B2B brands have increasingly turned to LinkedIn*’s live-streaming offering LinkedIn Live to elevate their messaging in creative new ways. Brands using LinkedIn Live are increasing engagement from virtually all public-facing sides of their organization, and pulling their professional communities closer than ever in real time using live-streaming.
The past year has been the first that LinkedIn has offered LinkedIn Live Events, a combination of LinkedIn Live and the professional platform’s other event features, and B2B brands have increasingly found value in the combined one-two punch, as we’ll explore.
The updated LinkedIn Live Events experience has allowed brands to create more robust virtual events, which have become de rigueur, must-have offerings for many brands since the pandemic began.
According to LinkedIn statistics, when brands use LinkedIn Live they have seen seven times the number of reactions and 24 times more community comments than when they publish standard non-live video content.
The sky’s the limit when it comes to how B2B brands can use LinkedIn Live. Here are 12 to get you started:
- Interviewing a Member of Your C-Suite
- Brand & Community-Building Events
- Answering Frequently-Asked Questions
- Talent & Career Branding Events
- Streaming a Keynote, Session, or Presentation
- Product Demonstrations
- Highlighting Special Events
- Streaming “Ask Me Anything” Episodes
- Introducing Various Team Members
- Deep-Dive Interviews
- Showcasing Behind The Scenes Workplace Culture
- Unveiling New Innovations & Product Launches
- Launching Episodic Content
- Announcing Major Brand News Live
- Sharing Tips and Tactics
Let’s take the lens-cap off and look at five brands that are elevating customer experiences by live-streaming with LinkedIn Live.
1 — Salesforce
Salesforce has turned to LinkedIn Live to elevate multiple areas of its live-streaming efforts, such as its Futureforce: Salesforce University Recruiting, with streams including “Exploring Salesforce | US & Canada (Non-Tech),” which has explored internship roles and more.
Salesforce has also creatively used LinkedIn Live to celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month, with “In honor of #HispanicHeritageMonth starting this week, join a conversation with J.R. Martinez,” and in a series of its BossTalks events such as “Episode #22 Owning Your Ambition – Shellye Archambeau.”
Additional Salesforce content live-streamed via LinkedIn Live has included interviews with a variety of guests including Catherine Price, science journalist, author, and the founder of Screen/Life Balance, who took a look at finding a better balance and reconnecting with the things that bring joy. Other live-streams looked at embracing change, such as in “How can we embrace change, and grow through its challenges? Find out on #BWellTogether with Cassandra Worth.”
LinkedIn Live events are also well-suited to playing an important role in successful B2B influencer marketing efforts, and as Salesforce global innovation evangelist Brian Solis recently noted in our 2022 B2B Influencer Marketing Research Report, businesses are seeing new levels of freedom when it comes to opportunities to innovate.
“When it comes to where B2B influencer marketing can take business in the next few years, our only limitations are our imaginations,” Brian observed.
During the early days of LinkedIn Live, Salesforce broadcast an 11-part series via LinkedIn Live, garnering some 600,000 organic viewers accompanied by a robust three percent engagement rate during the live-stream events, and the firm has continued to embrace LinkedIn’s streaming feature as it has matured over the past several years.
2 — Mitel
B2B telecommunications firm Mitel* has elevated its social live-streaming using LinkedIn Live for a wealth of varied online events, including a recent comprehensive discussion with company chief marketing officer Venkat Nagaswamy in, “Chatting w/ @Mitel CMO @VenkatNagaswamy,” along with a look at “Finding Your Soulmate in Business Communications,” with Daren Finney, senior vice president of global channels at Mitel.
Another of Mitel’s recent LinkedIn Live broadcasts used the medium to take an eye-opening look at “Marketing that Makes a Difference,” while additional live-streams have explored “What do you do when the world turns upside-down?” and a discussion on “What it takes to create successful digital marketing,“ featuring Hal Werner, global director of digital marketing and strategy at Mitel, who also sat down with us for an episode of Break Free B2B Marketing in “Break Free B2B Series: Hal Werner on the Intersection of Marketing Creativity and Analytics.”
