Let’s start with the obvious: Linkedin has more than 720 million members, making it an appealing option for all content marketers who are looking for a place to publish content. Fintechs often face added hurdles — like building trust and credibility — that make LinkedIn an especially appealing fintech content marketing tool. Business professionals trust LinkedIn and its the top platform they turn to when looking for peer insights and thought leadership.
Several years ago, LinkedIn opened up the publishing doors to all members, meaning anyone could publish blogs directly to the platform and promote that content throughout their LinkedIn networks. This is part of what makes LinkedIn a great platform for B2B marketers — especially because it allows you and your executives to communicate and connect directly with your customers.
Currently, there are two main ways you can publish your content on LinkedIn. One way is LinkedIn Publisher, which allows you to write a long-form article and share it with your own LinkedIn network. The second way is to post a LinkedIn status update, not unlike other social network updates, where you can share shorter, more concise updates and content.
With nearly 2,000 fintech groups, 90 million LinkedIn users in senior-level influencer positions, and 63 million in decision-making positions, LinkedIn is a powerful fintech content marketing tool, not only for reaching your target audience but also for connecting with others in your industry and researching relevant topics of interest.
Here are some of the other reasons LinkedIn is an excellent fintech content marketing tool.
LinkedIn is Where Leaders Go for Information
Unlike its social counterparts, LinkedIn’s primary purpose is to provide information rather than entertainment. Not to say the two are mutually exclusive, but LinkedIn users come to the site to educate themselves — usually about their industry.
As a fintech content marketing tool, LinkedIn provides the perfect platform for publishing high-quality content that can add value and educate your target audience. As we mentioned earlier, the platform is ideal for both short-form and long-form content.
Most B2B marketers know that buyers are doing their research online, before talking to a sales rep. In fact, buyers get through more than 70% of the decision-making process before they ever interact with your sales rep. What does that mean for fintechs? It means that your buyers are out there looking for assistance in finding a solution to their problems and challenges.
In other words, your buyers aren’t looking for a hard sales pitch but rather an authoritative perspective on how to best solve their problems. Thought leadership can be the way to your prospects’ hearts if you’re good at creating informative, relevant, and interesting content that adds value. LinkedIn offers various opportunities to do this while ensuring you’re getting in front of the right audience. Publishing content on LinkedIn means you can leverage your network of connections, but you can also share content in relevant groups.
LinkedIn is Great for Lead Generation
According to the B2B Content Marketing 2020 Benchmarks report, LinkedIn is the top organic and paid social media platform B2B marketers use — and the one they report generates the best content marketing.
LinkedIn is one of the top platforms for lead generation, and it makes it incredibly easy to do via built-in lead forms that pre-populate personal information, which reduces the friction of filling form fields manually. Fintechs can create LinkedIn Ads that direct clickers to a form fill instead of a separate landing page. Not only does this improve conversions, but it saves your prospect time.
Users also come to LinkedIn to take action. According to LinkedIn, 80% of B2B leads generated on social sites come from LinkedIn. Other companies back up that stat, including Simplus, which says that 70% of their form fills come directly from LinkedIn.
Fintechs have options when it comes to LinkedIn lead generation. You can do it for free or by using a paid strategy — though even those that use a paid strategy spend significantly less to run campaigns than they do to run equivalent campaigns on other social media platforms or search engines. HubSpot reports that LinkedIn Sponsored Content ads tend to have a higher CPC than Google Ads, but they also tend to see double the conversion rate.
HubSpot aggregated all of their customer’s results with LinkedIn Sponsored Content and found that while the ads have a higher cost-per-click than Google Ads, they also have double the conversion rate.
LinkedIn Videos are Highly Engaging
First, let’s look at the benefits of using video for marketing in general. According to Wyzowl:
- 89% of video marketers say video gives them a good ROI.
- 83% of video marketers say video helps them with lead generation.
- 87% of video marketers say video has increased traffic to their website.
- 80% of video marketers say video has directly helped increase sales.
When it comes to LinkedIn videos, users view more than 300 million of them each year. Posts that use video also get three times more engagement than posts that only include images or text.
With more than half of marketers on LinkedIn using video, it should be a no-brainer for fintechs looking to amp up engagement and content marketing efforts. Video can be added to both personal and company page updates, providing a dynamic way to connect with your audience and start conversations.
One way to leverage LinkedIn video is to use it as a teaser for long-form content you publish. Marketers can create short 30- or 60-second videos that provide an overview of a topic and use that status update to point people to an entire article, ebook, or white paper on the subject matter.
LinkedIn is a viable content marketing platform and a powerful fintech content marketing tool — but its effectiveness will always depend on how relevant the content is to your audience. Understanding the different features and offerings of LinkedIn can enhance your content marketing arsenal and make your overall marketing more effective.