Why LinkedIn influencer marketing matters for brands

If you hear about influencer marketing, you might automatically imagine young, trendy individuals posting pictures on Instagram that display an immaculately crafted lifestyle while promoting promoted products.

And while this form of influencer marketing works for some companies, product types and brands, it doesn't seem to make sense for others. This doesn't say, though, this influencer approaches for B2B businesses or other brands that may be searching for a more organized approach are completely off the table.

Join influencer LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is the world's largest professional networking site, with more than 600 million members and 300 million active users. Regardless of the profession, you will find individuals who possess tremendous power in their field of expertise as thought leaders.

In light of this, marketing influencer LinkedIn can be a game-changing addition to the overall marketing plan for Linkedin.

Why LinkedIn influencers?

Bearing in mind its business-oriented niche and smaller userbase than Instagram or Twitter, LinkedIn may like a surprising match for influencers. In light of this, why do you concentrate on identifying influencers for LinkedIn? Similar explanations.

1. Influencer LinkedIn has key decision-makers in their community

CEOs, CMOs, CFOs and several other team members and decision-makers are led by LinkedIn influencers, who pay careful attention to what such influencers say.

If a LinkedIn influencer discusses a certain product or service, it has a direct effect on the people who are most likely to buy the product or service. When you want to put your company ahead of the key people in your industry, LinkedIn is the way to go.

2. LinkedIn influencer's views bear weight

What these influencers have to say appears to have a major effect on LinkedIn relative to influencer marketing on other sites, with smaller scope. Here's the explanation. Sharing content consumed on Facebook or Instagram, such as photographs, memes and quotes, is fairly simple. Although this can be one way to build a following, the longer form content on LinkedIn this triggers exposure appears to be more sticky in the minds of its viewers.

Expertise, power, audience and authority are built on the professional-focused network of LinkedIn. Users follow influencers as they provide daily insights into the industry in the form of informative posts, blogs, and videos that evoke interest and consideration from followers.

Current Drift CMO Dave Gerhardt is a perfect example of someone who's created a reputation by sharing high value, professional knowledge on a daily basis. Lots of people are following him because they know they can get important marketing ideas from him like the following:

3. LinkedIn is the perfect choice for many brands

For many companies, LinkedIn influencers are a much better match for their brand than Facebook or Instagram influencers. If your brand has a more buttoned-up look, you'll have a much easier time finding an influencer on LinkedIn, which is targeted primarily toward business professionals.

This is also suitable for brands in a more nuanced or specialized market, like B2B brands looking to differentiate themselves from the competition and set their value proposition clearly. LinkedIn beats other social networks when it comes to producing leads for B2B companies. 80 per cent of social media produced B2B leads, according to Oktopost, come from LinkedIn. The remaining 20 percent are all the other social networks combined.

How to find influencers on LinkedIn

Now to the million dollar question: how do you find influencers on LinkedIn actually? How do you classify those people who have a wide audience attentive? There are many directions to go, some better than others.

LinkedIn influencer list

LinkedIn maintains its own list of influencers and includes platform users with very high profiles. On this list you will find people in the business world such as Melinda Gates, Adam Grant, Sara Blakely and other well known individuals. LinkedIn selects those users by hand.

Frankly, when you want to find influencers to partner for your company you should probably ignore this list. Such people are so well-known that they would be very unlikely to work directly for your company (unless you have millions of dollars to spend). More niche influencers are required.

Use search to find LinkedIn influencers

A faster, much more realistic way to locate influencers in LinkedIn is to search them manually using keywords.

One choice is to look for people in their job title or profile description who have similar words, but this is a rather lengthy operation. You must click on the profile of each user, evaluate how many connections or followers they have, and then look at the content they post to see if it is relevant to your company. You also need to look at how other people engage with their content and see if what they share with their audience resonates.

There's a much easier way to find important influencers: do a search for content instead of a search for profiles.

For instance, let's say you're looking for influencers from LinkedIn B2B who regularly share content-marketing information. Go to the search bar LinkedIn and type in "Marketing material." Make sure you set the filter to "Content" so it shows that you've posted content relevant to the subject.

Look for posts which have a high level of interaction, such as reactions, reviews, and views (if video) as you scroll through the content. A substantial amount of feedback on a post indicates the author is likely to have a wide following, and could be an influencer with which you want to work.

If a potential influencer is established, go to their profile and look at all their posts. When something they post gets a lot of exposure then that person in their niche might be a perfect match for an influencer.

Join LinkedIn Groups

One way of finding influencers on LinkedIn is by joining prominent industry-related groups. Simply type into your industry or keywords relevant to your industry to find such categories. Ensure sure the "Groups" filter is set to

Try entering these communities and paying attention to who shares the most regularly and who gets the most dedication messages. Those individuals are possible influencers with which you may want to interact.

Contacting influencers

The next move once you have established possible influencers is to contact them and see if they may be interested in working with you.

If you are already connected to the LinkedIn user, you can simply send them a message within the platform itself. If you are not connected to them, you can give them a very short free message or upgrade to LinkedIn Premium, which allows you to give direct messages to people you are not connected to. And though you have to pay for the service, InMail (the premium messaging service of LinkedIn) has a response rate 300 per cent higher than email.

If the influencer lists their contact details on their profile, this way too you can reach out.