How can your company leverage Thought Leadership on LinkedIn

It is important to publish your thought leadership across a variety of Forums. LinkedIn is a powerful platform which provides you the mix. You can use the combination of Company Page, Showcase page, sponsored content, Inmails, Slideshares as an option to build a foundation and showcase thought leadership for your company as well as professional professional brand.

Introducing Thought leadership to every stage of the audience Funnel

The basic funnel structure of an audience journey starts from Awareness to Engagement to Discovery to Purchase to Retention. Just like every other form of content, thought leadership needs to be promoted to drive visibility and engagement. And in the B2B world, the most effective promotion hinges on injecting content throughout the purchase process. In fact, Laura Ramos of Forrester says thought leadership impacts business at each stage of the buyer journey:

Awareness: more inbound inquiries and shortlisting

Engagement: faster sales cycles, higher close rates and bigger deal sizes

Discovery: Discovering the brand while looking out for solution

Purchase: Taking a buying decision

Retention: Looking for regular engagement and repeat purchase. Increased customer loyalty and higher lifetime value

Thought leadership is an important part of an always-on content strategy, where you deliver continuous content to your target audiences. After all, thought leadership can greatly influence buyers throughout the purchase process. In one of my earlier articles, I have mentioned about different types Thought Leadership. Here I will explain their utility for different stages of audience journey.

Industry thought leadership for the Awareness and Discovery stage. When you are focused on initially engaging prospective buyers, industry thought leadership serves as your lamppost, casting a light on important issues and trends while drawing buyers to you.

Product thought leadership for the Engagement and New Business stages. Once you’ve enticed buyers to consider your point of view, product thought leadership outlines a practical path for them to make their vision a reality.

Organizational thought leadership for throughout the purchase and retention process. At every stage, you want to position your company as a preferred partner, and organizational thought leadership goes a long way toward doing just that.

Different ways of Insertion of Thought Leadership into every stage of the purchase process

A media mix of Organic content and paid advertising option is necessary to take advantage of it. Lets have a look at the various Organic ways of distributing content across LinkedIn Platform.

Organic Way of Content Distribution (Thought Leadership)

LinkedIn Company Page: Company Pages have evolved from a nice-to-have to a need-to have. Through a Company Page, you can market your business to the LinkedIn community, telling your company’s story and giving customers and prospects a place to learn about your business, your employees, and your brand. Make your Company Page the hub for thought leadership. Your Company Page is the ideal central repository for your thought leadership. It’s often one of the first pages that LinkedIn members visit when checking out a company, making it the perfect place to feature thought leadership content, including links to your latest and greatest white papers, eBooks, and how-to content.

LinkedIn Showcase Pages: By creating dedicated pages for your more prominent brands, businesses, and initiatives using Showcase Pages, you can extend your LinkedIn presence. To complement the thought leadership content, your organization authors point people to other relevant content by curating articles from industry news, trends and content from LinkedIn Influencers. The idea is to show that your perspective isn’t trapped within the four walls of your company and that your ultimate goal is to educate anyone interested in the topic. In other words, it’s a way to demonstrate that you’re not self-centered but instead are truly motivated to help others.

It’s a fantastic way to directly engage the right people in the right context with thought leadership content. It’s a one-two punch of broad content on a Company Page and more specific thought leadership content segmented through a Showcase Page.

Long-form Content: Using an intuitive blogging tool that seamlessly integrates with your profile on LinkedIn, you can publish new and previously published content on LinkedIn to quickly grow your audience and network. Publishing on LinkedIn gives every professional the ability to share their expertise with the world. Once for the sole use of an exclusive group of Influencers, now all members are invited to publish long-form content on LinkedIn.

Articles posted with the tool are searchable by keyword in LinkedIn’s post search box and if your post is viewed enough times, it can get picked up by Pulse, the news app and content brand for LinkedIn. That means you can grow views, comments and shares by leaps and bounds.

Slide-Shares: Research shows that people seek out visual content and find it engaging. And there’s no reason you can’t publish your thought leadership content in visual formats. It just so happens that Slide-Share is not only a terrific repository for content in general, but also a platform for your thought leadership in a visual format.

