Jason Miller leads global content for LinkedIn marketing solutions and was previously a Senior Manager at Marketo. He’s on every content marketing influencer list including Forbes, Online Marketing Institute, Onalytica and frequently keynotes at assorted conferences throughout the globe.

We talk with Jason about B2B content marketing predictions, the best examples of LinkedIn Company Pages for B2B brands and lots more.

Hear this Content Marketing Rockstar share valuable B2B content marketing insights and make sure to stay tuned through the end of the podcast for details on how to win a free copy of  Jason’s book: Welcome to the Funnel, the #1 Best Selling Content Marketing Book on Amazon.

The show sheet for today’s podcast is available at: http://www.triblio.com/blog/LinkedIn

Beginning of Transcript

Jason Miller

Jason Miller: Sure Jeff. Thanks for the kinds words there. So my name is Jason Miller. I lead global content for LinkedIn marketing solutions and previously I was running global content and social at Marketo, where I kind of really got my chops up on content, social and learned a tremendous amount about the demand generation. Just full integrated marketing strategy and I was lucky enough to bring those fields over here to LinkedIn.

Jeff Zelaya: And looking forward at 2015, we’re getting the year started. It’s an exciting time. For content marketing, what are your predictions? What are you imagining is going to happen this year in our industry?

Jason Miller: That’s a really good question. I mean I think the biggest thing is I think that B to B marketers are going to start taking mobile very seriously, right? So this three-screen experience, at LinkedIn we call it “from coffee to couch†and what we see from our own data is we see three screens that are the mobile, the tablet, and the desktop. They kind of all kick off in the morning while the desktop stays – kind of peaks in the afternoon as it should. It’s where it works and then the tablet kind of spikes in the evening as you get home and you settle down in front of your television or whatever with your tablet.

But what remains constant is the mobile, the mobile device, right? Because we can’t put these things down. I think that – we’re checking our mobile device every six seconds now and I feel like B to B marketers may not have put a big focus on mobile and I think that’s – I think it’s going to be – there’s going to be a major shift in that, from a demand generation standpoint to content standpoint to – just B to B marketers actually taking their content and making sure that it has this cohesive experience for the user across all three of those screens.

I think that’s going to be really big and beyond that, I think just full funnel marketing, I think it’s something that I’ve always thought was going to really take off. I think that’s the year for the marketers to actually – to really take – to really grasp the concept of full funnel marketing and actually put a value on their marketing departments [0:02:57] [Inaudible] think it is.

But yeah, just marketers actually just refining their process around the funnel and actually tracking these campaigns to drive real pipeline and real revenue.

Jeff Zelaya: I agree. Mobile is huge, becoming such a big deal. Six seconds, wow! Checking your device every six seconds, that’s just – I’m trying to wrap my mind around that. That’s incredible and you’re right. I mean the funnel and paying more attention to that. I know your book does an amazing job of covering the funnel and how to really leverage that as a marketer. So I recommend you guys pick that up and read more about how to make sure you use that this upcoming year.

I know LinkedIn has been – 2014 was a huge year for LinkedIn. I mean just more growth, more product launches, a lot of acquisitions, a lot of great stuff happening there and as content marketers, I am always trying to figure out more ways of how to leverage LinkedIn.

Looking at this past year and even now, what are some of the ways that you feel B to B content marketers are really taking advantage of the whole platform and putting it to use to accomplish our content marketing goals?

Jason Miller: Sure. I think there’s a great opportunity for marketers on LinkedIn specifically B to B marketers and even more specifically content marketers.

Where I see companies really having success are the ones that have a definitive company page or a showcase page and they’re posting updates. They’re sharing good content and they’re using the publishing platform, which we opened up to all members recently, to just get – it’s a content play but it’s a thought leadership play. It’s a lead gen play. It’s all this stuff kind of coming together, right?

So if you would have asked me a couple of years ago, using social, what do I prefer, lead gen or brand awareness, I would have said lead gen all day long. But now we’re in this world of getting back to the full funnel marketing where you need that top of funnel awareness. You need that brand awareness before you go into the lead gen. So you have to find a good balance between lead gen, brand awareness and thought leadership.

I think LinkedIn is a great spot for that, through company pages, through company updates, sharing content through the publishing platform, having your employees write and contribute original content to share with their networks. You can link that all back to your site, to your blog, et cetera and then take it a step up and using sponsored updates, paying to promote your own good content.

