LinkedIn's Emergence as a Video Surveillance Marketing Power

LinkedIn has become one of the most powerful marketing sources for both integrators and manufacturers, surpassing trade magazines, banner ads, Twitter and other online advertising options.

In this note, we share data from our own campaigns as well as analysis of notable video surveillance vendors to show how you can and should make use out of LinkedIn for marketing.

Success for IPVM

LinkedIn offers two primary ways to market - 'Company Updates' and sponsored 'Company Updates'.

Company Updates are free, letting you create a short post with an image and a link to your website. You can then take any company updates and run them as ads.

Below is an example of a successful IPVM company update that we have sponsored.

We have generated over 80,000 impressions, 20,000+ were free and the other nearly 60,000 costs ~$1,200. Notice that this got us over 1,300 clicks back to IPVM, as well as 200+ likes and 100+ LinkedIn followers.

Most impressively, we have received at least 4 phone calls based on that update, converting into memberships. Surely, if that many people called, many more joined directly online.

Even without spending any money with LinkedIn, company updates are literally free marketing. As the chart below shows, IPVM gained over 600 click throughs in a week from LinkedIn users:

Indeed, these numbers are even more impressive, considering we had only started a LinkedIn company page the prior year and had less than 1200 followers then. We historically focused on Twitter, where we still have a strong presence and still get decent engagement but (1) there are now more qualified surveillance professionals on LinkedIn and (2) Twitter ads have become really bad, with much higher costs yet poor targeting abilities.

By contrast, most surveillance manufacturers, who started pages years ago, have thousands and even a few with 10,000+ company followers.

Liking

Even more important, LinkedIn shares content based on 'likes'. So let's say a company has 10 sales people and each of those sales people have 500 connections. If the company's sales people all like the company's update, that update will then be shown to the collective thousands of connections that their sales people have, multiplying the reach available.

Even sad petitions to get votes on pointless awards can generate many likes as the update below shows:

Between Arecont's own followers and the connections of the people who liked it, this post, that took 2 minutes to do, easily got thousands of impressions.

Moreover, LinkedIn likes are far more common than Twitter likes, plus Twitter likes do not get shared with others while LinkedIn's does.

Highly Qualified

More than any other social network, LinkedIn's impressions are much higher quality, for 3 reasons:

• Unlike Twitter, e.g., you must sign up with a real name, which radically cuts down spam accounts.
• People only sign up for LinkedIn if they are in business, reducing the problem of showing to random people, common on Facebook.
• The targeting LinkedIn offers is very precise.

Here is an example of how we targeted to very specific groups / regions / skills from our ad post last year:

There are so many options. Here are some other ideas:

• Want to hire Avigilon or Axis sales people? Run an ad that only shows to people who work at those companies.
• Want to get new integrator prospects in Kansas City? Restrict the location to Kansas City, job title to CXO or Director, skills to security management.
• Want to expand into retail? Run an ad to 10 or 20 of the largest retailers (select Wal-Mart, Target, etc.), restricting to LinkedIn profiles of those in LP or security roles.

Results

Posting company updates is a no-brainer, given that it is free, takes 2 minutes to post a nice update (with picture) and that it can easily reach thousands of people.

Even the 'sponsored' updates are attractive given the low cost involved and the ability to easily create, run and stop campaigns.

Sure, you could spend $5,000 for a trade mag ad or $10,000 to sponsor breath mints at a trade show, but the cost per impression and the ability to target are nowhere near close to what LinkedIn delivers. Try it. Let us know how it works for you.