine engagement and successfully market their own businesses, or their partners', on the platform.
As with every other channel, LinkedIn marketing does not work for everyone. Some B2C companies do manage to find their audience there, but LinkedIn is most effective for B2B brands.
The platform's rapid growth in recent years has made competition fiercer, and it is getting harder and harder for individuals and companies without an active audience (active, mind you, not large) to catch the attention of business professionals. Sound familiar? Then this article is for you.
Let's look at the basics of influencer marketing on LinkedIn, then move on to how you can raise your brand's visibility with the right partnerships.
An introduction to influencer marketing on LinkedIn
More and more companies want to diversify their marketing and move beyond Facebook advertising.
Some B2B companies are turning to new, up-and-coming channels and trying their luck with TikTok ads and live sessions on Clubhouse, but it is safer to get the most out of LinkedIn marketing first. Partnering with influencers can be a game changer for your growth strategy on the channel.
LinkedIn influencer marketing is a tactic that involves partnering with LinkedIn members who have large followings and relevant expertise, in order to extend your brand's reach and strengthen its credibility.
The key benefits of LinkedIn influencer marketing
LinkedIn is home to millions of B2B professionals who want to connect and learn from one another. Many of them are decision-makers. In fact, you will not find this many business professionals on any other channel.
Building a marketing strategy on LinkedIn is no easy task, though. For 42.38% of B2B marketers it is the most important channel for lead generation, which makes it an incredibly competitive environment for businesses.
To cut through the noise, you either have to invest in a solid plan and follow it consistently for months (with no guarantee it will work), or turn to people who have already gathered your target audience in their networks.
LinkedIn influencers have spent years building their authority, and their followers trust them implicitly. Their posts get thousands of views and hundreds of likes and comments.
LinkedIn influencers usually position themselves as experts in a specific niche, such as content marketing, advertising, product development or leadership. That lets them bring together people who are invested in the subject and highly engaged with what the influencer says in their posts.
The best thing about LinkedIn influencer marketing, of course, is that it is still an untapped opportunity for many companies. Build it into your marketing strategy and you still have a very good chance of standing out and outperforming your competitors.
How to find LinkedIn influencers
Rule number one: do not rely on "top influencer" lists. Search for "top LinkedIn influencers" and related keywords and you will find lists featuring Bill Gates, Richard Branson and Gary Vaynerchuk.
These are incredibly successful people with huge audiences. But they are unlikely to be interested in any partnership they have not initiated themselves.
Have you heard Instagram marketers recommend partnering with highly engaged influencers with 20K followers rather than working with celebrities? The same applies to LinkedIn.
To build partnerships that bring in revenue, you need to strike the right balance between a person's popularity and their engagement rate.
To show why, let's look at the types of influencer.
Mega-influencers. These people reach more than a million users with their posts. Their engagement rates, however, are not always as big as their follower counts.
It is clear enough that nobody would seriously consider approaching Bill Gates with a collaboration idea, but let's take his profile as an example of a mega-influencer and work out his engagement rate. With almost 40 million followers, Bill Gates gets 10K to 30K interactions per post. That puts his engagement rate somewhere between 0.025% and 0.075%. Now let's see how the numbers change for macro-influencers.
Macro-influencers. A macro-influencer has more than 100,000 followers. These people usually have experience in more than one area, so they reach a broader network.
Micro-influencers. These thought leaders have between 1,000 and 100,000 followers and usually get the highest genuine engagement. Surprisingly, the number of interactions under their posts is not far behind the figures for macro-influencers.
We recommend choosing between macro- and micro-influencers depending on your campaign goals. Partnering with macro-influencers can be useful for brands that want to extend their reach and improve their brand image. Micro-influencers, on the other hand, can help with lead generation and similar sales-driven campaigns.
Ideas for collaborating with LinkedIn influencers
99.9% of LinkedIn influencers do not care about making money from their posts. Most of them are founders and board members of some of the world's leading companies – they did not build such a strong online presence for the chance to earn a few thousand dollars per post.
Thought leaders on LinkedIn usually represent companies they founded or have been running for some time. That is why it matters to them to stay credible and to be able to influence the views of other decision-makers.
When you propose a collaboration to a LinkedIn influencer, make sure your ideas benefit both sides. How will they, or their brand, gain from partnering with your company? Are you offering access to a large audience? Could you share an exclusive discount code with the influencer's audience? The latter is only a good idea if you offer a quality product that the person you want to work with will find valuable.
Webinars and live Q&As
Inviting influencers to co-host webinars is an effective way to generate leads online.
Thought leaders are often keen to co-host online events, because it is a way to reach more people and prove their expertise on the subject.
If you have an active community on Slack, LinkedIn or Twitter, you can attract more members by inviting a LinkedIn influencer to take part in a Q&A session.
In an age when we follow everything remotely, people are looking for more ways to connect with one another. The chance to chat with a thought leader for an hour is a great incentive to join.
Roundups
This is a crafty but effective technique. By sharing a roundup of the influencers in your niche, you can boost activity on your page without setting up any partnership at all. People tend to engage with content that mentions them, which increases the visibility of posts like these.
Podcasts
Interview leading experts on podcasts. The best thing about this kind of content is that you can repurpose it for social posts and add quotes to related blog posts.
Renoun Creative is a customer success agency that helps businesses grow. On its website you will find not only service descriptions and testimonials but also a series of podcasts the company produces with niche experts. The episode with Rand Fishkin got more reactions and views on the host's social media account than all the previous episodes.
Articles
You can ask an influencer to write a piece on the subject they are an expert in, or offer to interview them for an article. Content like this is not only shared eagerly by the influencer's followers, it also earns more backlinks from other writers.
Exclusive discounts
Could your tool or solution be useful to an influencer you want to partner with? Give them exclusive access. It is also a good idea to share coupon codes with their audience, so that a thought leader has a reason to tell their network about your product.
LinkedIn posts
There is no need to overcomplicate things. You can ask an influencer to post about your product on their own page. The terms depend on your relationship with that person. If you have been in touch for a while and feel confident asking a favour, go ahead. If not, put together a proposal that explains the benefits of the collaboration for both sides.
To sum up
LinkedIn is to business professionals what Instagram is to fashion retailers – with the right approach, you can turn LinkedIn into a key channel for traffic, leads and sales.
If you are looking for ways to raise your B2B brand's visibility online, LinkedIn influencer marketing is definitely the place to start. It lets you extend your reach without having to filter out irrelevant audiences – choose the right people to partner with and you gain access to a large network of professionals who match your target audience.
