Diary of a first-time CMO - LinkedIn wins

LinkedIn wins

We’ve always had our LinkedIn page sit with the content marketing team. After all, if we want to provide our audience with quality content, then who better to provide them with that?

I think what’s been key for us has been to have a dedicated member of the team really focused on the details of what’s working, and what’s not - taking a very data-driven mentality.

While I think we’ve found our groove with our LinkedIn page now, we did find it difficult to transition towards a value-led approach initially because we were still taking requests from other areas of the business. For example, sharing promos on an upcoming partnership webinar.

But once we had drawn up a clear strategy document for our company’s LinkedIn page and firmly established road rules around what could be posted, and what couldn’t - it was much easier.

Our rule of thumb on our LinkedIn page is:

Anything that doesn’t provide direct value in the post doesn’t get on the page.

Because before, when someone would ask if we could just pop this on LinkedIn, we’d just do it. We didn’t have a reason to say no.

But now, we have clear guidelines. We can say:

‘This wouldn’t benefit the overall strategy of our company page, nor would it impact any of the KPIs set, so no, we won’t post this’.

Or we can suggest an alternative. For example, maybe it’s something better suited to be targeted towards a specific audience on paid social.

One thing to add here is that I’ve mentioned we use memes in this post. But we don’t anymore. We found that memes left too much to the imagination. Memes that we felt were funny and innocent were interpreted differently by other people so we decided it was best to avoid them in most cases so we didn’t inadvertently negatively impact our brand.

We could maintain our growth trajectory without them. The main thing is to focus on value each and every time.

Another helpful thing I can’t recommend enough is repurposing content. But not just any content. Use the data you have access to.

Look at your top-performing blogs and repurpose those into a relevant content format, such as a carousel.

Look at your comments - what are the most common things people ask questions about? Use that to build your posts around.

And don’t forget once your posts are live, use the data at your fingertips to learn more about what people respond to.

While we were still in our lead gen phase when I wrote this post, you can see this was really the beginning of our demand gen thinking.

We wanted to create an audience of our own so we didn’t have to be so reliant on other people. We’d seen Gong create this strong channel for themselves and we knew we wanted the same.

We wanted to get into the media machine mind frame. Which we’ve only continued to build out since.