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Businesses today are investing in their video strategy as a way to shape their brand identity and reputation. In line with this trend, LinkedIn is doubling down on its roll out of video capabilities to meet the growing demand for video creation and viewership. Since introduced to the platform in 2017, video has quickly surpassed text and image as the preferred content format for LinkedIn. The latest updates on the platform, which include livestreaming, creating ‘profile videos’ and ‘auto-captions’, all point to LinkedIn’s objective of improving video capabilities and expanding their B2B platform as a place for creative content and ‘creators’ to flourish.
Across the board, businesses are ramping up their video marketing strategies and taking full advantage of LinkedIn’s video capabilities to achieve this. The data backs up this trend, as LinkedIn reports continue to demonstrate that brands have the highest chances of increasing their account performance by leveraging video.
Video is a huge part of the LinkedIn content experience today and far more likely to seamlessly convey your brand message and values. Here are the benefits of including videos in your LinkedIn Strategy!
Video content has now transitioned from a ‘strong marketing trend’ to a ‘marketing standard’ that your existing clients, your prospects, and your network expect. Here are the top 6 benefits of leveraging video on LinkedIn:
- Increased Engagement: More and more brands are investing in video because it leads to more social engagement than photos and text. According to LinkedIn, users are 20x more likely to re-share a video post than a written one. So by posting videos on LinkedIn, you can expect more comments, likes, and shares.
- Expanding Your Network: As you increase engagement and start to attract more attention to your posts, you’ll get new connections and ultimately more followers on your company profile. Videos allow followers and connections to engage with your content differently, for example you can mark your videos with relevant hashtags which will push your video content to more people’s feeds and make them more likely to come up in searches.
- The LinkedIn algorithm loves video: LinkedIn’s algorithm is trying to curate content that is most relevant to your feed and as videos are a dynamic and interactive medium, LinkedIn ranks them highly. So, videos are more likely to appear at the top of your followers’ feeds, which gives your business a much greater chance of getting noticed and staying top of mind.
- Diversifying your content: It’s important to be consistent with your brand across your LinkedIn profile, but not to the point where consistency becomes monotony. Videos and live streaming are an excellent way to break the pattern of text or image-only posts and make your profile more dynamic, colourful, and interactive.
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5. Nurturing Your Buyer Persona: Videos offer a very compelling and personalised way of telling your brand story and seamlessly conveying your values. A key part of nurturing your buyer persona lies in the storytelling of your brand and ensuring your brand’s personality stands out against the competition – all of which is more easily achieved through video. In this way, video plays a powerful role in nurturing your prospect at key points in their buyer’s journey. According to HubSpot: 80% of people are more likely to buy a product after having watched a video!videos involve creative visuals, music or sound elements, movement, characters etc. all of which are opportunities to showcase your brand personality and flare.
As the examples evidence, if you are seeking to boost engagement, brand awareness and grow your LinkedIn network, creating compelling quality videos is the way to go. LinkedIn however is a unique platform that determines it's parameters for videos differently to Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. Your strategy therefore needs to be adapted to the B2B platform to ensure that you are leveraging the correct video functions to connect to your leads and prospects. Remember that as a business, speaking to other business professionals, your 'LinkedIn voice' should be driven by 'honesty and professionalism'!
Here are 5 key ways to leverage LinkedIn’s video capabilities and when to do so!
- Embedded videos are videos posted initially on other networks and then shared on LinkedIn. The advantage of embedded videos is that you’re reusing the same piece of content across multiple channels, therefore expanding your viewership and saving time. An example of this is creating a YouTube video post, your viewer will be able to see the video along with text, hashtags and call to actions. The only downside is that this content will be branded with the YouTube logo and colours.
- A native video is a video uploaded straight to LinkedIn. These videos are maximum 10 min in length and then auto-play in users’ feeds. Native videos can help draw attention to your content and increase engagement more than ‘embedded videos’, because they typically get more likes and shares, which might be linked to the algorithm favouring them. LinkedIn gives you video analytics insights such as the top companies, titles, and locations of your viewers, along with how many views, likes, and comments your videos get. For native videos you can either upload a pre-recorded video or record one within the app if you’re using a mobile device. You’ll have the option to add text, stickers, or filters to your video before posting.
- LinkedIn video ads allow you to target a specific audience and can thus be a helpful tool for brand promotion. LinkedIn Video ads are one form of Sponsored Content on LinkedIn. LinkedIn allows you to create a dedicated campaign where you can include up to 5 distinct video ads, this gives your campaign more exposure and increased opportunity to optimize for highest performance. Make sure to be descriptive about the video in the ad headline and text. This will help your audience understand your message. Also be sure to include a clear CTA, so your audience knows how to act on their interest.
Livestreaming! LinkedIn reports that livestreams generate 7x more reactions and 24x more comments on LinkedIn than regular videos. You can now host live events or 'record a live' (unedited) video on the platform, for example to announce a product launch or have a Q&A with industry experts etc. Before you go live you will need to prepare in advance as LinkedIn requires verification which means you need to submit an application and demonstrate that your brand is legitimate and has a certain number of followers etc. All LinkedIn events are 100% public and automatically saved, so you can easily share the recording post-event for maximum distribution. - Sending videos in your LinkedIn messages humanizes your sales and marketing efforts and therefore leads to a higher engagement rate. The first way to do it is by posting a URL that features your video, this means that the URL will appear like a post in your message feed. Your prospect can click this video to watch it on a custom landing page, which will allow you to add a call-to-action and track metrics. Alternatively, if you are using the mobile app, you can record and upload a video directly within the message! This is a highly personal way to make an impression and acts as a conversation hook with your lead.
Including videos in your LinkedIn strategy is an excellent way to grow your brand presence, expand your network, and diversify the content you share. At IBT Online we specialize in growing your exports, sales, brand, and business internationally and will help you design and launch your bespoke video marketing strategy to reach your target markets around the world. Don’t hesitate to get in touch!