How Can Your Brand Measure Success On LinkedIn? — Part 3
The Advanced Guide
Part 2 of this article series took you through the basics of LinkedIn’s built-in analytics dashboard for measuring your Company Page’s performance on the site. In there, I took you through the various metrics available to you to help you decide which metrics you should focus on to report on your efforts in relation to your business goals.
In addition to this, I took you through the ins and outs of what we refer to as “vanity metrics”, which are the generic metrics most marketers use to report on their social media performance, which may not always enable them to report on and measure ROI. For a review of these topics, be sure to read my article, “How Can Your Brand Measure Success On LinkedIn? — Part 2 (The Intermediate Guide)”, so that you can gain a better understanding of the metrics you should focus your monitoring efforts on, and which you should glaze right over.
In the article below, I will take you through some of the mistakes brands have made over the years when it comes to measuring their performance on LinkedIn. Hopefully, this will help you gain some insight on what you should avoid doing in order to help you see more success for your efforts on the site.
“Happy employees develop happy customers.” — Aaron Ross ( Author of fromimpossible.com) @motoceo
What Should You Watch out For When Measuring Success On LinkedIn?
In this article, I will cover…
#1 General Mistakes That Brands Make On LinkedIn
#2 LinkedIn Analytics Mistakes
Let’s get going…
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#1 General Mistakes That Brands Make On LinkedIn
LinkedIn has become the world’s largest network of B2B and B2C professionals, and many marketing and sales teams are leveraging the opportunities that the platform can provide them in order to build their professional networks, generate business leads, increase brand exposure, and more.
LinkedIn is where 43% of marketers have sourced their customers, and where 80% of B2B leads have been generated. What’s more, about 50% of LinkedIn users are more likely to buy from businesses that they have interacted with on the site. Given the positive impact of LinkedIn on B2B and B2C marketing and branding campaigns, it’s important that you know how to properly leverage the platform by avoiding common mistakes. You wouldn’t want to spend unnecessary time and resources building a LinkedIn presence only to come up short because of a simple oversight, would you?
Some Of The Most Avoidable Mistakes Made On LinkedIn
1. Being Inactive
It’s counterproductive for your brand not to be active on LinkedIn. The digital era makes social media networks like LinkedIn an effective channel for connecting with partners and customers alike. However, you’re likely to miss out on these opportunities if you fail to establish your social presence on LinkedIn. Without regular updates, your community won’t know if you’re still around and you risk losing touch. You can help your company keep active on LinkedIn by regularly posting status updates, publishing relevant and high-quality content, or engaging your connections in meaningful conversations.
2. Sending Impersonal Requests
It might be tempting to send as many connection requests as possible to LinkedIn users to expand your network, but unless you take the time to personalize your message, you won’t get the results you want. You’d do better to explain to your prospects why they should accept your invite by focusing on what they can get from connecting with you. That being said, before inviting companies to join your network, make sure you know the nature of their business, what they do, who their customers are, and where your products or services fit into their business.
3. Spamming Users
Having LinkedIn users accept your connection request does not give you the license to send them random, irrelevant messages that aren’t worth their time or attention. It’s not advisable, for example, to hard sell to someone who barely knows you or what your company has to offer. Instead, you should direct your efforts toward getting to know them first — their interests, activities, goals, and challenges — to truly understand if you can help them. With the right strategy, LinkedIn can be a great B2B or B2C marketing tool for building relationships with your target market.
4. Ignoring Reviews And Comments
Modern-day consumers are taking advantage of social networks to rate businesses in terms of the quality of their products or services. And with people spending more time on social media, it’s easier than ever for anyone to see what LinkedIn users have to say about your company. Obviously, negative online reviews can affect your branding, marketing, and sales efforts. To help your business get more positive reviews, listen to your customers’ feedback and always address their questions, comments, or complaints. It’s not enough to be present on social media. Brands need to actively engage with their audiences and respond when engaged with.
5. Not Getting Your Employees Involved
Before you look outside for help to spread word about your company, approach your employees first. They can and should be your brand’s top endorsers, helping boost your engagement, visibility, and most importantly, building an air of trust and authority. On the other hand, not paying attention to this resource group may reflect poorly on your ability to maximize your internal assets. Statistics say there are about 50% of employees who are already sharing things on social media about their employers, including job posting, blog articles, and other useful content. You can use LinkedIn or other third-party tools to make it easy for your employees to promote your brand or your content to attract more traffic to your site, expand your market reach, or gain more leads and followers.
6. Not Having A Posting Strategy
LinkedIn remains the best B2B social media platform to this day, so it only makes sense that you must develop a marketing strategy specifically for LinkedIn users. When it comes to posting your content, for example, you need to be aware of the ideal time and frequency of posting. This is to help ensure your success in engaging your audience or attracting leads and potential sales through the content you’re sharing on the platform. LinkedIn users seem to be receptive toward consuming content at various times during the day, around early morning and early evening hours. Just make sure to track your metrics to gauge if you’re posting at the best time and frequency for your particular audience.
7. Over-Promoting Your Brand
You may be using LinkedIn to promote your product, service, or business, which is perfectly fine, but you should never overdo it. Instead of focusing on your brand, you should, first and foremost, think of your audience. Veer away from posting promotional updates or sales pitches because you can be sure they will not appeal to your audience (unless the “perfect” opportunity presents itself, which doesn’t happen often). When crafting or sharing content, always make it your goal to serve the needs and interests of your audience. This type of engagement is also an effective way to gain new followers in the LinkedIn community. Eventually, you’ll get people trusting you and talking about your brand more.
