From Connection to Conversion: LinkedIn Influencer Marketing Guide for 2024
By Alexandra Kazakova 14 min READ | Oct 16 2024
Table of contents
With 92% of B2B marketers incorporating LinkedIn into their digital marketing strategies, it's clear that the platform holds immense potential for reaching your target audience.
And the good news is that you won’t have to start from scratch.
Instead, you can tap into the established networks of industry leaders within this space via influencer marketing.
However, if you are new to the platform, it can be challenging to leverage this opportunity to its fullest.
With so many influencers, strategies, and metrics to consider, it's easy to feel lost.
That's why we've created this comprehensive guide to help you in the journey.
It explores:
Basics of LinkedIn influencer marketing
A step-by-step guide to LinkedIn influencer marketing
Real-life examples of LinkedIn influencer marketing
P.S.: Want to find authentic influencers whose follower demographics match your target audience?inBeat.co can help!Wesimplify your search for micro and nano influencers with powerful filters such as follower count, location, language, engagement rates, and verification status. While you can’t directly find LinkedIn influencers, you can use “LinkedIn” as a keyword to discover social influencers active on other platforms who also use LinkedIn.
LinkedIn influencer marketing leverages trusted professionals on the platform to promote brands, products, or services to a targeted professional audience.
It connects brands with decision-makers, industry leaders, and highly engaged professionals, enhancing credibility and driving engagement.
Steps for a successful LinkedIn influencer marketing campaign:
Understand your goals and target audience: Define clear objectives and ensure your target audience aligns with LinkedIn's user base.
Find the right influencers: Use LinkedIn's advanced search, explore groups, and monitor hashtags to identify relevant influencers.
Streamline content briefs and communication: Provide clear guidelines and use centralized tools like project management platforms for collaboration.
Develop engaging content: Encourage storytelling, use LinkedIn polls, and promote user-generated content to engage your audience.
Post and schedule content strategically: Utilize analytics to determine optimal posting times and schedule content accordingly.
Optimize audience targeting: Leverage LinkedIn's targeting features to reach the most relevant users based on demographics and interests.
Perform creative testing: Test different ad formats, messages, and calls to action to see what resonates best.
Monitor and optimize the campaign: Regularly track performance metrics and adjust strategies as needed.
Real-life examples:
Miro: Achieved a 5% CTR and reduced CPC by collaborating with influencers who acted as brand ambassadors.
Shopify: Drove over 1,000 purchases and significant revenue by partnering with influencers and store owners.
Buffer: Increased brand awareness through the #MyWorkFromAnywhere campaign with influencers sharing personal remote work stories.
Key takeaways:
Partnering with the right influencers enhances brand credibility, reach, and engagement.
Tailor content to align with your audience's professional interests and preferences.
Continuously monitor and optimize campaigns using LinkedIn's analytics tools.
Centralize communication and provide clear guidelines to ensure smooth collaboration with influencers.
inBeat.co offers tools and services to help brands find authentic LinkedIn influencers and optimize their influencer marketing campaigns. They also provide a free LinkedIn Ad Mockup Generator for creative testing.
What Is LinkedIn Influencer Marketing?
LinkedIn influencer marketing is a strategic approach that leverages the power of trusted voices on the platform to promote brands, products, services, or content.
Unlike other social media platforms, LinkedIn focuses on professional networking, which makes its influencer marketing uniquely positioned to connect with:
Decision-makers
Industry leaders
Highly engaged professionals
The core aim of this strategy is to use the influencer's network to:
Expand the brand's reach
Drive targeted engagement
Enhance credibility
Increase website traffic and leads
Boost content performance
Here’s an example of a LinkedIn influencer marketing campaign executed by inBeat.co’s sister agency for Miro:
9 Solid Steps For a Successful LinkedIn Influencer Marketing Campaign
Experts at inBeat suggest to follow the below-mentioned steps to run a successful LinkedIn influencer marketing campaign:
1. Understand Your Goals and Target Audience
As you plan a LinkedIn influencer marketing campaign, it's essential to start with a solid foundation.
Understanding your specific objectives and ensuring your target audience aligns with the platform’s user base are critical first steps.
Let’s see how to do so:
Determine specific business goals: Clearly define the business outcomes you want from your LinkedIn influencer marketing campaign. These may include:
Enhancing your brand’s reputation
Increasing your reach
Driving specific sales conversions
Setting precise objectives helps in strategically choosing the right influencers and crafting messages that align with your digital marketing strategy.
Identify and match your target audience: Analyze whether your target audience's demographics, such as their industries, job titles, and professional interests, match the user base on LinkedIn. This step ensures that the platform is suitable for your campaign and maximizes the potential for engagement.
Assess audience engagement trends: Study the interaction patterns and content preferences of users within your target demographic on LinkedIn. This includes looking at:
Posts they engage with most frequently
Type of content they share
Discussions they are most active in.
Understanding these aspects can help refine your campaign’s content strategy so that it resonates well with the intended audience.
Pro Tip: inBeat experts recommend setting up custom dashboards in LinkedIn's Campaign Manager to track key metrics directly tied to your business goals, like lead generation and brand awareness. Regular monitoring of them enables precise adjustments and keeps your campaign aligned with your strategic objectives.