I mean you could take that – I always say like doing inbound marketing alone is sort of like hanging out with the same group of high school kids your whole life. You’re very limited on your audience because you’re only reaching the people who you already connected to.

If you want to break beyond that audience and get to the coveted second degree connections there and with some unprecedented targeting, you have to kind of pay to promote your own good content and [0:05:56] [Indiscernible]. It could be a PR play and again it could also fill in one of those two buckets between lead gen and brand awareness and also thought leadership.

So I kind of – that’s where I see companies really having success on LinkedIn is sharing good content, amplifying that content with some paid promotions and then taking a visual approach in, so you could bring SlideShare into the loop there and even LinkedIn groups, but the whole suite of products there working together. If you have good content and you’re not sharing there, I think you’re just missing opportunities.

Jeff Zelaya: Well, LinkedIn Blog has tons of resources and I recommend anyone to check that out because there’s so much you could do as a B to B marketer with LinkedIn that most of us are just kind of touching that tip of the iceberg and there’s so much more that – very powerful stuff that LinkedIn offers.

So look into the array of great resources that Jason and his team put out to take advantage of it all. Looking at some of the brands that you maybe are familiar with or names that pop on your radar, are there brands that you think are doing an effective job of really leveraging LinkedIn? Any names come to mind?

Jason Miller: Yeah. I mean there are always the usual suspects, right? The HubSpots and Marketos and Eloquas of the world. But Kapost I think does a really great job. They share great content. They have a great LinkedIn group which is basically their community, their own like external community of content marketers that they curate the conversation around. [0:07:25] [Indiscernible] resource on LinkedIn and I think you really get out of it what you put into it. So that’s one that comes to mind.

Moz.com, if you look at their company page, they do a fantastic job of sharing great content. They just put up a great cover photo for 2015 predictions from Rand, which I thought was really cool.

I mean there’s so many and a lot of the stuff is free to do. I’m thinking of a couple of other ones. I just wrote a post called Five B to C Companies Killing it on LinkedIn. People think that LinkedIn is always strictly B to B and that’s not the case. It works if you’re trying to connect, if you’re trying to market to a professional mindset, right? Because the audience on LinkedIn is much different than an audience on a different social network.

We like to think of like as people spend time on other social networks. But when they’re on LinkedIn, they invest time. They invest time on LinkedIn. So it depends on what your goals are as a marketer. But I think there are some great companies that are doing remarkable things on LinkedIn and those are the ones that are – just kind of come off the top of my head.

Copyblogger is another one with their Rainmaker Platform. They’re doing some really great stuff. MarketingProfs of course, Content Marketing Institute, as they should be, right? But yeah, there are companies from start-ups to enterprise. I could go on forever about that but yeah, that – we did – for a quick reference, we do – every year we do a thing called “the top company pages†where we showcase some of the top company pages in there, some of the results from there. So I would recommend taking a look at that as well for some inspiration.

Jeff Zelaya: Great examples and make sure that LinkedIn is on that list as well because you guys are obviously always the example of how to best leverage your own platform. You eat your own dog food. You practice what you preach and I love that.

Now, Jason, I know this comes up a lot. Is more content the answer? Is that going to be our focus, creating more and more content every single year that passes by?

Jason Miller: That’s a good question. I think that – Mark Schaefer wrote about content shock last year and it was all the rage for a while. I think Mark is a very smart marketer and he brought up some good points. But at the same time, we’re in a world of – where we call it – we don’t need more content. We need more relevant content.

So are you write just to be – are you creating content just to be creating content? Are you writing something because it’s a cool thing to write about or are you doing what Ann Handley calls “pathologically empathizing with your customers or prospects� Are you in their shoes? Your job as a content marketer is to create content that answers a question or a pain point better than anyone else, right? And then optimize that content. Put a little spin on it. Make it interesting and then promote the hell out of it.

So the answer is not more content. That’s not going to solve your problems. The answer is cutting through and getting to pure relevance, like answering the top questions in several formats. Optimize it to be found and then pay [0:10:34] [Phonetic] to promote that content yourself.

Again, search engines have killed these content forms and for good reason, because they were providing a bunch of bad content. But now it has leveled the playing field. So you can make an impact starting this afternoon if you want to, but you have to start now. Getting to the core of what is the most important question on your customers’ minds, what’s keeping them up at night, your customers and prospects’ minds and just write it better than anyone else.