3 — A.P. Moller – Maersk
Embracing its 1.3-million-plus LinkedIn page followers, global transport and logistics firm A.P. Moller – Maersk has taken to LinkedIn Live events with recent offerings such as an opportunity to meet various team-members, as in “Meet the Business Platforms Team.”
Maersk has also used LinkedIn Live to take a look at its hiring processes in, “Maersk Logistics & Services – Hiring Process,” along with examining how the firm addresses its array of sustainability efforts, in “Maersk Sustainability & Safety.”
4 — Demandbase
Demandbase has taken to LinkedIn Live for numerous live-streaming events, including a recent broadcast that examined some of the economic challenges that B2B organizations have been facing, with its “Current Economic Challenges & How B2B Leaders are Combating Them” event.
The company utilizes the Demandbase TV branding and an accompanying #DBTV hashtag for its LinkedIn Live events, and other recent live-stream events have included a look at the role of marketing data science, featuring Christopher Penn, co-founder and chief data scientist at TrustInsights.ai, and Sana Ghazi, principal data scientist at Demandbase, in “DB Live: What Is Marketing Data Science?”
Demandbase has also successfully incorporated live-streaming via LinkedIn Live into a robust online video strategy that includes regular features such as “5 Questions 4,” which asks notable B2B industry leaders five topical questions. Our CEO Lee Odden, for example, explored “5 Questions 4: Understanding Influencer Marketing and Why It’s Important for B2B companies with Lee Odden,” which shows the one-two punch of turning live content in derivative digital assets that can be repurposed over time.
Demandbase’s video efforts through live-streaming its DBTV content has propelled the company to several industry awards, including as a 2022 Digiday Awards finalist in the “Modernizing Video and TV” category, and as a winner in the Demand Gen Report’s 2022 Killer Content Awards Winner, being the Finnys winner for packaged or bundled content.
5 — Mercer
Global professional asset management firm Mercer has taken to LinkedIn Live with broadcasts on a variety of topics, including “Building more relatable, sustainable and people-shaped organizations” — part of its MercerChats series featuring notable industry speakers such as Tamara McCleary, CEO of Thulium and Kate Bravery, advisory solutions and insights global leader at Mercer.
Mercer has also used LinkedIn Live to explore “Evolving the employee experience for a new era of work,” with global experts discussing the key actions business leaders can implement to shift with changing employee experiences.
Build Peak Brand Awareness Using LinkedIn Live
Your own marketing initiatives can also benefit with the addition of a savvy LinkedIn Live strategy, and we hope that the examples we’ve seen here from Salesforce, Mitel, A.P. Moller – Maersk, Demandbase, and Mercer will prove useful in your own campaign efforts as we make the push towards 2023 and beyond.
Our latest social media poll has asked whether B2B marketers plan to use LinkedIn Live over the next 12 months, and you can vote over the next week either on our LinkedIn or Twitter pages.
You can learn more about how B2B brands including JPMorgan Chase, CompTIA, Microsoft, NASA, and SAP are using LinkedIn live in our additional article, “Livestream Marketing: 5 B2B Brands Rocking LinkedIn Live.”
Additionally, LinkedIn offers case studies highlighting how brands have found success using LinkedIn Live, including Adobe, Dentsu Aegis Network, and others.
More than ever before, creating award-winning B2B marketing that elevates, gives voice to talent, and humanizes with authenticity takes considerable time and effort, which is why more brands are choosing to work with a top digital marketing agency such as TopRank Marketing. Reach out to learn how we can help, as we’ve done for over 20 years for businesses ranging from LinkedIn, Dell and 3M to Adobe, Oracle, monday.com and many others.
* LinkedIn and Mitel are TopRank Marketing clients.