Research your competitors to gain valuable insights and identify opportunities to stand out in LinkedIn influencer marketing.
You can follow these tips to enhance your approach:
Track influencer collaborations: Observe the LinkedIn influencers your competitors work with and analyze their:
Relevancy to the industry
Follower demographics
Types of engagements they generate (likes, comments, shares, reposts, etc.)
This will help you identify the most effective profiles for your own influencer partnerships.
Review content strategies: Examine the content types (articles, videos, or interactive posts) that your competitors post with their influencers. Note which formats and topics engage the audience most. It will help you refine your content approach to better suit the platform and audience preferences.
Observe endorsement styles: Pay attention to how competitors’ influencers endorse products or services. Are they using direct calls to action, sharing personal stories, or providing professional testimonials? This can assist you in crafting more compelling influencer content.
Pro Tip: At inBeat, experts use LinkedIn’s 'Companies to Track' feature from the analytics suite to monitor competitors’ performance metrics like engagement rates and follower growth.
The right influencers can help you reach your target audience, boost engagement, and build trust in your brand.
However, it’s not just about follower count; the influencers you choose must have a relevant voice, align with your brand values, and actively engage their professional network.
Let’s have a look at some tips to hunt them:
Use LinkedIn’s advanced search filters: Use LinkedIn’s advanced search features to narrow down influencers by industry, job title, location, and keywords relevant to your niche. This allows you to identify professionals who actively engage with topics that matter to your audience to ensure alignment with your campaign objectives.
Explore LinkedIn groups: Join LinkedIn groups and monitor industry-specific discussions to spot influencers who are actively contributing valuable content and insights. Influencers who lead conversations in these groups are often seen as thought leaders, which makes them ideal partners for reaching a targeted audience.
Monitor hashtags and content trends: Track industry-specific hashtags on LinkedIn to discover influencers who are an active part of relevant conversations. Creators frequently using trending hashtags and generating meaningful discussions are seen as thought leaders, which makes them valuable partners for your campaign.
Pro Tip: After identifying successful influencers for your campaign, expand your reach by finding lookalike creators who share similar audience demographics, engagement styles, and content themes. This strategy allows you to scale your campaign effectively and connect with a wider yet relevant audience without losing the consistency of your messaging.
4. Streamline Content Briefs and Communication for Influencers
A well-crafted influencer marketing brief, along with a centralized communication channel, ensures that both parties have a mutual understanding of the campaign objectives, messaging, and expected deliverables.
To create one, the strategies below can help you out:
Outline specific objectives: Clearly define what the campaign aims to achieve and the key messages that need to be conveyed. Also, specify the desired outcomes, like increasing brand awareness, generating leads, or driving engagement. This helps influencers understand the purpose behind their content and align posts accordingly.
Detail content requirements: Provide a description of the content format, length, style (through mood boards), and tone that should be used. You must also establish clear guidelines for:
Including mandatory elements, such as hashtags, links, and specific calls to action
Reporting deliverables, like how and when to submit content drafts
Giving performance updates
Doing Required revisions
This is important to maintain consistency across different pieces of content and ensure that the influencer’s output meets your brand’s standards.
Centralize communication: Use project management tools like ClickUp to manage all influencer activities in one centralized platform. They allow you to:
Assign tasks
Set clear deadlines for drafts, revisions, and final submissions
Keep direct communication with each influencer
This ensures everyone understands their responsibilities and adheres to campaign timelines.
Here’s an example of how our sister agency, inBeat, manages the campaign for their clients like Miro, Soylent, Nielsen IQ, etc.
Pro Tip: inBeat Agency experts have created a dedicated onboarding space within the project management tool where influencers can access all necessary resources, guidelines, and brand assets. You can also follow this to ensure a smooth start and make it easy for influencers to find what they need and stay aligned with the campaign goals.
5. Develop Engaging Content
To capture your audience’s attention and drive meaningful interactions, your content must be relevant, visually appealing, and value-driven.
Let’s have a look at some essential tips for it:
Leverage storytelling: Encourage influencers to incorporate storytelling into their posts by sharing their personal experiences with your product or service. Showcase how it solves problems, improves processes, or adds value. This builds trust by demonstrating practical outcomes rather than just delivering promotional messages.
Use LinkedIn polls: Add LinkedIn Polls to your influencer marketing content strategy to directly engage with followers by asking questions relevant to your campaign. Besides driving interaction, this approach also offers valuable feedback from a broader audience and helps you refine your messaging.
Encourage user-generated content (UGC): Inspire influencers to engage their followers in creating UGCs and share their experiences, tips, or testimonials related to your product.
To streamline this, you can also collaborate with platforms like inBeat Agency, which specializes in UGC services and helps craft authentic content.
Pro Tip: Create a dedicated hashtag for your UGC campaign and encourage influencers and followers to use it when sharing their content. This makes it easy to track submissions, engage with users directly, and repurpose the best content across your marketing channels.
6. Post and Schedule Content
Strategically timing the release of content on LinkedIn ensures it reaches your audience when they are most receptive.
