by Want to generate more leads with LinkedIn? Wondering how LinkedIn video can help?
In this article, you'll learn how to create LinkedIn videos that improve your customer acquisition efforts.
Why Businesses Should Consider LinkedIn for Customer Acquisition
Customer acquisition is no longer what it used to be. According to HubSpot's research, 81% of consumers trust the advice of family and friends over that from businesses. People are becoming less responsive to traditional advertising and marketing, making it even more challenging for businesses to gain new customers.
That's where having a robust social media presence on a platform like LinkedIn is advantageous. LinkedIn boasts more than 610 million users with 90 million senior-level influencers and 63 million members who are decision-makers in their organizations. It's a platform where B2Bs can reach their target audience, generate leads, and ultimately acquire customers.
With a visitor-to-lead conversion rate of 2.74%, LinkedIn beats all other social media platforms including Facebook and Twitter. In fact, LinkedIn is 277% more effective in lead generation than both platforms. Investing in appropriately targeted marketing throughout the buyer's journey can improve acquisition on LinkedIn.
While images and text have their own merits, recent trends demonstrate that videos rule the roost on social media. On LinkedIn, videos are shared more often than any other type of content. And on average, people spend 3x times longer watching LinkedIn video ads than static ads.
So if you're not using LinkedIn video for your marketing, you're missing out on a big opportunity to drive lead generation. Here's how to get started creating LinkedIn video to improve your customer acquisition efforts.
#1: Outline Your LinkedIn Customer Acquisition Strategy
To find and attract customers on LinkedIn, you need to reach out to them to let them know you exist and have a solution to their problem. To do this, it's important to carefully formulate a plan that's aligned with your marketing goals.
Focus on these factors to outline a plan for your LinkedIn video marketing:
Understand Your Company Goals: Understanding your company's long- and short-term goals is essential for defining the objectives of any campaign. Then, depending on the goal you want to achieve (such as building brand awareness, generating qualified leads, or maximizing conversions), select the part of the marketing funnel you want to focus on.
Identify Relevant Campaign KPIs: After identifying your goal, plan a LinkedIn marketing campaign to achieve it. Select relevant metrics to measure the effectiveness of your campaign. These metrics can vary from the number of qualified leads generated to the amount of engagement generated by the campaign.
Define Your Target Audience: Identify your target audience and design a campaign that will appeal to them. When defining your audience, consider product dynamics and ideal prospects. Plan video content that will resonate with this audience.
Set Realistic Campaign Targets: Think about how this campaign will fit within your overall marketing strategy. Setting an achievable, measurable goal will help you optimize spending and achieve a better ROI. Again, using the right metrics will help steer your campaign.
Plan Timelines and Expenditure: No plan is complete or successful unless it includes a proper timeline and budget. Set a budget and allocate the resources needed to implement the campaign in the given timeline and help it run successfully.
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#2: Choose a Video Type for Each Stage of Customer Acquisition
Once you've created your LinkedIn marketing plan, move to the next step which is developing LinkedIn video content for each stage of customer acquisition.
There are two types of videos you can upload directly to LinkedIn:
- LinkedIn native videos are created for and directly uploaded to LinkedIn. Native video will autoplay in the LinkedIn feed and grab more attention.
- LinkedIn video ads are sponsored videos that appear in the feed. These videos can be used for brand awareness, consideration, and lead generation.
The main difference between the two LinkedIn video types is that native videos can be up to 10 minutes long, while video ads can be up to 30 minutes. And although you can embed external videos in your LinkedIn posts, native videos perform better.
To create LinkedIn video for lead acquisition, remember that each stage of the customer journey is unique and requires specific content to keep people involved and moving through the funnel to the conversion stage. The videos you share on LinkedIn should be geared toward optimizing the consumer's experience at each stage of the journey and aligned with the main objective of your campaign.
Here are the types of videos that work best on LinkedIn for the awareness, consideration, and purchase stages of the marketing funnel:
LinkedIn Video for Building Awareness
Awareness is the initial stage of a consumer's contact with your company and its products. At this stage, the objective is to encourage people to seek more information about your business and drive traffic to your website.
One effective type of LinkedIn video for this stage is a short introductory video that tells customers about your company and promotes it. The objective is to create awareness about your company, as Nuveen does in this video.