Jeff Zelaya: There are skeptical people out there, those non-believers that we’re trying to convince that content is important and just like you said, it’s not just creating more of it, but making sure it’s relevant, that it has context, that it’s awesome, that it’s really targeted. But how do you ultimately turn that content, that great post that you wrote, that article, that webinar maybe that you’re delivering, how do you turn that into a return on the investment that you’ve made? How do we get ROI from our content?

Jason Miller: That’s a really great question and I think as marketers, I think we’ve solved that. There’s no more question about the ROI of content or social for that matter. But let me take a step back at the really basic part of content marketing here and where I’ve seen success and where I think anyone can start and make an impact very quickly. When I first started Marketo, I had a story. I had to tell a story of marketing automation and a very complicated story, which I wasn’t an expert at, at the time either.

So every time I would come across a problem, I would research it. I would ask some experts and I would write about it. If I found some solution to that problem, there has got to be more marketers out there who are my target audience, who are having the same problem. If I can write a quick and simple explanation of how I solved that problem and then put it on a blog, that’s content marketing at its core. You’re helping, not selling.

Then who is going to be top of mind when that person is ready to buy your products or service? Well, of course you are. So where do you get the ROI up? Well, of course you can do referral traffic. You can track conversions of course. But where the real magic comes in and where I talk about this in the book is what we call “big rock content,†is we take – there are two approaches. Take these problems, these little blog posts and wrap them up into an ebook [0:12:53] [Indiscernible] ebook. Everything you want to know about this product or this topic, right? Big content is what I see is the answer moving forward. We had this mentality of – they always say, “Think like a publisher.†Well, I think we need to not only think like a publisher but publish like a publisher.

The publisher wants to own a conversation. They release a book on that and they release a very well-written book and in this sense in content marketing, you could take all of these blog posts, roll them up into – with all these – solving all these pain points into a big rock piece of content and then repurpose it back out into info graphics, slideshows, webinars, events, et cetera, and that could fuel a demand gen and social strategy for up to a quarter, even up to a year in some cases if the topic is broad enough.

When I first started at LinkedIn, the biggest question – I will give you a great example. The biggest question on our customers and prospects’ minds was, “How do I use LinkedIn for marketing?†but not only that. But how do I use it effectively?

So we wrote – I wrote the book called The Sophisticated Marketer’s Guide to LinkedIn and that has been our biggest piece of content to date. It has driven millions of dollars in business and we track that with – through our different campaigns all the way back to pipeline to close revenue.

But again, we wanted to own that conversation. So we wrote the definitive guideline literally and then gave it away for free and the benefits have been – it has been a very fruitful piece of content for us and it continues to.

Jeff Zelaya: Yeah, I see $5 million in revenue from that guide that Jason Miller and his team created. So if you have the right technology in place …

Jason Miller: I was going to say that was – it drove over five million and just …

Jeff Zelaya: In 2014, in one year or a couple of – wow! So I mean that’s just a little example of what – and this is just one guide. I mean there’s so much more that the team is producing. So if you’re using the right technology, you’re tracking it, there’s no doubt anymore. There’s an ROI to be had from content and from social media.

Jason Miller: Exactly. What’s even more important to note there is that not only did I want to show – own this conversation around how to be the best marketer on LinkedIn. We use LinkedIn marketing solutions to drive that result. We wanted to prove that this – that LinkedIn marketing solutions worked as an integrated marketing solution.

Those results were – I mean on top of – of course we have email marketing, but everything else was driven strictly – almost strictly by LinkedIn marketing, LinkedIn’s own marketing solution, their own platform. Not LinkedIn proper, but not LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, our own showcase page, our own sponsored updates, et cetera. So it was a great experiment. It turned out well.

Jeff Zelaya: That’s incredible. I know you network and are always around some of the leaders in the content marketing space, of course you being one of them. What have you noticed that the top content marketers possess in terms of qualities or skills and what are some of the similarities you think between the elite in our field?

Jason Miller: So another great question. I think of this a little bit different, right? What I’ve learned over the past few years is that as a marketer, to really be successful in this day and age – it’s a very fast-moving industry, right? But I think you have – you don’t have to be an expert in any one thing. I talk about this in the book a lot too. It’s called the – like a hybrid marketer, if you will, like a renaissance marketer.

