Authored by Amanda Bulat
Stopping the scroll. It’s become a top objective for marketers who want to earn attention and engagement on social media. How can you compel users casually browsing their feeds to stop scrolling and hear what you have to say?
The goal is not to interrupt. (Interruption marketing is out, as you might’ve heard.) The goal is to intrigue someone with content that is relevant, interesting, and clearly useful to them. On our platform, we consistently find that one of the best ways to quickly convey these qualities is through LinkedIn video.
In particular, live video continues to emerge as a popular and alluring format. To help marketers master this relatively new frontier, and improve their LinkedIn video marketing strategies holistically, our own Product Marketers Kylee Lessard and Arjun Desai teamed up with the live-streaming experts at Socialive to create an in-depth webinar packed with practical guidance.
If you have a free hour over the lunch break, you can watch the LinkedIn video webinar now. If you’re short on time, we’ve pulled out key points and takeaways that you can find below.
Stopping the Scroll with LinkedIn Video
Why is video on LinkedIn an important component of my marketing strategy on the platform? How can I capitalize on the opportunity with finite budget constraints? What sort of content might my organization feature in this format?
You’ll find all your answers ahead.
Your Audience Wants Video Content
The case for a heightened focus on video marketing makes itself. Data continues to clearly illustrate that audiences are hungry for this content format — both on social media and more generally. Here are a few numbers featured in the webinar:
- 3 out of 4 executives watch work-related videos every week (Forbes)
- More than 50% of customers want to see videos from brands (HubSpot)
- 59% prefer to watch a video on a topic rather than reading about it (Forbes)
And live video, specifically, is on a fast rise, as these figures indicate:
- 65% increase in hours of live video viewed from 2017 to 2018 (Conviva)
- 62% plan to adopt live broadcasting in the future (Hootsuite)
- 15x anticipated growth in live video web traffic by 2020 (Hootsuite)
Virtually every forward-thinking brand should be accounting for video marketing in their strategy moving forward, and live video is an excellent way to maximize your potential audience engagement with the format — on LinkedIn, we find that live streams garner 7x the reactions and 24x the comments of standard native video on the platform.
The upside is clear. But marketers tend to encounter two key barriers when it comes to video content creation.
What’s Holding Back Video Marketing?
Generally, our audience of marketers (and third-party survey data) tell us that these two challenges rise above all others when it comes to establishing a fruitful, consistent video marketing strategy:
- Not Enough Budget: Producing high-quality video at scale can feel intimidating for any organization — especially those with more restrictive budgets.
- Not Enough Content: Marketers who lack experience creating video content might not even know where to start, or what their audience wants.
We’ll share plenty of specific content ideas shortly, but beyond the creative aspects, these two challenges are intertwined: lack of budget seemingly holds marketers back from producing the amount of video content they feel they need to be effective.
This is a fair reservation to hold, but we feel it’s rooted in an outdated model — what is playfully described as the “budget-eating snail approach”:
Modern marketers smartly want to customize content for each channel and placement to maximize resonance, but again, that’s very difficult to scale. However, there are efficient ways to make it happen.
Unleashing Video through the New Way of Marketing
It’s not exactly new ground for us to cover here at LinkedIn, but repurposing content is an especially valuable tactic for video and live streams. The premise involves creating one staple piece of content and then slicing it up for several different uses.
With this approach, you can address both of the aforementioned hurdles because it enables you to create more content with greater cost-efficiency, thus stretching your budget and creative capital.
Not only does repurposing benefit you, it also benefits your audience by enabling them to consume your content through whatever method they prefer. In fact, the blog post you’re reading at this very moment exemplifies what we’re talking about. We took an hour-long live video presentation, and distilled the key points into text form, because those who prefer to read shouldn’t have to miss out on this information.
The next step, if we really want to get sophisticated, might be to review the analytics for our video and make a note of spikes in engagement or questions. We can deduce that viewers found these moments particularly important, indicating we might want to excerpt them as shorter clips to feature on our LinkedIn Page, blog, or within video ads.
LinkedIn Video Examples and Ideas
If you’re still unsure what to broadcast on LinkedIn video or LinkedIn Live, here are a few suggestions to get your gears turning:
- Events
- Company culture
- Trainings/workshops
- Commencements
- Behind-the-scenes
- Fireside chats
- Product features
In terms of specific subject matter, you can check out Content Suggestions to discover topics and trends that are top-of-mind for your audience.
LinkedIn Video Best Practices
As you embark on your LinkedIn video marketing journey (you can apply for access to LinkedIn Live here), here are some pointers to keep in mind as you plan live streams or video ad campaigns.
LinkedIn Live Video Best Practices:
- Ideal range for length is 15 minutes to one hour. While keeping video content on the short side is generally advisable, we actually recommend viewing 15 minutes as the floor for a live broadcast. It’s an event! Give it time to build.
- Moderation is key. We’re not talking about alcohol or desserts; we’re talking about audience engagement. Because live video tends to elicit more comments and feedback, you’ll want to have at least one brand rep dedicated to responding and answering.
- Hashtags help discovery. Including #LinkedInLive and other relevant hashtags will help your broadcast be discovered by people outside of your Page’s following.
LinkedIn Video Ad Best Practices:
- Add captions. Research shows that 79% of online videos are viewed with the sound off.
- Hook your audience quickly. Unlike a live stream, video ads aren’t something your audience made an appointment to watch. Aim to establish that compelling relevance to your target viewer immediately, within the first few seconds.
- Test and retest. No matter how educated, any guesses we make about what will hit home with viewers is only that: a guess. Data-driven marketers recognize that testing is the best path to reliably strong results — try experimenting with different intro text, length, opening shots, etc.
Get Rolling with LinkedIn Video and Live Video
Are you ready to stop the scroll and start engaging new prospective customers? Video offers an excellent path, and as we’ve established, it isn’t as difficult or prohibitive as many think.
LinkedIn Live is still currently in a limited beta, but we’re accepting participants and you can apply. (We’re looking for brands with 500+ Page followers, consistent native video output, and creative ideas for using live video.) Meanwhile, any marketer can create a video ad campaign right now. Head into Campaign Manager and you’ll be on your way.
And remember, you can watch Kylee and Arjun discussing all of the above topics in greater depth — plus sharing real-life examples of these tactics — in action by watching the full webinar on-demand.
