5 Most Critical Marketing Trends CMOs Need to Ace using LinkedIn of 2019
According to the survey results concluded from the BRANDfog 2012 CEO, Social Media and Leadership Survey CMOs and C-Suite team players’ engagements on social channels significantly increase the brand reputation, establish confidence in the leadership team of that brand, and eventually contribute in the increase purchase intent of customers.
About three million CMOs share copious amounts of content across various social media channels, follow brands and fellow influencers, and engage in discussions around their brand and its industry. Though all these engagement and promotional practices are proven effective strategies to build online reputation and establish brand advocacy, there are even more ways CMOs can get active and boost engagement on social channels. This guide has been created to provide insight into the critical marketing trends and practices every CMO need to follow.
Let’s begin unravelling best practices and tactics to make your brand and CMO stand apart in your industry!
- More sophisticated measurement
Companies and CMOs can now source more insights than ever before with plenty of data mining tools and third party vendors delivering customer and market data. Marketing departments not only have the ability to see top lead gen sources, but also the ability to see how consumers interact with their brand cross-channel. Since companies have become increasingly adamant on demonstrating revenue and calculating the value of marketing efforts, marketers need to practice more sophisticated and measurable engagement strategies in campaigns that they run. As per Content Marketing Institute that released the study findings “2017 B2B Benchmarks Content Marketing Institute 2017 B2B Benchmarks”, around 57% of marketers can prove qualified marketing leads to sales.
Best practices
While setting specific marketing goals, organizations need to step back from ROI estimations to ensure they are setting practical, data-backed and achievable goals in order to prove the effectiveness of marketing efforts. That’s why it is especially important that marketers select the right set of metrics that are the most relevant to their marketing goals as well as overall business goals and are aligned to ROI.
Specifically within social media, CMOs can make use of the LinkedIn Conversion Tracking tool to get the complete picture of their LinkedIn activities that make an impact both on and off the social media platform. Special focus should be given to which campaigns, posts, ads, and demographics are generating leads and ROI. Then, use those insights and analysis to optimize their efforts.
2. Engagement-driven native advertising
Customers are becoming more well-informed and sophisticated in their ways to respond to advertising. Nowadays, they are better capable of blocking out irrelevant and intrusive messages and communications. Native advertising will facilitate CMOs reaching customers on diverse social media channels with valuable content, statistics, news feed, and targeted solutions rather than interrupting them. MediaPost.com concluded that audiences interact with native ads as much as up to 20% to 60% more than traditional advertising efforts.
Best practices
If the marketing budget of your organization has not yet included native ads, then it is time to make the transition and include these activities as part of your marketing strategy. Native ads can be used to increase followers to social media pages and groups, and ultimately generate traffic to landing pages linked to those ads.
CMOs can use LinkedIn Sponsored Content to deliver relevant business messages and schedule those messages to deliver at the right time and venues in the right format for the audience. Sponsored Content can be used to target the widest possible range of audience by incorporating top-performing and solution-driven organic content.
CMOs can also use LinkedIn Elevate to increase social views and engagement of their feed by getting their employees to share and spread content.
3. Extending Influencer marketing
Today buyers are surrounded by massive collections of information and content that they lose interest in or become numb to. However, influencer marketing is an effective way to add value to your audience who is looking for recommendations in work, personal life, health, home, etc. Influencer marketing amplifies your content to reach a wider range of viewers. That’s why Influencer Marketing is considered as the fastest means of online marketing efforts for acquiring consumers as it speeds up the impact of organic search and paid search.
Best Practices:
Start with spotting influencers in your segment and remember that influencers do not necessarily have to have a celebrity scale massive following. You need to focus on influencers who make the most buzz within your industry and impact your audience segment.
Specifically within LinkedIn, CMOs and marketers can use InMail to start connecting and building long-standing relationships with influencers. Once connected, you can start sharing content they have shared, promoting their content and looking for opportunities to have them engage with your content as well.
4. Account based marketing for precision targeting
Account based marketing (ABM) is gradually becoming an effective method for organizations with broader employee bases and resources. As technology is empowering ABM with better tools to source data, interact with clients and measure effectiveness, many organizations are focusing their efforts on limited high-value accounts to deliver a greater degree of personalized content and solutions. ABM has already proven to be effective by driving higher results that 84% of brands are focusing their marketing resources in it (SiriusDecisions). It has been proven to drive much greater ROI than other methods of marketing, says the Information Technology Services Marketing Association.
Best Practices
The first thing to do when adopting an ABM strategy is to discover key accounts. Then, start aligning the marketing team with the sales team in order to spot likely candidates. The next step is to plan strategies for how to deliver personalized content and information. For this, CMOs can make use of the LinkedIn Account Targeting tool to identify key accounts and provide personalized outreach.
5. Utmost dependency on video content marketing
Last but not is sharing video content. Video content is continually increasing in terms of popularity and consumption shared online. Cisco has predicted that by the year of 2020, around 82% of the type of information shared across the internet will be video content, as detailed in the Cisco Visual Networking Index: Forecast and Methodology, 2016–2021.
Best Practices:
CMOs and marketers need to find out how their brands can make the utmost use of video content to convey information. Companies may not need to invest in costly in-house production studios, as they can create simple and easy-to-follow how-to videos, behind-the-scenes video, motion graphics, news or live feeds with a few simple products or even a smartphone.
LinkedIn allows video embedding on company page feeds and even allows users to target video posts by optimizing them to a specific audience segment.
An upcoming LinkedIn feature will be here soon and it will definitely boost the impact of video content as it allows users to record and instantly share videos from the Company page itself using the LinkedIn app.
Conclusion
With all these awesome techniques of engaging and reaching a broader audience, CMOs and marketers can get much closer to consumers to identify their consumers’ thoughts on products, expectations and needs all in real time. It’s important that CMOs and Marketers listen to their audience through social media, stay up-to-date with trends, and maximize their efforts to create personalized content in order to build a relationship with customers through their various social media platforms.