You don’t have to be an expert in any one thing, right? But you do have to understand how lots of things work together. So I’m not an expert in SEO but I understand very well how SEO affects content, social and how to optimize for it, right? I’m not an expert in demand gen but I understand how demand gen and email marketing worked to promote my content and how to measure that success and tie it back to pipeline.

So understanding all those things, even coding. I took some coding classes last year because I wanted to understand how the internet actually reads my webpages, how it interprets my content. The building blocks for the internet, I mean that’s important for marketers to understand when they’re delivering content and optimizing it.

So what I see as some really forward thinking renaissance marketers, if you will, are these folks who are not an expert in any one thing. You don’t put your eggs all in one basket. But you diversify and you learn as much as you possibly can about demand gen, SEO, social, content, email marketing, basic coding, basic HTML, basic CSS, all that stuff. I think if you have an understanding of that, then you’re going to do very well moving forward.

Jeff Zelaya: I agree. Again, you’re hitting it right on the head. Having that diverse skill set, having a little bit of everything is going to make you very dangerous in the content marketing space and knowing those skills and that important information. How you stay up-to-date? It seems like you’re – you have your hands on the pulse of content marketing and you’re always getting on that edge of knowing what’s coming up and trends that are emerging. So what are your sources of staying up-to-date? How do you do it, Jason?

Jason Miller: Well, I have – I mean I have a list of – I mean I use the Pulse reader. LinkedIn bought a reader a few years ago called Pulse, a news tool. So I have my little list built in there with blogs I subscribe to. I wrote a blog post on LinkedIn called – it’s in the book as well, called – I think it’s 16 blogs that I read religiously. But I mean these are the blogs that I’ve read over the years. I mean there’s a virtual PhD in anything you want to learn out there. You just have to be willing to go find it and consume the content, from podcasts to blogs to slideshow decks, to just industry events of course.

I just never stop, man. I mean I’m eternally curious and I know who to follow and I like to read their stuff. Moz.com is great for SEO. Copyblogger is some of the smartest folks in the planet, publishing great posts every day on content marketing.

Of course MarketingProfs, Ann Handley is a friend of mine and she does – everything she does I think is brilliant. Content Marketing Institute. I mean the list goes on. I have Brian Solis to get some more futuristic look at analyzing the world, Rebecca Lieb who I love from Altimeter Group. But yeah, just reading those when I can and lots of experimentation.

When I was at Marketo, this is interesting, when I was at Marketo, John Miller – no relation. I learned more at Marketo in two years than I did my entire life, because they have such a brilliant set of marketers and such a fast-moving industry. But John gave me a lot of leeway to do a lot of experimenting. He basically said, “You can do whatever you want. But you have to be able to track it back to some sort of ROI,†and with the marketing automation platform we use, we were able to do that.

But experiment in trying new things and what I called the George Costanza approach, the exact opposite. When somebody calls you out and says social doesn’t work for B to B marketing, go out there and prove that it does. But yeah, I think just between reading and networking and experimentation and trying new things. That’s how I keep up on stuff.

Jeff Zelaya: You’ve got like endless energy and I feel it on this call and I could see it just in your history. You used to work at Sony Music. You’re a rock star. I mean real rock star. You’re a huge fan of rock music. So this is probably the most important question I’m going to ask you today. What are your top three favorite rock bands of all time, Jason?

Jason Miller: Easy question, easy question. So yes, I do – I write a music blog called Rock N Roll Cocktail and I’m out a couple of nights a week shooting rock photography although I just had a little baby. So I have to cut out [0:20:39] [Indiscernible] now.

But top three bands, man, I will tell you what. Number one is The Cult. I love this band more than life itself. Maybe I’m overselling that a little bit. Cheap Trick is one of my all-time favorites. I got to [Indiscernible] those guys in November and then if I had to put a third in there, it would probably be – let’s select a good one. I would say the top two.

I really like – there’s a band called The Tea Party from Canada that I worship, one of my favorite bands, and I can’t believe I’m drawing a blank on a question that I should know so well. I celebrate Kiss’s entire catalog and in fact my desk here at LinkedIn has got a bunch of pictures all over of Kiss that I took at various concerts and memorabilia from Kiss shows and people always send me Kiss stuff. I got a bunch of baby stuff. It’s all Kiss-related. So yeah, I love Kiss.

End of Transcript

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