We love a good success story, especially when it showcases a less traditional approach to marketing. Global events management firm IQPC was hard hit by the annihilation of face-to-face events. They pivoted to virtual and turned their focus to digital media, with LinkedIn becoming one of their key channels for marketing communication. In this episode, we talk to Marketing Director, Dionne Vaz, about her year on LinkedIn and how IQPC used the channel to connect and convert.
Dionne strongly believed that LinkedIn would complement IQPC’s marketing, build the brand and grow their database – even though email marketing was the company’s best performing channel. She was so convinced that LinkedIn would help the company connect with their B2B audience, that she decided to conduct her own experiment. Post consistently, respond to comments on the company page and analyze data-driven results.
“I started posting consistently. And once I hit about five to 7k views, I went back and showed them (the rest of the team) the results. Obviously, I had their attention. Our biggest question though, was ‘can we replicate this?’ So, we got a group of five people consisting of sales, marketing, and product. And we each picked certain areas that we were going to focus on. And within a week, we got three to 10k views on our posts. And at this point, we got the rest of the New York team as well as the global offices to take notice and start posting on LinkedIn.”
She discovered that:
🔥 Posts with personal stories got more engagement
🔥 Sharing a variety of content, even bite-sized bits, was more effective
🔥 Writing personalized notes increased connection
🔥 Content could influence sales, even in other departments
🔥 Personality is key!
According to Dionne, you need to write on what you know (and what you want to be known for), on what customers want to hear, and relate this back to your business.
Her strategy?
“Go back to your pillars. That which you want to be known for. Then start looking for the people using those hashtags, or talking about those kinds of topics. And you can easily start following a couple of key hashtags. And then once you find a conversation over there, just jump in, and give your perspective. I think that’s the important thing. It’s not just about saying great idea, great comment. It’s about bringing your perspective and personality as well. I’ll also connect with the right kinds of people, the kinds of people that I’m interested in talking to or learning from, and the kinds of people that I want to see my posts.”
On using analytics:
“Shield Analytics allows you to see how much engagement you’ve had. So how many comments or how many likes, or shares. And it’s an easy place to see trends… for the past year we’ll have all my stories ranked (and can rank these in whichever order we want). And I think that’s important to identify trends. That’s how I knew a lot of the personal stories were working. And then the other thing I found out was that in posts that had personal stories, my comments grew by 1,530%, profile views were up 235%. And engagement was up 48%. Then I noticed the trend of posts with numbers doing really well. So, I think analytics are important, even more important when you’re doing this as a team, because then you can start learning what’s working from each other.”
Find out more about Dionne’s data-led insights and how you can replicate them on this episode. Or connect with Dionne on LinkedIn.
If you’d like to chat more about your marketing concerns (or any of your content!), please give us a shout at C+P Digital – we would love to help!
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And as always, sweet dreams😴…well, hopefully!