To optimize content scheduling, follow the below tips:
Use updates analytics: LinkedIn's Updates Analytics can help you track engagement metrics such as views, likes, comments, and shares on specific posts. Reviewing them across different times and days can help you identify trends that indicate when your posts receive the most interaction.
Design a detailed content calendar: Construct a comprehensive content calendar that outlines specific posting dates for influencers. This ensures they know exactly when to post and facilitates timely and coordinated content delivery throughout the campaign.
Leverage LinkedIn's automated scheduling tools: LinkedIn offers built-in functionalities that let you schedule posts in advance. It ensures content is published at the most effective times, regardless of geographic and time zone differences. You can encourage influencers to use it to sync their posts with your campaign's timeline.
Pro Tip: inBeat experts suggest coordinating a test phase at the beginning of your campaign where you and your influencers experiment with posting at different times of the day. You should then analyze engagement data from this phase to identify the most effective times for posting.
7. Optimize Audience Targeting
Optimize audience targeting to refine your content distribution and ensure it reaches the users most aligned with your business goals.
You can follow the below strategies to implement this step:
Apply LinkedIn’s audience targeting feature: LinkedIn’s audience targeting feature is a powerful tool that lets you tailor the content distribution to specific segments of your target audience based on various criteria like:
Job title
Industry
Company size
Geographic location
This ensures your content reaches the most relevant and responsive audience, which maximizes the engagement rates and effectiveness of your influencer campaign.
Leverage matched audiences: Advise your influencers to use LinkedIn’s matched audiences feature to retarget users who have interacted with your brand-related content previously. From here, you can also create a list of companies or email addresses to target simultaneously.
Pro Tip: inBeat experts recommend trying LinkedIn’s Audience Expansion feature to automatically target users with profiles similar to your defined audience. This allows you to connect with new potential customers and maximize your campaign’s exposure without compromising on relevance.
8. Perform Creative Testing
Through creative testing of different ad variants, you can uncover which visuals, messages, and formats capture your audience’s attention and drive the best results.
For this step, inBeat experts have shared the following tips:
Evaluate different messaging and CTAs: Create ad variations with different:
Headlines
Descriptions
Calls to action
Test these elements to determine which combination drives the highest engagement rates and conversions through LinkedIn’s Analytics.
Test multiple ad formats: Experiment with various LinkedIn ad formats like single image ads, carousel ads, and video ads to see which resonates best with your audience.
Pro Tip: You can also test different tones like professional, conversational, or humorous, for your LinkedIn ads to see which one is preferred by your target audience. inBeat experts recommend analyzing the engagement metrics of each style to determine the best fit.
9. Monitor and Optimize the Campaign
Lastly, constantly evaluate the LinkedIn marketing campaign.
It allows you to identify strengths, address weaknesses, and fine-tune strategies for better results.
Let’s have a look at some tips for effective tracking and optimization:
Set up real-time alerts for performance drops: Leverage LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager and other analytics tools to create real-time alerts for sudden declines in engagement or key performance metrics. These instant notifications help you swiftly identify problems and make timely adjustments to keep your campaign on track.
Monitor influencer-specific performance: Keep a close eye on performance metrics for each influencer to see who is generating the highest engagement and conversions. This detailed tracking helps you pinpoint the most effective partnership so you can focus resources on top performers to drive better results.
Analyze post-engagement behavior: Use analytics to track user actions after engaging with influencer content, such as website visits or newsletter sign-ups. This data reveals the path from interaction to conversion and helps optimize the influencer content and calls to action for better results.
Pro Tip: inBeat experts have regular optimization sessions to review performance data with influencers. They hold these sessions to assess what’s working, identify areas needing adjustment, and brainstorm new concepts.
Real-Life Examples of LinkedIn Influencer Marketing
Let’s explore some of the top brands that have successfully leveraged LinkedIn influencer marketing to drive success:
Buffer’s #MyWorkFromAnywhere campaign tapped into the remote work trend by collaborating with influencers on LinkedIn and Instagram.
Influencers shared their personal stories, practical tips, and experiences of flexible working and incorporated the importance of Buffer in it.
Results:
Increased brand awareness
Positive association with the brand
Skyrocket Your LinkedIn Influencer Marketing with inBeat.co
LinkedIn influencer marketing leverages the influence of trusted professionals to connect your brand with a targeted audience.
This approach promotes meaningful connections, boosts visibility, and generates tangible results, which makes the platform a valuable channel for achieving your marketing goals.
Key Takeaways:
Partnering with the right influencers on LinkedIn can significantly enhance brand credibility, reach, and engagement.
Tailor LinkedIn content to align with your audience’s preferences and professional interests.
Continuously monitor and optimize campaigns using LinkedIn’s analytics tools.
Centralize communication and provide clear guidelines to ensure smooth collaboration with influencers.
Still wondering how to get started with LinkedIn influencer marketing for your brand? inBeat.co can help you put foundation with its comprehensive search engine to find the right LinkedIn influencers. Moreover, we also feature a free LinkedIn Ad Mockup Generator to help you creatively test different ad formats.
