What is breakthrough creative worth to a brand? Research has shown that powerful creative can help businesses generate 10-20x more sales. Conversely, companies associated with low-scoring creative have been shown to lose market share.
In other words, improving your ability to stand out in the LinkedIn feed could have a significant impact on your company’s revenue. Here are 10 tips and best practices for creating content that excites your audience’s minds.
1. Interact to add value
Professionals on LinkedIn are eager to interact with content when they see value in it. Whether you want people to embark on a new experience or answer a quick poll, conveying value and lessening the commitment are critical to gaining engagement.
Before taking action, readers want to feel assured that their time will be rewarded. When planning interactive content, remember that perceived value is the key to gaining attention, but received value is the key to lasting affection.
2. Disrupt to please
When members scroll through their LinkedIn feeds, they’re on an active search for a satisfying disruption. In this context, content and ads that disrupt the norm and defy expectations are simply more likely to get noticed.
Disruptive content can include bold or counter-intuitive statements that ignite the reader’s imagination and curiosity, or it can include eye-pleasing, pattern-breaking visuals that stand out in the scroll.
3. Inspire your audience
The most inspirational content on LinkedIn often originates from a true understanding of an audience’s worries, wants, and needs. Inspirational content can be easy to create, easy to love, and easy to share, and for these reasons there’s an abundance of it on the platform.
The keys to creating inspirational content that stands out are specificity and scale. Instead of settling for inspirational quotes, aim to create stories that inspire confidence in your brand and connect back to your company’s core values. Inspirational stories that reinforce your brand’s values can deliver positive effects for years.
EJ McNulty,executive creative director at Wunderman Thompson North America, recently shared a helpful framework for defining and telling your B2B brand’s inspirational story for LinkedIn Collective.
4. Know what you’re trying to stand out against
This piece of advice is particularly important if your goal is to gain attention with thought leadership content. Trying to assume a leadership role in an ongoing conversation can be difficult in any market. If you’re entering the conversation devoid of context, it’s even harder.
While everyone’s LinkedIn feed is uniquely tailored to them, a little research can help you understand the people, brands, and ideas that are most likely to be present in your audience’s LinkedIn feeds. By gaining a better understanding of what your audience is seeing and reading within their LinkedIn feed, you’ll gain a better feel for which messages will blend in and which ones will break through.
5. Consider the visual space
Pay special attention to how a scrolling professional will experience your content. What will they notice first? What about your content will compel them to stop scrolling?
It’s important to remember that your reader will not necessarily consume your text and images in a linear fashion. For instance, in the example below, the differing styles and sizes of text will cause most readers to view them “out of order.”
The non-linear nature of the LinkedIn feed can also help you to keep a reader’s attention after you’ve earned it. Rich media options like videos and click-through presentations can keep scrollers engaged for several minutes.
If you’re using visual creative to gain attention, It’s important to consider how your images will appear on mobile devices. Often, when images are rendered down, the focal point can get lost and the image blends into the background. For this reason, when designing visuals, it’s generally a good idea to consider what the thumbnail version will look like.
That said, you’ll want to embed larger images instead of standard thumbnails as content with larger images tend to get a 38% higher CTR. An image size of 1200 x 627 pixels is recommended.
6. Create new value with curation
As marketers, we obsess over originality. So much so, that we’ve acquired an originality delusion. We tend to favor original and untested ideas, yet in the real world where we operate, old ideas tend to outperform new ones.
Though novelty can entice, too much newness can have the opposite effect on people. Henry Ford understood this when he pitched his automobile as a horseless buggy. So did Steve Jobs when he pitched his pocket device as a phone upgrade.
People are more willing to embrace change when it’s presented as a logical step forward from what they already know. In this sense, curation allows creatives to expand on ideas with which their readers are already familiar.
You can modernize existing ideas, repackage them for convenience, or infuse them with practical value. You can curate from your own content library or borrow from others using attribution. The point is, if you’re struggling with originality, curation can allow you to cultivate original content from common ground. The Content Suggestions feature in LinkedIn Pages can help you find relevant, trending articles within your industry to curate.
7. Run A/B tests
Sometimes in marketing a small change can turn mediocre creative into breakthrough creative. For example, a minor adjustment to an image can lead to a major improvement in engagement. The only way to truly know whether your creative has more thumb-stopping potential is to test it.
That said, not everything should be tested to the same degree. If your content clearly isn’t connecting, it’s okay to move on from it. But if you feel as though your content may still be bound for bigger things, don’t stop now. Trust your intuition and test it out.
Learn how you can easily A/B test campaigns on LinkedIn.
8. Give branding its due
Many marketers using LinkedIn, particularly B2B marketers, have come to prefer performance marketing because it’s relatively predictable and the results are easier to track. Conversely, brand marketing often takes a back seat because it (ostensibly) lacks metrics that can be clearly tied to growth. As a result, even though they acknowledge that branding is essential for long-term viability, marketers are often hesitant to ask for buy-in for branding initiatives and stakeholders are slow to grant it.
That’s a shame because few things can power up performance like a good brand campaign. Not only that, but brand marketing campaigns that focus on spreading a message tend to allow more creative flexibility than performance campaigns focused on securing an action.
On LinkedIn, thumb-stopping content often originates from branding campaigns, because they are designed to be interesting to a broad audience. Prioritizing your brand-oriented goals may be just the thing that gets your fountain of creativity flowing.
9. Get to the point
Concise headlines generally lead to more engagement. When writing ad headlines, aim for 150 characters or fewer. As for descriptive copy, shoot for 70 characters or fewer (anything over 100 characters will be truncated on desktop).
Whatever you’re trying to say, keep trying to say it more clearly, more succinctly. Instead of starting with a pronoun, try kicking things off with a powerful verb. It can take several attempts and tests to find the right combination of words, but the effort is almost always worth it.
10. Make sure the right people are seeing your content
Sometimes a boost in effective reach is all that's needed for content to achieve breakthrough status. You may already have a legitimate thumb-stopper; now you just need to find the right thumbs.
When targeting your content on LinkedIn, the key is to be specific, but not so specific that you limit your effective reach potential and the insights you can gather. To this end, you can also use A/B testing to optimize your targeting on LinkedIn. Just create a campaign, duplicate it, and alter the targeting criteria you’d like to test.
If you’d like to reach more professionals who are similar to the target audience you’ve selected, LinkedIn’s Audience Expansion tool can be a great tool for increasing brand awareness and engagement.
Finally, getting your content in front of the right people can also help you add followers on LinkedIn, which can significantly improve the potential of your organic content going forward.
For additional tips and insights that can help you earn your audience’s attention in the LinkedIn feed, subscribe to the LinkedIn Ads Blog.
Topics: LinkedIn Pages
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