Four Reasons Why Your Brand Needs a LinkedIn Newsletter
While the trusty newsletter doesn’t always conjure images of super slick marketing, it’s long been a staple in many a brand’s repertoire – and with good reason.
Historically the concept prompts visions of clunky back-end platform navigation and endless work to grow your subscriber list.
But LinkedIn might have the answer to such woes. Their newsletter feature offers extensive functionality to help brands capitalise on the network’s huge member base (up again this quarter – in the region of 1bn according to LinkedIn’s latest stats).
Newsletters provide an excellent way of offering customers (both current and potential) that highly-prized value exchange. Why should they consider your business? What makes you stand out? More often than not, the answer is in supplying an answer to their question, a solution to their challenge, and some insight they may not have considered.
And while longer-form content isn’t for every brand, it can be a valuable way to create much-needed touchpoints with your audience.
So, should your business be creating a LinkedIn newsletter? The short answer is that it’s certainly worth giving it a go. With low risk and high reward, any brand can test the waters without too much input or commitment, not to mention benefits such as:
1. It’s Easy to Execute
And I mean really easy. In a few short clicks, even those unacquainted with the likes of WordPress will find professional-looking content appearing before their eyes.
Start with a simple title, description and image (often the brand logo), then add the basics of any article – headline, description, cover image – to the intuitive, user-friendly system.
If you really want, you can even throw in video to keep things more exciting and dynamic.
2. You can Choose if it Comes From a Brand or Person
And, in truth, there are benefits to both. A brand newsletter is the traditional way to go, enabling all of the credibility and insights to sit within the business and craft the desired image.
On the other hand, many companies put forward stakeholders with whom they want their audience to associate knowledge and insight. In this instance, a personal newsletter offers the ideal profile-building opportunity.
Either way, it’s great to have the choice.
3. It Supplies a Read-Made Audience of Engaged Users
Once the first newsletter is published, anyone following your LinkedIn page will receive a notification to let them know of its existence – already a huge bonus compared to the traditional newsletter.
From there, they can choose to subscribe and will receive notifications both in-app and via email, a nice double whammy from LinkedIn.
Even better, users don’t need to be logged in to LinkedIn to view the content (an easy way to lose people is the dreaded ‘enter your password’ pop-up) – meaning visibility doesn’t get lost along the way.
So, LinkedIn makes it nice and easy for an already-engaged audience, who’ve taken the time to follow you on a social channel, to interact with you in a new way.
4. It Provides a Boost to your LinkedIn Channel
LinkedIn newsletters offer the benefit of automatically turning those who subscribe into followers of the page – another nice little bonus and great way to expand your audience.
And, of course, every time subscribers receive the notification that a newsletter is now live, it reminds them of the great content available only a click away, on the profile of the publisher.
Like all things, LinkedIn definitely has areas to improve. For example, we found that navigation to the newsletter can be tricky, as it doesn’t abide by the surely logical option of living on the LinkedIn profile that hosts it. On balance though, we’d advise brands give it a go.
If you’d like to learn more about social media strategy, feel free to reach out to Alex Dixon.
The author: Alex Dixon is a senior social media strategy director at WPR who specialises in using Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and X to keep clients ahead of the curve when it comes to social media marketing.