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Do LinkedIn Newsletters Actually Get Results for Brands?

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Do LinkedIn Newsletters Actually Get Results for Brands?

The notifications keep popping up in the My Network section of my LinkedIn account. But they’re not the usual request to connect. Instead, they’re invitations from people asking me to subscribe to their newsletters.

I received six click-to-subscribe requests on one recent day. I’d already subscribed to a newsletter or two through the platform. Why the sudden onslaught of requests? Did everybody realize the power of newsletters at the same time?

The answer was simple: LinkedIn expanded its newsletter creation feature to more people recently (and will continue to roll it out to even more in the coming months.)

I started to wonder: Do (personal and corporate) brands find these newsletters beneficial? How hard are they to create?

To answer these questions (and more), I turned to brands and agencies who use the LinkedIn newsletter, one of the people who worked on the newsletter feature, and LinkedIn’s published guidance.

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Connect through conversations and ideas

The LinkedIn newsletter capability grew naturally from the platform’s articles feature, according to Lorraine K. Lee, who served as editorial lead for the LinkedIn newsletter product launch.

The idea is to help the LinkedIn audience stay up to date on topics and conversations important to them through content created by the people they’ve connected with and brands they follow. It also gives brands and other newsletter creators the opportunity to connect with their followers on topics they are (or want to be) known for.

Lorraine advises any brand or individual to focus on content that’s genuine and open. “A company that’s writing a newsletter each week sharing high-level policies or updates isn’t going to get a lot of traction.

A company that shares employee stories or struggles the HR team faced when implementing remote work policies is.”

“Any time you can tell a story and show what’s behind the curtain — that’s what will help you engage and grow your audience,” says Lorraine, who now heads editorial at Prezi.

Tell a story and show what’s behind the curtain to engage and grow your @LinkedIn newsletter audience, says @lorraineklee via @AnnGynn and @CMIContent. Click To Tweet

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Get results with repurposed content

Andy Crestodina, co-founder of Orbit Media, created Digital Marketing Tips on LinkedIn when LinkedIn made the newsletter option available by invitation only. The results have been crazy, he says. In the first 10 months, he gained over 100,000 subscribers. Today, more than 118,000 people subscribe to the weekly LinkedIn newsletter.

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His motivation was simple – he wanted to get more value from older blog posts. “Virtually all of our content is evergreen, so I had a virtual assistant start moving old articles into LinkedIn to give them exposure to a new audience. They required very little adaptation, so it was a near-zero effort,” Andy says.

Each LinkedIn newsletter article is about half or two-thirds of the original, with a call to action to read the rest on the Orbit Media website.

The strategy paid off in increased traffic to the Orbit Media website. Since introducing the LinkedIn newsletter in early 2021, more than 10,056 visitors have come to his site from LinkedIn, and almost 90% of them were new visitors.

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“For years, we warned against building on rented land,” Andy says, “but when the location of that rented land is amazing and the cost is low, you should go ahead and rent.”

A @LinkedIn #newsletter strategy based on repurposed #content worked for @Orbiteers. So go ahead and rent if the location is amazing and the cost is low, says @Crestodina via @AnnGynn and @CMIContent. Click To Tweet

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Tweak content for the platform to earn subscribers and leads

Christina Daves, president of CastMedicDesigns, launched the Get PR Famous newsletter on LinkedIn and now has over 2,500 subscribers. (Get PR Famous is also the name of a course and live event she created.)

“I am repurposing content by taking old articles or blog posts and updating them. I also include YouTube videos I’ve done in the past that will help with that particular topic,” she says. “I’m a huge proponent of reusing your content and not always reinventing the wheel. You just need to tweak it specifically for this audience and the topic you’ve chosen.”

Christina says she’s been blown away by the results. She publishes twice a week and averages 1,500 to 2,000 views per newsletter – about 10 to 20 times more than she gets on regular posts. Each newsletter also nets her one or two consultations with prospects.

“More and more people are jumping on board, which will dilute the excitement and newness of this type of content. (But) provide great content, and people will stay with you,” Christina says.

More people are creating LinkedIn newsletters, which could dilute excitement. But if you provide great #content, people will stay with you, advises @PRforAnyone via @AnnGynn and @CMIContent. Click To Tweet

Test which format readers prefer

VEM Tooling made LinkedIn its primary newsletter distribution platform based on the surge of readers and positive reactions it received, according to Sales Director David Reid. He says subscribers find the LinkedIn newsletter format more comfortable and enjoyable than traditional email newsletters, though both formats feature the same content.

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As far as a marketing tool, David says, VEM has found more success with its LinkedIn newsletters because it reaches a broader audience and allows them to see reactions from readers who click on like and other emojis or write comments. (LinkedIn newsletters also are less likely to get stopped by spam filters than traditional email newsletters, he says.)

How to get started

The first step in creating a LinkedIn newsletter is to see if the option is available to you. To find out, go to the Creator hub by visiting the Resources section of your LinkedIn profile page. Here you will see if the newsletter feature is available:

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According to LinkedIn, the newsletter creator access is available to members (and brand pages) that have:

  • At least 150 followers or connections
  • Recently shared original content
  • Agreed to adhere to its professional community policies

(Note: Creator mode will affect your profile appearance, moving the Activity and Featured sections before the About section. It also allows you to use hashtags underneath your title.)

