CMOs have a unique opportunity to make a difference on social media. And LinkedIn is leading the way. It starts with building your personal brand and continues all the way through more conversions, greater customer retention,and proving ROI.

This guide takes a focused, practical look at how you can be the most effective on LinkedIn and beyond. You will learn how to create an irresistible presence on the platform and how to use LinkedIn to address the top trends in B2B and B2C marketing right now.

Read on to learn how to position yourself, your team, and your brand for success.

LinkedIn can be a valuable resource for those in senior management. Executives use LinkedIn to connect with peers, establish thought leadership,and grow their business.

Research shows that 82% of consumers are more likely to trust a company whose CEO and leadership team engage on social media. Seventy-seven percent are more likely to buy from such a company.

CMOs are leading by example on social media: the nearly 3 million CMOs on LinkedIn share more content, follow more companies, and participate in more discussion than the average member.

If you’re ready to build your reputation and advocate for your brand, it’s time to get active on LinkedIn.

Your Audience is Always On, and Visits LinkedIn on the Move*

LinkedIn Members are Becoming More Global by the Second

More than two members join per second

Two out of three new members are from outside the US

On average, over 100M unique visitors a month

CMOs are Active Contributors to LinkedIn’s Content Economy

CMO Engagement Metrics Compared to the Average Active Member

208%
more shares

132%
more companies followed

64%
more mobile views

50%
more check InMail

Profile Picture

Pick a friendly, professional-looking picture that’s consistent with your personal brand. No casual shots, animals, or other people in the photo, please.

Custom URL

Pick the shortest, simplest available URL based on your name. Headline: Change your default job title headline to demonstrate your areas of expertise.

Summary

Share your vision and management philosophy in this personal note. Don’t be afraid to express strong opinions about the work you do and why it matters.

Experience

Prune it down to just a few relevant past roles, and explain how each contributed to the CMO you are today.

Multimedia

Add video, images, and SlideShare presentations that highlight your team’s strongest content.

If one word sums up marketing this year, it’s “more.” We have more data to parse, more channels to cover, more opportunities to embrace, more responsibilities to shoulder. The only things we don’t have more of are time and resources.

To cut through the clamour of “more, more, more,”we need to come down from the clouds and get down to practical, street-level actions you can take for immediate impact.

The following five trends are well worth an investment of your budget and attention right now, starting today

Marketers have access to more data now than ever before. We can track consumers across the internet and back. And the CEO is increasingly demanding we do just that.

We need to demonstrate ROI and prove marketing’s value in concrete ways. Marketers are beginning to be more sophisticated with measurement, but we have a ways to go—right now, only 57% say they can prove their marketing leads to sales.

What to Do:
When setting goals, work backwards from ROI to make sure you will be able to prove results. Focus on the metrics that are relevant to your goals and tie directly to ROI.

How LinkedIn Can Help:
LinkedIn Conversion Tracking can help give you the full picture of your LinkedIn marketing efforts on and off the platform. Create conversions in Conversion Tracking for each campaign.

Account based marketing (ABM) has always been an effective tactic for companies with enough people and resources to do it properly. Now technology is bringing ABM to the rest of us. Rather than focusing a ton of effort on just a few accounts, you can bring a degree of personalisation to many accounts at once. ABM gets results: 84% of companies engaged in ABM say it brings in a higher ROI than other types of marketing.

What to Do:
The first step towards an ABM strategy is identifying key accounts. Start working with your sales department to find likely candidates, and begin planning how you might personalise content.

How LinkedIn Can Help:
LinkedIn Account Targeting can assist in both finding key accounts and delivering personalised outreach.

Consumers today are surrounded by so much content they’re becoming numb to it. Influencer marketing is an easy and effective way to give your content added value for your audience, and an amplification boost to make sure it gets seen. Influencer marketing is the fastest-growing online method of acquiring customers, outpacing organic search, email, and paid search.

What to Do:
Start identifying influencers in your industry. It’s not about the absolute biggest social following—you don’t need Ed Sheeran or Taylor Swift. Look for people who are the most influential with your target audience.

How LinkedIn Can Help:
You can start building relationships with influencers on LinkedIn. Use InMail to make a connection and add them to your network. Then share their content, help promote them, and look for opportunities to work together.

Consumers are growing more sophisticated in their approach to advertising, more likely to tune out intrusive or irrelevant messaging. Native advertising makes it easier to reach consumers on social media by adding value to their content feed, rather than interrupting it. Research shows that consumers interact with native ads 20-60% more than traditional advertising.

What to Do:
If your budget doesn’t already include native ads, it’s time to make them part of your strategy. Use native ads to add followers to your social networks and drive traffic to landing pages.

How LinkedIn Can Help:
LinkedIn Sponsored Content delivers business messages in the right format and venue for your audience. Use Sponsored Content to target the broadest relevant audience for your top-performing organic content.

Video content is an ever-growing percentage of all content consumed online. Cisco estimates by 2020, 82% of all data transferred online will be video. And it’s not all Netflix and YouTube: 75% of business executives watch work-related videos weekly.

What to Do:
Explore how your brand can use video to tell stories. You don’t need an in-house production studio. Think simple how-to videos, motion graphics, behind-the-scenes video, and live feeds.

How LinkedIn Can Help:
LinkedIn supports video embedding right in your Company Page updates. You can specifically target each post to the most relevant audience.

It’s an exciting time to be a CMO.

Marketers today have a direct line to our customer
we can see what they’re thinking about and what
they need, and we can respond in real time. You can
start a dialogue, be the public face of your brand, and build your personal reputation on social media.

With LinkedIn, you have more tools at the ready to
make sure your quality content reaches the right
audience at the right time.

You can measure your efforts with a high level
of sophistication.

You can personalise with automated account
based marketing.

You can expand your reach with influence
marketing and native advertising.

You can earn more attention with
multimedia content.

If you’re ready to take action, LinkedIn can help

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