Another option is to share short videos that focus on your products rather than your company as a whole. Here, Samsung promotes their flagship mobile device, the Galaxy Note10, through a minimalistic LinkedIn video.
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FIND YOUR NEXT FAVORITE TOOLEvent and motivational videos can also be effective at the awareness stage. To illustrate, you could share footage from live events hosted by your company. The goal is to create an upbeat, positive feeling about your company. The video should motivate the consumer and evoke an emotional response.
LinkedIn Video for Consideration
Consideration is often viewed as the most important part of the customer journey because what happens next depends largely on the lead's experience with your business at this stage.
The goal of these videos should be to enhance the customer experience. There are several types of LinkedIn video that work well for this purpose.
Company story videos that show the human side of your business can help the audience connect with you. These videos typically include employees and executives speaking about your company and their experiences working for it.
Another effective video type for lead acquisition is corporate social responsibility (CSR) videos, which generally deal with the social responsibility accomplishments of your company. They can create a good feeling about your business and show viewers how you're giving back to the community.
Explainer and product demo videos tell consumers about your products and discuss how they provide a solution to the problem they may have.
- In an explainer video, discuss a problem and explain the solution that your company can provide.
- For a product demo video, explain in detail how your product works and what problems it's designed to solve. This explainer video about Workflow Builder by Slack is an excellent example. It's simple and gets right to the point.
LinkedIn Video for Conversion
In this stage of the customer journey, you need to convince the customer that you offer the best solution to their problem. Give them a gentle reminder that your products are top-notch and your company is trustworthy. Testimonial videos work well for this purpose.
Testimonial videos are excellent for building confidence in your business. Share video testimony of existing customers talking about your products and how those products helped solve their problem. Consider asking the customer to comment on their experience with your company and staff.
Goldman Sachs uses the following employee testimonial in a LinkedIn video ad.
#3: Optimize Your LinkedIn Video Post
Like all other social media platforms, LinkedIn has its own video posting guidelines. To optimize your LinkedIn video content, follow these best practices.
Deliver Your Message as Briefly as Possible
The attention span of viewers is short, so long LinkedIn videos can be counterproductive. Try adding a hook in the first few seconds to grab their attention. The most successful LinkedIn ads are 15 seconds on average, while the informal cutoff for any LinkedIn video is 10 minutes.
Driving engagement should be your natural goal when creating LinkedIn videos. Ask questions and tell a story to encourage viewers to engage with your content and share it with their networks. Include an effective call to action in your video to drive engagement.
It's also helpful to add subtitles to your video for people who are watching with the sound muted, which is often the case in the office or other public places.
Follow LinkedIn Video Specifications
To optimize native LinkedIn video, follow these specs:
- File size: 5GB or less
- Aspect ratio: 1:2.4 or 2.4:1
- Length: from 3 seconds to 10 minutes
- Frame rate: 60 frames per second (FPS) or less
- File formats: .ASF, .AVI, .FLV, .MOV, .MP4, .MKV, and WebM
These are the specs for LinkedIn video ads:
- File size: 200MB or less
- Aspect ratio: Horizontal only, with resolutions from 2.4:1 to 1:1
- Length: up to 30 minutes
- Frame rate: 30 FPS is the maximum
- File formats: .MP4
Optimize Your LinkedIn Video Post
Optimizing your LinkedIn video post is essential. Add a description that will catch users' attention in the feed so they'll want to click on the video and watch it.
To reach a wider audience, add relevant LinkedIn hashtags to your video post but don't overdo it. To get an idea of content type in your niche, follow relevant LinkedIn hashtags. You can explore hashtags in the Discover More tab below the Followed Hashtags tab.
Conclusion
To reach a destination or achieve a goal, you need a plan. Without one, your best intentions will be wasted. Similarly, all of your LinkedIn marketing efforts will be ineffective if they're not carefully planned and faultlessly executed.
When creating a LinkedIn marketing strategy for customer acquisition, remember that people's needs are different at each stage of the funnel and your video content needs to be tailored to meet those requirements.
What do you think? How do you use video in your LinkedIn marketing? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
More articles on LinkedIn marketing:
- Find out how to use four LinkedIn marketing features to nurture leads.
- Discover four ways to publish LinkedIn video when you don't know what to talk about.
- Learn how to succeed with LinkedIn ads.
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