From there, the process is simple. At the top of your LinkedIn home page, click “Write an article.” Create the content and then click “create a newsletter.”

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LinkedIn offers these tips as best practices:

  • Choose a name that clearly describes your newsletter’s content focus.
  • Make sure to include your logo in the newsletter and a cover photo for each article.
  • Be direct in your article headlines.
  • Engage subscribers by adding a few lines of commentary or asking a question when you share the newsletter.

Once you publish your first newsletter, LinkedIn automatically sends a newsletter invitation that includes your name and newsletter title to your connections and followers. You also receive a dedicated newsletter page link you can share on LinkedIn and other social media platforms.

Another tool for your content kit

LinkedIn newsletters offer an option for delivering content to and interacting with a community that may not want another email newsletter popping up in their inboxes.

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Even if you aren’t the earliest bird to the LinkedIn Newsletter feature, you can still test the tactic to see if it helps your content fly further and attract a wider audience.

Want to learn how to balance, manage, and scale great content experiences across all your essential platforms and channels? Join us at ContentTECH Summit this March in San Diego. Browse the schedule or register today.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute




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How To Combine PR and Content Marketing Superpowers To Achieve Business Goals

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A figure pulls open a dress shirt to reveal the term PR on a Superman-like costume, reflecting the superpower resulting from combining content and PR.

A transformative shift is happening, and it’s not AI.

The aisle between public relations and content marketing is rapidly narrowing. If you’re smart about the convergence, you can forever enhance your brand’s storytelling.

The goals and roles of content marketing and PR overlap more and more. The job descriptions look awfully similar. Shrinking budgets and a shrewd eye for efficiency mean you and your PR pals could face the chopping block if you don’t streamline operations and deliver on the company’s goals (because marketing communications is always first to be axed, right?).

Yikes. Let’s take a big, deep breath. This is not a threat. It’s an opportunity.

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Reach across the aisle to PR and streamline content creation, improve distribution strategies, and get back to the heart of what you both are meant to do: Build strong relationships and tell impactful stories.

So, before you panic-post that open-to-work banner on LinkedIn, consider these tips from content marketing, PR, and journalism pros who’ve figured out how to thrive in an increasingly narrowing content ecosystem.

1. See journalists as your audience

Savvy pros know the ability to tell an impactful story — and support it with publish-ready collateral — grounds successful media relationships. And as a content marketer, your skills in storytelling and connecting with audiences, including journalists, naturally support your PR pals’ media outreach.

Strategic storytelling creates content focused on what the audience needs and wants. Sharing content on your blog or social media builds relationships with journalists who source those channels for story ideas, event updates, and subject matter experts.

“Embedding PR strategies in your content marketing pieces informs your audience and can easily be picked up by media,” says Alex Sanchez, chief experience officer at BeWell, New Mexico’s Health Insurance Marketplace. “We have seen reporters do this many times, pulling stories from our blogs and putting them in the nightly news — most of the time without even reaching out to us.”

Acacia James, weekend producer/morning associate producer at WTOP radio in Washington, D.C., says blogs and social media posts are helpful to her work. “If I see a story idea, and I see that they’re willing to share information, it’s easier to contact them — and we can also backlink their content. It’s huge for us to be able to use every avenue.” 

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Kirby Winn, manager of PR at ImpactLife, says reporters and assignment editors are key consumers of their content. “And I don’t mean a news release that just hit their inbox. They’re going to our blog and consuming our stories, just like any other audience member,” he says. “Our organization has put more focus into content marketing in the past few years — it supports a media pitch so well and highlights the stories we have to tell.”

Storytelling attracts earned media that might not pick up the generic news topic. “It’s one thing to pitch a general story about how we help consumers sign up for low-cost health insurance,” Alex says. “Now, imagine a single mom who just got a plan after years of thinking it was too expensive. She had a terrible car accident, and the $60,000 ER bill that would have ruined her financially was covered. Now that’s a story journalists will want to cover, and that will be relatable to their audience and ours.” 

2. Learn the media outlet’s audience

Seventy-three percent of reporters say one-fourth or less of the stories pitched are relevant to their audiences, according to Cision’s 2023 State of the Media Report (registration required).

PR pros are known for building relationships with journalists, while content marketers thrive in building communities around content. Merge these best practices to build desirable content that works for your target audience and the media’s audiences simultaneously.

WTOP’s Acacia James says sources who show they’re ready to share helpful, relevant content often win pitches for coverage. “In radio, we do a lot of research on who is listening to us, and we’re focused on a prototype called ‘Mike and Jen’ — normal, everyday people in Generation X … So when we get press releases and pitches, we ask, ‘How interested will Mike and Jen be in this story?’” 

3. Deliver the full content package (and make journalists’ jobs easier)

Cranking out content to their media outlet’s standards has never been tougher for journalists. Newsrooms are significantly understaffed, and anything you can do to make their lives easier will be appreciated and potentially rewarded with coverage. Content marketers are built to think about all the elements to tell the story through multiple mediums and channels.

