Influencer marketing has become an extremely popular and effective marketing strategy in recent years. More and more brands are leveraging the power of influencers on social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter to promote their products and services. However, one platform that is often overlooked for influencer marketing is LinkedIn.
With over 740 million users worldwide, LinkedIn is the largest professional social media platform. It’s user base consists primarily of working professionals across all industries and career levels. This makes LinkedIn an extremely attractive platform for B2B brands looking to partner with influencers who can help promote their business products and services to other professionals.
Compared to other social platforms, LinkedIn offers some unique benefits for influencer marketing that brands should strongly consider.
Highly Targeted Audience
One of the biggest advantages of LinkedIn for influencer marketing is the ability to reach a highly targeted professional audience. While platforms like Instagram and Facebook offer broad consumer audiences, LinkedIn provides direct access to specific segments of working professionals.
Brands can identify and partner with LinkedIn influencers within their industry or niche to ensure their content and messaging reaches the right target demographics. This leads to higher engagement rates and increased conversions from influencer content since it caters directly to the intended audience.
For example, a B2B SaaS company could partner with LinkedIn influencers who are CTOs, CIOs, or directors at technology companies. The influencers share content related to business software solutions which precisely matches the interests of the brand’s target buyers.
Thought Leadership Positioning
LinkedIn is inherently designed as a professional platform for establishing thought leadership and authority within an industry. Users follow influencers on LinkedIn mainly for high-quality professional content, insights, and career advice.
This lends itself perfectly for thought leadership based influencer marketing. Brands have the opportunity to leverage influencers as subject matter experts to educate and guide their professional audience. By publishing useful content that provides real value, influencers can organically build awareness and credibility for themselves and the brand.
For professional services like management consulting or financial services, thought leadership is exceptionally important. Partnering with respected industry experts as influencers allows brands in these sectors to produce engaging content that cements their status as go-to trusted advisors.
Increased Trust & Credibility
In any form of marketing, establishing trust with your audience is critical for success. Influencer marketing on LinkedIn inherently provides a higher degree of trust and credibility as compared to other social platforms.
Firstly, the transparent and professional user profiles provide important context about an influencer’s true credentials, expertise and experience. Followers can clearly understand if the influencer truly knows the industry they are discussing.
Secondly, the content shared by influencers on LinkedIn is more educational, thought-provoking, and relevant for professionals. Followers engage with influencers primarily for industry insights, not entertainment or humor.
Lastly, the community oriented culture of sharing knowledge and helping others succeed lends itself to building rapport between influencers and followers. Recommendations from trusted experts go a long way on LinkedIn.
Lead Generation Opportunities
A major goal of any influencer marketing initiative is to drive traffic and leads for the brand. LinkedIn provides excellent opportunities for lead generation through company page followers and contact details in user profiles.
By partnering with LinkedIn influencers, brands can reach thousands of new potential customers and expand their company follower base. Followers of the influencer who engage with sponsored content may organically follow the brand’s company page to stay up to date.
Additionally, the user profiles on LinkedIn contain lead generation gold – professional contact details. Influencers can include CTAs within their posts prompting followers to get in touch with the brand’s sales team via the provided contact information.
Measurable Performance & Data
The amount of data and analytics available on LinkedIn makes it much easier to track and measure influencer marketing performance. Brands can leverage the platform’s data to identify the right influencers, optimize campaigns, and quantify results.
Specific metrics like share of voice, content engagement, click through rates, and website traffic from LinkedIn provide clarity on how well influencer content is performing. Brands can even track leads and sales opportunities generated by influencers back to the original sponsored content.
The measurable data takes the guesswork out of influencer marketing. Brands can definitively assess which influencers, types of content, and topics resonate most with their LinkedIn audience.
Top LinkedIn Influencer Marketing Metrics
| Metric | Definition |
| Impressions | The number of times influencer content is displayed to users |
| Reach | The total number of unique LinkedIn users who see the influencer content |
| Engagement Rate | The percentage of impressions that result in likes, comments, shares, or clicks |
| Clicks | The number of times users click on the influencer content |
| Link Clicks | Clicks specifically on hyperlinks within the influencer content |
| Shares | The number of times users share the influencer content with their own networks |
| Cost Per Lead | The cost to acquire a lead driven by the influencer campaign |
| Sales Revenue | Actual sales generated that can be attributed to the influencer campaign |
Tips for Success with LinkedIn Influencer Marketing
Here are some best practices brands should keep in mind when running influencer marketing campaigns on LinkedIn:
Target Micro-Influencers
Instead of celeb-style mega influencers, brands seeing success on LinkedIn leverage micro and niche influencers in their field. Look for contributors, subject experts and thought leaders with mid-size engaged followings.
Prioritize Quality over Reach
Don’t get distracted by vanity metrics like follower counts. The relevance and authority of the influencer matters much more. Ensure content aligns closely with their expertise.
Promote Valuable, Educational Content
Avoid overly promotional content. Focus on educational, insightful content that solves problems for professionals. Teach don’t sell.
Make the Brand Connection Clear
Transparency is important on LinkedIn. The influencer partnership should be clearly communicated without being overly self-promotional.
Don’t Neglect LinkedIn Groups
Interacting within relevant LinkedIn Groups is a great way for influencers to expand their reach and credibility. Groups allow targeting specific niches.
Compensate Fairly Based on Value
Don’t expect influencer partnerships for free. Offer competitive compensation tied to performance and value generated from campaigns.
Examples of Successful LinkedIn Influencer Marketing Campaigns
Here are some real world examples of brands running effective influencer marketing campaigns on LinkedIn:
Drift – Top Sales Leaders as Brand Advocates
Drift partnered with over 40 B2B sales leaders, authors and speakers to educate audiences on conversational marketing and revenue acceleration. The thought leaders shared their expertise through long-form blog articles and LinkedIn posts leading to high engagement and monthly site traffic increases over 300%.
Mon Sterling – Employee Advocacy
Digital agency Mono used their own employees as influencers by empowering them to share content across personal LinkedIn profiles. Employees sharing curated content resulted in a 25% increase in organic traffic and over 5,000 LinkedIn followers in just a few months.
Hive – Micro-Influencer Campaign
Hive, a social media management platform, worked with over 30 micro-influencers in the social media space to raise brand awareness and highlight their unique product features. The widespread influencer seeding helped increase website traffic by 52% month-over-month.
Conclusion
LinkedIn offers a uniquely targeted professional audience and lends itself well to thought leadership content. However, success requires an intelligent strategy based on leveraging micro-influencers, sharing educational content, and building transparent partnerships. With the right approach, brands can drive strong results from influencer marketing campaigns on LinkedIn and connect with highly relevant professionals.
