As a social medium, LinkedIn remains a platform that is little exploited from a purely marketing perspective. There are relatively few advertisements or “promotional” posts by celebrities to promote a product or service. However, a new trend is gradually taking hold on the platform: LinkedIn’s version of influencer marketing. Brands are teaming up with local experts from niche industries to raise awareness of their products, services or employer brand. Let’s take a closer look at this phenomenon, which is both global… and very local.
Anyone who regularly frequents LinkedIn will have noticed: for some time now, coaches and consultants of all kinds have been taking over the platform. They feed the news feed with a never-ending stream of stories, allegories and words of wisdom to demonstrate their professional worth. But Arthur Durand, founder of the Copilote agency, which specializes in influencer marketing on LinkedIn, puts this movement into context:
Finding content creators on LinkedIn remains a fairly recent phenomenon,” he says. On the platform as a whole, we’ve gone from 2% – 3 years ago – to 5% of users speaking out on a regular basis. So it’s still a niche market.
Even more recently, brands have decided to partner with prolific users who have built up a professional circle on LinkedIn. In concrete terms, brands partner with users who have established credibility in a given industry. They pay these users (on a fixed-rate basis or according to the performance of their publication) to produce one or more publications designed to talk about the brand.
An upcoming trend?
Influencer marketing, the LinkedIn version, has already taken shape in Europe and the United States. And it’s now arriving in Canada.
As far as I know, this is one of the first influencer marketing campaigns in Quebec on LinkedIn,” says Arthur Durand, founder of the Copilote agency.
The first phase of the campaign ran from June 15 to July 15. And the influencers selected for the operation didn’t have 100k subscribers in the bank. Instead, the idea was to approach industry leaders: Nicolas Demarthe (54,000 subscribers), Caroline Boyce (17,500 subscribers) and Vincent Mazrou (14,500 subscribers), to name but a few, are well-known figures in the Quebec recruitment world.
What pleasantly surprised us,” says Arthur Durand, “was the number of interactions we were able to achieve with our influencers. Under each publication, we had around a hundred positive interactions including comments, likes and shares.”
Outside recruitment and HR… what potential?
This campaign is aimed at an audience of HR managers, who have a strong presence on LinkedIn. The question then becomes, is there any real potential for influencer marketing in other industries? Copilote’s founder believes there is:
Entrepreneurship brings a lot of people together on LinkedIn – this includes business leaders, solopreneurs and coaches who speak out and publish regularly. Marketing managers have a strong presence on the platform. There are also a lot of sales reps; they don’t create content, but they are present, because their clientele is there.”
So the potential is there. It’s the tone that counts.
On LinkedIn, the more you sell… the less you sell; the more you promote a product or service, the less likely people are to want to comment and interact with the brand. Users prefer personal stories and experience sharing, which are less aggressive.”
Now it’s up to micro-influencers to write good stories!
