Thought Leadership on LinkedIn: Paid & Organic Social Strategy

See how I helped this B2B Conferences business refresh their social media strategy for better engagement.

Situation

B2B IT research and consulting company Gartner promoted its annual conferences to relevant C-level audiences on LinkedIn, but was having trouble keeping up with new ad formats and constantly evolving social media algorithms.

The company had nearly doubled its investment in paid LinkedIn ads over the years but was discouraged with diminishing returns despite increased budgets.

Solution

I presented Gartner with a deep dive on how LinkedIn user behavior and algorithms have evolved in recent years:

– Increased engagement on content shared by individual users over company pages
– A preference for thought leadership content based on personal experiences
– People learning from people, not just following company pages and job searching
– Longer-form, more relatable content paired with user-generated multimedia over strict best practices and branded content

These insights offered a new opportunity to lean into internal Gartner experts and conference speakers as thought leaders through organic social media content, and “boost” individual content as a new paid ad format: LinkedIn Thought Leader ads.

We paired the Thought Leader ads with new paid and organic creative that emphasized the personal experience, and brought individuals to the forefront, both in image and voice. It was important that we follow Gartner’s strict visual branding guidelines.

I identified several internal candidates to participate in the pilot social media campaign: conference speakers who were already active on LinkedIn or had a sizeable LinkedIn following, were well-known and respected across their industries and among clients, and had diverse representation.

I ghostwrote several individual posts for Gartner experts and developed a seamless process for them to review, approve and connect their accounts to the Gartner advertising account. I shared best practices with the Gartner conferences marketing team so they could continue to iterate and optimize campaigns over time.