LinkedIn Best Practices & New Features for Investment Firms

Prior known as the bland corporate cousin of the global social media family, LinkedIn now offers comprehensive brand benefits. Today’s LinkedIn is more than a utilitarian networker, it can be an essential part of the financial brand marketing rotation, providing a crucial digital puzzle piece in developing a consistent and well-rounded online image and especially important in talent acquisition. By rethinking its mission and presence, LinkedIn has grown into an effective multi-dimensional resource for an ever-expanding list of social utility:

• • Engaging potential clients
  • Managing firm reputation
  • Promoting thought leadership
  • Monitoring competitor activity
  • Scoping out journalists for media exposure
  • Fostering brand credibility
  • Attracting talent & goodwill

And this list just scratches the surface. To help your company get positioned to truly benefit from these features and everything else that LinkedIn provides to financial and investment firms looking to find a marcom advantage, we will describe in detail three essential best practices necessary to long-term and ongoing success:

1. 1. Optimize Your Company Page
   2. Utilize Lesser-Known (But Highly-Effective) Features
   3. Become an Engaging Thought Leader With A Consistent Cadence

1. Optimize your company page

More so than other social networking sites, your profile page on LinkedIn is an absolutely critical factor for strong financial brand reputation. Bare profiles don’t mean much on Twitter, but they are make-or-break for the more buttoned-up LinkedIn. This is where your house must be in order to avoid the derision of discerning potential talent and clients. So, make sure to do the following:

Ensure your taglines, missions and firm descriptions are clear and concise. Know your formatting and word count limits to make sure as much relevant information is within view. If you find your content is too long, potentially revise shorter to create a tighter brand presence that helps convey you understand how to operate within parameters.

Make sure your company page is always up to date. Ensure your firm logo and summary section are aligned with what is used on your website to ensure consistency with your brand. Also use your core brand descriptions to create recognition and allow clients to quickly identify your profile.

Be clear about what you do and how you do it. Make it immediately evident what your core service is as well as the essence of your role in the financial space. If you can provide the user with a full firm experience without requiring a visit to your external site, that is an ideal LinkedIn experience.

Upgrade imagery to help tell your story. Find visuals that are exciting and unique, yet relevant. Always think about what resonates with your target audience and how it relates to your firm’s unique story. Successful brand imagery and design will help bolster your online presence and build a narrative. Also make sure you have a strong landscape image that conveys both professionalism and quality.

Pro-tip: Go even further with imagery by creating a custom company landscape image for employees to use on their personal profile pages, which helps increase your brand visibility and reach while creating a more human connection.

2. Utilize Lesser-Known, But Highly Effective Features

While the core features of LinkedIn are well-known, there is more than meets the eye, with the platform recently beefing up their offerings to help optimize your firm’s profile effectiveness. Showcasing a well-rounded page utilizing LinkedIn’s lesser known, yet highly effective features could just get you those lead gen numbers and organic exposure your investment brand is looking for.

LIFE Section. Holding prime real estate on your profile, the Life section provides you with a highly curated opportunity to drill down into what your firm is all about, the type of people you employ, and the values they hold. It is a clean and comprehensive snapshot of work culture, as well as a great avenue to engage and attract discerning, purpose-driven talent looking for more from their employer.

Showcase Pages.Designed to spotlight individual brands and business units, LinkedIn Showcase pages are the perfect way to segment your inbound LinkedIn traffic and aid in business development. Acting as extensions of your primary page, these sub-categories allow you to highlight all aspects of your brand while creating the opportunity for more thoughtful and targeted posts without blasting your followers with a flow of disparate content, which can hurt engagement and retention.

Live Streams. LinkedIn’s Live feature allows your firm to build deeper connections and drive more engagement through real-time thought leadership content within an interactive platform. This not only boosts visibility (LinkedIn’s algorithm prioritizes quality live content), but it can also create anticipation for your followers to look forward to, such as a live Q&As, major press interviews, or engaging presentations showcasing your firm’s new offerings. This will provide a more in-depth look into how you operate and think while also humanizing your firm.

3. Become an Engaging Thought Leader with a Reliable Presence & Cadence

LinkedIn wants users to consume content and engage more in conversation, so creating a professional, highly visible and value-added presence is paramount. This all starts by the amount of activity displayed and organized every week. Firms should create biweekly to monthly content calendars of diverse and thought-provoking social posts to be deployed 2-3 times per week, a cost-effective general cadence that will set in motion the building of potential leads, without overwhelming your marketing department.

Be The Expert. Everyone is trying to learn something new on LinkedIn, either personally or professionally, and by creating thought leadership that helps connect dots or showcases your understanding of key concepts in your field, you are effectively educating audiences and solidifying your status as a value-added part of the larger network.

Promote Posts. For an extra boost in content reach, LinkedIn promoted posts could also be beneficial in pushing long-form thought leadership pieces that can target specifically B2B or B2C lead generation. Their geotargeting can save on your ad budget, while focusing on a much more relevant and receptive audience by optimizing their platform to sync with your firm’s existing CRM and gathering leads directly for you.

Utilize Engaging Media. On the topic of engaging content, to keep your audience wanting more, it’s best practice to break up your content in various post forms that don’t just include text. Be sure to switch it up by investing in other forms of custom social assets such as short-form explanatory videos of your strategies, colorful GIFs and branded images. Not only will this keep your audience engaged, it will further authenticate your brand as well.

Adapt With Analytics. An easy way to see which posts are performing well is to take a look at your LinkedIn insights. Once you’ve identified your best performing posts, you’ll be able to gain insight into which topics and post types resonate best with your audience. Then, you can create a content strategy that utilizes this information and see if you get an increased level of engagement.

What your social media presence says about your firm

LinkedIn now has the features to make investing beyond the basics worthwhile for financial firms. Developing a strong presence and using the platform as part of your targeted social media strategy is not just a nice-to-have, but it is essential in building a well-rounded brand and in generating leads.

Whether your clients are retail investors, advisors, or institutions, we can help develop an effective LinkedIn strategy to deepen your brand presence and resonate with your target audience. We have helped firms build their identity, target the right audience, and effectively deliver their message, all with a keen eye on how to help them grow their business. Serving clients from alternative investments and mutual funds to financial service providers and institutional investors, we deliver branding, marketing, and public relations solutions.

Contact MBC Strategic to see how your investment firm can benefit from our investment industry expertise and extensive marketing experience in today’s changing digital environment.