How to Use LinkedIn Video to Acquire More Leads and Customers

It's becoming more and more difficult for businesses to reach customers through traditional marketing and advertising strategies, and that means it's becoming harder to acquire new customers. Research done by HubSpot tells us that 81% of all consumers rely more on their family and friends for advice, as opposed to that provided by corporations or small businesses.This is where it can be extremely advantageous to have a strong social media presence on a platform such as LinkedIn. Given the fact that there are more than 600 million users active on the platform, with 63 million members who are upper-level management, and another 90 million who are senior-level influencers, it's definitely a business-oriented platform.LinkedIn is the ideal platform for B2B's to reach their target audience, to generate promising new leads, and eventually to attract new customers. LinkedIn leads all social media platforms in visitor-to-lead conversion rate, with a 2.74% success rate. That makes LinkedIn nearly 3 times more effective at lead generation than either Facebook or Twitter.

Most people are aware that images and text have strong appeal, but that video pretty much dominates the Internet these days. On the LinkedIn platform, videos are shared far more than any other kind of content, with users spending at least three times more time viewing LinkedIn ads than static ones. Anyone not using LinkedIn to enhance their marketing success, and to acquire new customers, is missing out on a major opportunity. Here are some strategies you can use to acquire new customers via LinkedIn.

Formulate a plan

Obviously, before you can reach out to your LinkedIn users to let them know about your solution to their problem, you'll have to have a plan. This plan should be closely aligned with your overall marketing goals, and should focus on that portion of the marketing funnel which is most closely aligned with your particular goals for this campaign.For instance, generating qualified leads, building brand awareness, or maximizing conversions can all be closely associated with different parts of your marketing funnel to increase your prospects of success. Then you'll need to establish the campaign KPI's you will be using, define your target audience for this campaign, and set realistic campaign goals which are specific and achievable. Then you'll need to plan out your timelines and assign a budget to the whole venture, so it can all take shape.

Choose video types

Once you have formulated your marketing plan, you can move onto the next step, which will be developing LinkedIn video content for all the various stages of customer acquisition. Two distinct video types can be directly uploaded to LinkedIn, those being LinkedIn data videos, and LinkedIn video ads, which are generally used to generate leads and build brand awareness.

The main difference between these video types is that LinkedIn data videos are allowed to be no more than 10 minutes long, whereas video ads can have a 30-minute duration. When you're creating LinkedIn videos for lead acquisition, you should keep in mind that each separate stage of the customer journey is discrete and unique, and that means it will require specific content to maintain user engagement and to maintain steady progress.Any video shared on LinkedIn should be prepared with the objective of optimizing the customer's experience at each stage, while also remaining in alignment with your campaign's main objective.

Optimize your LinkedIn video post

As with all social media platforms, LinkedIn requires specific video posting guidelines to be observed, so when you're optimizing your own content, here are some best practices to keep in mind. Recognizing that viewers' attention spans are quite short, your LinkedIn video messages need to be as brief as possible. Ideally, the first few seconds of your video should hook the viewer, otherwise they may not see any of the rest of your content.While the established cutoff for LinkedIn videos is somewhere around 10 minutes, all of the most successful LinkedIn video ads have an average of about 15 seconds. That should tell you something about viewers' attention spans right there, and it should be a strong hint that providing a great deal more content than that may be a waste of your time.

Since you're primarily trying to promote engagement with your LinkedIn videos, you should be asking questions and telling a story, so that viewers will engage with your content, and hopefully share it with all their friends and relatives. Make sure to include an effective call to action with your video content, so as to further promote engagement.It's also a good idea to include subtitles on your video content, since the majority of viewers will be watching with their sound muted. Many users are viewing content in public places or in their office, and will not have the sound on to alert other users that they're watching their cellphones. Another thing you can do to optimize your LinkedIn video post is to add a description which will be very catchy, and will capture the attention of a number of users very quickly.This will hopefully make them interested enough to click on the video and watch it through to its conclusion. If you're trying to reach a bigger audience, you can also include appropriate LinkedIn hashtags along with your video post, but be careful not to go overboard on this. To get some idea of the type of content in your particular niche, you can follow LinkedIn hashtags, and you can explore more of these hashtags by using the Discover More tab which is included right underneath the Followed Hashtags tab.

Wrapping it all up

Whenever you're trying to achieve some kind of objective, you will need a solid roadmap or a plan that will guide you to that objective. If you lack this one crucial element, more than likely no amount of energy or effort will bring about the desired results. In the same way, your best LinkedIn marketing efforts may fall well short of your intentions, if they're not planned out and executed very carefully. When you're developing a strategy on LinkedIn for acquiring new customers, pay close attention to the fact that people have different needs at each stage of the customer journey, and your videos need to be closely aligned with those needs.