Newest Update From LinkedIn — Thought Leader Ads
I have been hearing about “Thought leader ads” for a while, and I’ve been curious ever since to learn and dig into how it exactly works. And not to mention that it’s also one of the more exciting social media updates in a while.
A couple of weeks back, LinkedIn’s rolled out with its brand new thought leader ads that allows companies or brands to sponsor the posts of their employees, boosting their reach amongst a desired target audience. It’s super straight forward, but it’s also the very first ad offering to inspire me to debase myself. This could also be because I have been waiting so long to get my hands on this update.
But now that it’s rolling out to all companies, it’s going to be the next best thing for tech B2B markers and content-savvy marketers. (Example below).
No one wants to hear from your brand … but they do want to hear from the people who work for it
One of the biggest lessons I have learnt , out of trying many ad types, formats is that no one wants to hear from your brand account. Because the stereotype is, as soon as a brand tries to oversell themselves by writing so much about “why they are the number one soap brand in the market” for example — its a huge thumbs down on authenticity.
This is common around most corporate brands — the ones trying to sell their products or services 24/7— but over the last few years, it’s become true of media brands too. Publishers have been hit hard by their best writers and creators leaving to start Substack newsletters and earning significantly more money. The only media business models that seem to work anymore are built off singular creators with strong personal brands or people who are genuinely proud of what they do for their company that they become ambassadors without realizing (but this obviously takes a lot of time and trust).
People want to hear from people
— Whether they’re an influencer or a famous business personality — and our social media overlords know this. Posts from brand accounts get suffocated by the algorithm, reaching only a fraction of their followers, unless the post is of great interest for the brands’ die-hard advocates
Is this because social networks want to force brands to promote their posts? That’s a given! But it’s also because they know that people scroll right by when they see a post from a brand.
But people DO want to hear from people who work for your company. It’s a direct testimony of well your project kick-off was, or how you landed your dream customer after a successful sales pitch at a conference.
That new case study? people are much more likely to big-up the story if it comes from your hard-working product manager. That new product launch? People will be more likely to like and comment and share it if it’s told by your CEO, or the team behind the launch. Storytelling makes a huge difference when it comes from the right person.
For instance, check out this great product launch video from Vimeo CEO Anjali Sud, which has over 36,000 likes and over 1,000 shares.
In the beta, companies saw a 70% higher CTR and 60% higher engagement rate with thought leader ads vs. single image ads from their corporate accounts.
This comes as no surprise: humans are wired to seek out stories from peers in our circle, and it’s always better to hear about your brand story from someone else — it comes off way more credible and authentic. For millennia, it was how we passed down knowledge, learned lessons, and survived. And for Gen-Z audiences, this is huge! (they were anyway never interested in hearing directly from brands as to why the brand was good, hence the whole influencer culture and creator economy took off)
No where to go but up for B2B marketers
A lot of marketers will hesitate to try out this ad format. They are likely to be worried about promoting an individual’s account over their brand account.
If there’s one thing that I’ve learned over the years, it’s that the most effective B2B content strategies develop thought leaders who syncs with your brand and develop credibility with your target audience. The key is identifying folks who live and breathe your mission and have valuable insights your audience really wants to hear. As Elon has turned Twitter into a toxic conspiracy theory wasteland, those business audiences are increasingly spending their time on LinkedIn.
Thought leader ads are poised to make that strategy much more effective. Right now, thought leader posts are available on LinkedIn campaign manager and should be widely available starting in July.
- As of now, Thought Leader Ads are limited to only the Single Image Ad Format. So if your employees’ post contains a video, a carousel, or a document, for example, they will not qualify for boosting.
- Thought Leader Ads are also limited to only the Engagement and Brand Awareness campaign objectives.
If anyone’s interested to try it out, here’s a help guide on how to get started.
And if you find that article useless, you can try this article out, it has way more visually-helpful assets to help you understand how exactly you can create the ad type.
Bonus: Create high-value content that converts
Founded by the team behind In Plain English, Circuit is a strategic growth company for developer-focused software startups. We help companies produce a higher ROI on their content marketing efforts.
If you want to build a better content strategy, scale content operations, increase product awareness and adoption, and grow a community, we help brands make this happen.
