Video Marketing on LinkedIn: 2021 B2B BenchMark

"You start doing video marketing on LinkedIn - and you are going to easily hit your leads and demand generation targets, and you are going to see engagement on LinkedIn skyrocket!" (anonymous CEO)

Unfortunately, the above quote IS IN NO WAY CORRECT. An interesting aspirational view, but an flawed one at that. Although not agreeing to this statement on demand generation, as far as marketing strategies go, B2B video can be an effective brand awareness augmentor. In fact, it might drive greater social media platform engagement, as well (although 'skyrocket' is not the right term for it).

Not having encountered good tactical research or hard stats on this matter, this article sets out to uncover and share some recent findings. Does video marketing on LinkedIn drive greater engagement? If it drives greater engagement on a company's LinkedIn page, then that target audience might also engage with company pages as on their website. Were this true, then video LinkedIn marketing (organic), might be a good demand generation driver. Naturally, this depends on the subsequent actions of the target audience on the website.

First Hand Research

This research reviewed 36 companies across 11 industry sectors. These were all B2B oriented firms. All had LinkedIn profile pages (company pages), and each had one of three types of videos. They either had an animated looping video, a video ad, or a recorded live video (be it a webinar recording, panel discussion, or LinkedIn live recording).

Industry sectors included: [thanks to the companies below]

• Construction [Aecom, Clayco, Armacell]
• Consulting [Accenture, Cap Gemini, EY Parthenon]
• Energy [Acciona, Chevron, Eversource]
• GreenTech B2B [ERM, Golder, First Solar]
• High Technology [HPE, Envista, Dell, Wistia, ContractPodAi]
• Investment Capital [Insight Partners, Aves Lair, Sequoia Capital]
• Legal Services (Corporate) [McCarthy Tetrault, Fasken, Latham Watkins]
• Logistics [Core & Main, Graybar, Mainfreight]
• Medical Equipment [Philips, Align Tech, Astellas Pharma US]
• Manufacturing [GE, Linamar, Pentair, Alfa Laval]
• Payroll | HR [ADP, Ceridian, Workday]

Each sector includes metrics from at least three companies. All data came from the publicly available information on LinkedIn, from April 28 - May 1, 2021.

This benchmark includes a total of 742 data measures. Although, I did not run full statistical analytics on this research set (for goodness of fit, confidence intervals, etc), this information is indicative empirical observations to guide B2B marketers. Note too, this research does not differentiate between product or service offerings, by sector. In itself, that would be an interesting comparison.

One final proviso; this research reviews the organic components ONLY. In other words it is SMO (social media organic). The benchmark does NOT review video advertising (paid), what makes a successful video, impactful calls to action, or other such factors.

Video Approach

This benchmark reviewed the most recent 50 posts of each of the 36 companies. It provides the first pie chart below, with an overall breakdown of the posts by volume. Of the most recent 50 posts, what fraction of those were video posts versus static posts?

Of all the posts reviewed, 32.1% of company posts are video posts. As a rule of thumb, for common practices, your LinkedIn video marketing should be about 32% of your posts - if you want to fit within B2B industry norms. Broaden this to estimate that 20% - 35% of your posts should be videos to be within industry norms.

Now, comparing the overall engagement (number of likes, comments, and shares) of video posts compared against static posts offer the following observations shown in the next pie chart above. Although only 32% of posts are B2B videos, they garner 55% of LinkedIn user engagements. It would be an interesting, yet VERY manually intensive exercise to measure how many of these engagements are from each company's own employees.

What this immediately tells us is that video posts tend to drive more engagement. In effect across the industry sectors in this research 32% of the posts (videos) drove 55% of the engagements. This answers one question as video does increase engagement. Without knowing what portion of that engagement comes from the target audience means that it is still unclear whether video drives engagement with the right people for marketers interests. However, it is interesting from an indicative perspective. Videos on LinkedIn do appear to have a positive impact on user engagement.

Post more Videos?

To answer this next question, does a correlation exist between the fraction of videos posted by the various companies, compared to the fraction of engagements the video posts garnered. In this regard, consider the next graph below showing volume of video posts vs engagement of video posts.

When comparing all the video LinkedIn (LI) posts, compared to the engagement share of video posts, there is a negative correlation. The line shows a best-fit linear trend. Our trend shows that the higher fraction of LinkedIn Video posts that a sector provided; the lower fraction of video engagements, compared against all engagements by users.

A more refined look is the review at the company level, rather than at the sector level. Graphing this comparison provides a similar conclusion. When companies increase the volume of video posts as a fraction of their overall LinkedIn posts, there is a diminishing return on engagement. Given that videos are an expensive asset to create, a company may be best off limiting it's video posts to 10% - 35% of it's overall LinkedIn Posts.

More Followers More Video Engagement?

When looking through the data, there is a positive correlation between the fraction of posts focused on videos, and the followership. Very large followerships are often also loosely indicative of larger corporations. From a sector view, the graph below shows a positive correlation between the number of followers for a sector (cluster of sector specific companies), and the number of videos those companies post. As followership grows, companies tend to post a greater proportion of their content as videos.

Not surprisingly, the graph below shows this same trend with more detail, at the company level.

What we are seeing above could be the result of larger companies having more resources, thereby investing more heavily in video assets. These then being readily available for the social media teams to share on social posts. For the smaller and startup companies, it can be an interesting tactic to include more videos on your own LI company page. This might convey the notion that the company is larger than it is in actuality. In many cases, company size can be a credibility enhancer, giving prospects a sense of security that the organization will not disappear overnight.

Below is a chart with the Sector statistics, for your reference.

Video Marketing on LinkedIn: Do It or Drop It?

As pointed out in the discussions above, take this benchmark data as directionally indicative. There is plenty of room for further research. There are other factors at play, like the number of employees who may or may not be engaging with the content. A deeper study would be very interesting to control for the employee effect.

For a related grass-roots benchmark on LinkedIn company post - practices read: B2B Best Practices in LinkedIn Content Posting: What 400 Posts Revealed.

Don't forget that there is more to organic video marketing on LinkedIn, than only demand generation. Recall that an important secondary component of B2B marketing is driving brand awareness, providing a sense of trust and credibility, and engaging with potential new employee candidates. In that regard, videos draw in viewers. It is also important to diversify the content shared on a company's LinkedIn company page. Diversifying your content across product and brand ads, content ads, webinar notices, video content (ads, discussions, panels, webinars, etc), infographics, blog posts snippets, and so on; is important to showcase who you are, and what your company does. This research showed that purely increasing the number of video posts may not help drive ever increasing engagement. In that regard, diversify and experiment.

Coming back to the originating CEO's comments. The opening quote was utter nonesense - DO NOT TRUST IT! Video content on the organic LinkedIn side will help you on branding, employee engagement, and investor relations aspects. This moreso than helping drive demand generation. Regardless, it is important for establishing a professional presence. But use it wisely, focused on high quality, and as part of your social media marketing mix.