Example: Content Marketing Institute, which has established itself as the go-to resource for all things Content Marketing

Paid Way of Content Distribution (Thought Leadership)

Sponsored Content: LinkedIn Sponsored Content lets you build brand credibility and educate more than 433 million of the world’s professionals as they’re consuming content in the LinkedIn feed on their desktops, tablets, and smartphones.

LinkedIn Sponsored Content helps you achieve your goals by sharing your thoughts and ideas with a targeted audience who are highly engaged on LinkedIn. You choose from a range of business demographic targeting options and set your own budget, with the flexibility to invest on a CPC or CPM basis. Through LinkedIn's Direct Sponsored Content option, you can reach your target audience directly in LinkedIn’s feed without publishing on your Company Page. It means you can personalize and A/B test your content ads to improve performance. You’ll have access to campaign performance analytics to nimbly optimize and hit your goals. In addition to sharing links to thought leadership content you can also add rich media using Slide-Share and video.

With Direct Sponsored Content, you can now make your content more relevant by sending personalized messages to specific audiences. This gives you the ability to test and retest a variety of content in real time. It also makes it possible to get very specific with your thought leadership and target much more effectively by segmenting your audience for better relevance.

Direct Sponsored Content lifts limitations on who can, and cannot, post in the feed. Because content doesn’t have to start on the Company Page, different business units can try content specific for their audience with the Company Page administrator’s approval.

Sponsored InMail: As you move into the lower half of the funnel where direct response goals reign supreme, Sponsored InMail provides the most direct way to engage your prospects on LinkedIn.

You get professional, credible outreach and the ability to deliver targeted messages directly into prospective buyer inboxes, whether they are on their desktops or mobile devices—with your LinkedIn profile attached. Because your messages are only sent when members are active on LinkedIn, you break through the limits of traditional email marketing to realize 100% deliverable. By delivering the right content and personalized messages, you can get the attention of the highest-value audiences and drive more conversions and leads.to fill out your landing page form, they can do so in just two clicks using LinkedIn Lead Accelerator’s Autofill capability.

Outcome - You increase conversion rates and grow your funnel by leaps and bounds with a greater number of high-quality leads.

Display Ads: With LinkedIn Display Ads, you can accurately target and put your thought leadership in front of more than 433 million members on the LinkedIn network, choosing from a variety of display formats. That includes everything from IAB standard formats to highly engaging native ones such as Spotlight Ads and Follow Company Ads. In fact, you can display ads on various LinkedIn pages, including profile pages, home pages, inbox, search results pages, and groups pages. By using extremely targeted and contextual ads in a quality professional context, you can reach and engage more possible buyers than ever before.

Network Display (LinkedIn Programmatic): To complement the contextual targeting enabled by LinkedIn Onsite Display, take advantage of LinkedIn Display Advertising to reach a high-quality professional audience seeking insights and information. Designed to help you get in front of the right audiences on a frequent basis, this display advertising option allows you to reach prospects with accuracy and at scale as they consume information on LinkedIn and across the Web. This includes extending your reach across LinkedIn’s network of 2500+ business publisher sites and beyond, targeting your audience through the Ad Exchanges, but always in a brand-safe environment. By frequently connecting with your target audience, you increase awareness and engagement.

Dynamic and Text Ads: As a sophisticated marketer, you know that message relevancy is critical to successfully connecting with target audiences and driving desired actions. And LinkedIn Dynamic Ads makes it possible to accurately target decision makers and deal influencers with highly relevant, dynamically generated, customizable creative on LinkedIn.com. Using Dynamic Ads, you can:

? Target the audiences that matter. Select the audiences you want to reach based on a wide range of professional targeting options including company, work experience, groups and interests.

? Customize your creative, personalize your message. Craft your ad copy, choose your call to action and leverage dynamically generated images from LinkedIn member profiles.

? Grow your company follower count. Encourage LinkedIn members to follow your company and build better relationships with your target audience with one-click “Follow Company” calls to action.

I will be coming up with my next article about "How to create thought leadership article". If you like the article, please like, comment and share below.