3 LinkedIn Tools to Help Your Community Stay Connected to Your Brand

With in-person conferences canceled, face-to-face meetings a rarity, and travel limited, it’s challenging for brands to stay connected to their community. Right now remaining connected to your brand’s community may be more important than ever.

For a brand to remain connected to its community requires continued messaging — whether paid or organic or a mixture of both. In times of economic uncertainty, the conventional wisdom holds that brands should scale back marketing expenditure. Certainly, companies that are struggling to survive should pull back on advertising. But extensive research shows that companies who are in a position to invest in advertising can reap benefits. 

Peter Field, a fellow at LinkedIn’s B2B Institute, puts it this way: 

“Brand advertising is not about profiting in recession, it’s about capitalizing on recovery.” 

Jon Lombardo, global lead for The B2B Institute, shares a case study that underscores Field’s point. During the Great Depression, Post Cereal cut back on advertising while its main rival, Kellogg’s, doubled its advertising. When the economy recovered, the result left Post trailing Kellogg’s in market share. 

Keeping your marketing running today requires more than a commitment to advertising despite a difficult economic climate. The era of social distancing means you need new tools and techniques to succeed. 

Here are three LinkedIn tools to help your community stay connected to your brand.

We’ve developed “Thriving Through Change,”  a practitioner’s playbook to help you succeed in a marketing landscape where events are virtual and face-to-face meetings are rare or non-existent, which you can download here.

Content Suggestions

Marketing, especially online marketing, is a conversation. Effective marketers know how to spark and sustain dialogues with their communities across a range of topics. On your brand’s LinkedIn Page, the Content Suggestions feature enables marketers to see what content is striking a chord with their audience. 

Real-time insights from Content Suggestions help you better understand what content you should reshare via your LinkedIn Page and how you can join ongoing conversations in thoughtful and relevant ways. The Content Suggestions tab also allows you to filter content by audience size, industry, location, job function, and seniority to ensure you are engaging your target audience effectively.  

LinkedIn Events 

It’s difficult to predict when in-person events will be restored to the marketing professional’s toolkit, but LinkedIn Events offers you an elegant way to bring your community together online. LinkedIn Events makes it possible to build and nurture your relationships in a trusted online venue — safely and in real-time. With LinkedIn Events, marketers have a versatile, interactive format that can help launch products, showcase your employees or customers, and demonstrate your thought leadership. 

LinkedIn Events enable you to:

• Host your event safely, in a trusted environment: Using LinkedIn Live, you can choose to live stream to your Page followers or Event attendees, so you can meet audiences where they are. 
• Attract the right professional audiences: We make it easy for you to share your event to your Page followers and send direct invitations to your first-degree profile connections.
• Drive buzz and engagement for your event: You can promote your event or live broadcast by posting an update to your Page or Event feed and by recommending key posts for attendees to check out.
• Get more mileage out of your events: Once your virtual event is over, you can keep the conversation going with the Video tab — a dedicated hub for a Page’s organic video content that can be accessed by all members of your community. 

“What I really like about LinkedIn Events is the fact that I can plan an event with my network and not be required to go to another platform to organise the event.” -Michael Quinn, senior manager at EY in Washington

LinkedIn Live

Live video has been proven to be a powerful medium for marketing and communications professionals well before in-person gatherings became impossible. LinkedIn Live gives you a way to broadcast live video, promote thought leaders, and foster conversation with your community. The numbers are impressive: LinkedIn Live videos get 6x more engagement and 23x more comments than native videos produced by the same broadcasters. 

As marketers and communications professionals, we are always going to be challenged to do more with less, to be creative in trying circumstances, and to meet challenges with resolve even when we aren’t sure of the outcome. Some challenges will be larger than others, but there is no such thing as “ideal marketing conditions.” We understand that it’s your job to solve problems and overcome hurdles and are here to help you along the way. #inittogether 

The Practitioner’s Playbook is part of a series designed to help you drive value and get results in good times and bad. The first installment is “Trust in a Time of Uncertainty.”