8. Not Optimizing Your Page
Failing to optimize your company page is inexcusable. This is where people go first to find out about your business, product, service, or even job opportunities. If users don’t immediately find the information they’re looking for, it’s almost guaranteed that they’ll leave your page and find the information they need somewhere else. Optimize your LinkedIn company page with a good use of target keywords, a mix of important marketing and investor information, and mobile optimization techniques. Like any other marketing touch point, your page should effectively showcase what your brand is, why you operate, and what sets you apart.
9. Not Leveraging Sponsored Content
Many brands run ads on LinkedIn, but not nearly as many have tried their luck on LinkedIn Sponsored Content. That’s understandable because it takes more effort and resources to produce a relevant, valuable piece of content, than short ad copy. However, investing in sponsored content definitely has its advantages. Sponsored content on LinkedIn is native, and you’ll get a ton of traffic from professionals and decision makers looking for educative information. If your brand can deliver on and satisfy that search for knowledge, you can capitalize on an opportunity to position your brand as an authority figure, building trust within the right circles.
See how brands like Duo Security increased qualified leads by 239% by viewing their success story here.
#2 LinkedIn Analytics Mistakes
There are several top marketing analytics mistakes that are common across different industries, and from my experience, if you want to be successful in using LinkedIn analytics, you should be careful to avoid them.
The Most Common Analytics Mistakes
1. Not Addressing The Biggest Problems When Analyzing LinkedIn Performance
Many times, the most relevant problems from a business-impact perspective are also the most complex and difficult to solve from an analytics point of view. That means analytics professionals might steer clear and head straight for the easy problems. “Easy problems” are, for example, situations with readily available data or questions about marketing activities that are simple to track. But who cares if you have fantastic results from an advertising campaign test, if that campaign can only potentially affect a tiny fraction of the company revenue?
If your analytics professionals fall into the trap of solving the easy problems rather than tackling the most relevant problems, you might have to get them back on track. When you are trying to decide where to focus your analytics efforts, look for the biggest potential revenue impact, margin impact or cost reduction opportunities. Then start your analytics there.
2. Not Viewing Results As A Whole
Many times in LinkedIn analytics, the lack of a holistic view becomes a problem. This is also called a problem of “missing variables” in econometric modeling. This problem is particularly common in digital marketing analytics, which tend to overlook influences from offline media that are harder to track, as well as the results achieved from online efforts. By merely focusing on the results achieved from your LinkedIn efforts, you could fail to see how your efforts on the platform fit into the “bigger picture”. Be sure you are looking at all aspects of the business, not just your marketing department.
3. Using The Wrong Data
This problem encompasses a broad range of mistakes like using the wrong data, using data that has noise, or using data that is irrelevant. Your analysis is only as good as the data you’re using to generate it. If you are using the wrong data, then all your analytics conclusions based on that data are going to be inaccurate. There is a lot to be said about the importance of the process of cleaning data before starting any analysis. This typically involves looking at the data to identify noise patterns, remove outliers, or complete any missing parts. For example, if you are using data from two different tracking systems, an old one you used last year and a new one you are using this year, you’ll need to normalize the information to be able to join both sources of data for analyses and comparisons.
4. Forgetting To Measure Against Statistical Significance
In order to gain accurate insights from your performance on LinkedIn, you need to measure your results against pre-defined statistical significance levels. Because, if you’re measuring your efforts based on results alone, you will never be able to accurately monitor and set your goals on LinkedIn — meaning that the data you gather will be nearly useless.
5. Accepting Data At Face Value
If you don’t understand the limitations of the LinkedIn analytics methodologies you are using, you will be tempted to take results at face value and act upon them, instead of accounting for those limitations. One way to approach these limitations is to cross validate results using several techniques. For example, you can use a controlled in-market test to confirm the results of an econometric model. A common problem to avoid is to use the same tool to try to solve all situations. For example, some companies or professionals specialize in certain techniques like applied neural networks, agent- based modeling, or multi-linear regression. In this case, every problem that they encounter they try to solve with that same tool. Each analytics methodology has pros and cons, and being aware of those will help you avoid plenty of mistakes.
6. Relying On Average Best Posting Times
There are so many reports and infographics that show you the best time to post on social media. Some of them follow a similar pattern, while others contradict each other. These studies are helpful in setting up an initial posting time when you first create your social media accounts, but after you gather sufficient data through posting regularly, you should find your unique best times. Every LinkedIn page has a unique set of followers who behave differently. Posting at the average recommended times won’t get you the best engagement or traffic. To get maximum results, you need to analyse your posting data, and find these times. Most social media management tools can find these times for you. But if your management tool doesn’t offer this you can always find another that does.
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Thank you for taking the time to read my article set “How Can Your Brand Measure Success On LinkedIn”. I hope these articles have enlightened you on why you should be actively monitoring your performance on the platform, and optimizing on them in order to see increased success. We’re constantly adding to our collection of resources for brands looking to achieve sales and marketing success, check out our publication, Inside Revenue, to see what we’ve released so far, and check back regularly for new content.
LinkedIn Resources
What Can I Do With LinkedIn? — Part 1 (The Beginner’s Guide)
What Can I Do With LinkedIn? — Part 2 (The Intermediate Guide)
What Can I Do With LinkedIn? — Part 3 (The Advanced Guide)
How Can Your Brand Measure Success On LinkedIn? — Part 1 (The Beginner’s Guide)
How Can Your Brand Measure Success On LinkedIn? — Part 2 (The Intermediate Guide)
How Can Your Brand Measure Success On LinkedIn? — Part 3 (The Advanced Guide)