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“Today’s content marketing pretty much provides a package to the media outlet,” says So Young Pak, director of media relations at MedStar Washington Hospital Center. “PR is doing a lot of storytelling work in advance of media publication. We (and content marketing) work together to provide the elements to go with each story — photos, subject matter experts, patients, videos, and data points, if needed.”   

At WTOP, the successful content package includes audio. “As a radio station, we are focused on high-quality sound,” Acacia James says. “Savvy sources know to record and send us voice memos, and then we pull cuts from the audio … You will naturally want to do someone a favor if they did you one — like providing helpful soundbites, audio, and newsworthy stories.”  

While production value matters to some media, you shouldn’t stress about it. “In the past decade, how we work with reporters has changed. Back in the day, if they couldn’t be there in person, they weren’t going to interview your expert,” says Jason Carlton, an accredited PR professional and manager of marketing and communications at Intermountain Health. “During COVID, we had to switch to virtual interviewing. Now, many journalists are OK with running a Teams or Zoom interview they’ve done with an expert on the news.”

BeWell’s Alex Sanchez agrees. “I’ve heard old school PR folks cringe at the idea of putting up a Zoom video instead of getting traditional video interviews. It doesn’t really matter to consumers. Focus on the story, on the timeliness, and the relevance. Consumers want authenticity, not super stylized, stiff content.”

4. Unite great minds to maximize efficiency

Everyone needs to set aside the debate about which team — PR or content marketing — gets credit for the resulting media coverage.

At MedStar Washington Hospital Center, So Young and colleagues adopt a collaborative mindset on multichannel stories. “We can get the interview and gather information for all the different pieces — blog, audio, video, press release, internal newsletter, or magazine. That way, we’re not trying to figure things out individually, and the subject matter experts only have to have that conversation once,” she says.

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Regular, cross-team meetings are essential to understand the best channels for reaching key audiences, including the media. A story that began life as a press release might reap SEO and earned media gold if it’s strategized as a blog, video, and media pitch.

“At Intermountain Health, we have individual teams for media relations, marketing, social media, and hospital communications. That setup works well because it allows us to bring in the people who are the given experts in those areas,” says Intermountain’s Jason Carlton. “Together, we decide if a story is best for the blog, a media pitch, or a mix of channels — that way, we avoid duplicating work and the risk of diluting the story’s impact.”

5. Measure what matters

Cutting through the noise to earn media mentions requires keen attention to metrics. Since content marketing and PR metrics overlap, synthesizing the data in your team meetings can save time while streamlining your storytelling efforts.

“For content marketers, using analytical tools such as GA4 can help measure the effectiveness of their content campaigns and landing pages to determine meaningful KPIs such as organic traffic, keyword rankings, lead generation, and conversion rates,” says John Martino, director of digital marketing for Visiting Angels. “PR teams can use media coverage and social interactions to assess user engagement and brand awareness. A unified and omnichannel approach can help both teams demonstrate their value in enhancing brand visibility, engagement, and overall business success.”

To track your shared goals, launch a shared dashboard that helps tell the combined “story of your stories” to internal and executive teams. Among the metrics to monitor:

  • Page views: Obviously, this queen of metrics continues to be important across PR and content marketing. Take your analysis to the next level by evaluating which niche audiences are contributing to these views to further hone your storytelling targets, including media outlets.
  • Earned media mentions: Through a media tracker service or good old Google Alerts, you can tally the echo of your content marketing and PR. Look at your site’s referral traffic report to identify media outlets that send traffic to your blog or other web pages.
  • Organic search queries: Dive into your analytics platform to surface organic search queries that lead to visitors. Build from those questions to develop stories that further resonate with your audience and your targeted media.
  • On-page actions: When visitors show up on your content, what are they doing? What do they click? Where do they go next? Building next-step pathways is your bread and butter in content marketing — and PR can use them as a natural pipeline for media to pick up more stories, angles, and quotes.

But perhaps the biggest metric to track is team satisfaction. Who on the collaborative team had the most fun writing blogs, producing videos, or calling the news stations? Lean into the natural skills and passions of your team members to distribute work properly, maximize the team output, and improve relationships with the media, your audience, and internal teams.

“It’s really trying to understand the problem to solve — the needle to move — and determining a plan that will help them achieve their goal,” Jason says. “If you don’t have those measurable objectives, you’re not going to know whether you made a difference.”

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Don’t fear the merger

Whether you deliberately work together or not, content marketing and public relations are tied together. ImpactLife’s Kirby Winn explains, “As soon as we begin to talk about (ourselves) to a reporter who doesn’t know us, they are certainly going to check out our stories.”

But consciously uniting PR and content marketing will ease the challenges you both face. Working together allows you to save time, eliminate duplicate work, and gain free time to tell more stories and drive them into impactful media placements.

Register to attend Content Marketing World in San Diego. Use the code BLOG100 to save $100. Can’t attend in person this year? Check out the Digital Pass for access to on-demand session recordings from the live event through the end of the year.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

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Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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