How To Leverage LinkedIn Polls | Brafton

If you’ve spent much time marketing business-to-business products or services, you’re likely familiar with LinkedIn. It’s a platform tailor-made for your needs: a place to encounter fellow professionals and share your expertise.

But if you’re just posting normal, text-based posts on LinkedIn, you’re missing out on a few extra value-adding options. Take the LinkedIn polls feature, for example. These quick surveys are a powerful, versatile tool with several possibilities for your brand.

You can use the results of LinkedIn polls to inspire your marketing content creation, ensuring that your posts are based on the real thoughts and feelings of your audience. You can also benefit from learning more about your customers in general, and from engaging so directly with them on a regular cadence.

As with any content marketing tool, the success of your LinkedIn polls will depend on your approach. Fortunately, we’ve got you covered with best practices based on our industry observations and firsthand deployment of LinkedIn polls to learn about our own audience. Let’s get started.

The Value of LinkedIn Polls for Marketing

When deciding which tactics and technologies to include in your marketing strategy, ROI is king. What kind of return can you expect on a given investment? LinkedIn polls look very good through an ROI lens, not only because they’re quick and inexpensive to deploy, but they also provide multiple streams of value if you know how to read the results effectively.

The following are some of the notable benefits of LinkedIn polls as part of your marketing campaign, covering a wide spectrum of value:

Engagement and Interaction

One of the most promising aspects of LinkedIn polls is their interactive nature. When you post a poll on your corporate LinkedIn page, you’re inviting your target audience to get involved. Rather than passively reading a post (or not) and moving on, people will be compelled to share their feelings on an issue or idea.

Interaction on LinkedIn posts can become the beginning of a virtuous cycle for your brand. When users interact with your posts, that can help your continued brand visibility and reach on LinkedIn. Building a strong social media brand involves creating content that gets people to engage. A poll is a way of directly asking for interaction, without forcing respondents to go out of their way.

Market Research and Insights

Polls aren’t just quick ways to touch base with your target audience — they let you know what people are thinking, in near real-time. This means you’re immediately aware of the preferences, opinions and behaviors of the people who follow your brand on social media.

Information about your audience can become fuel for marketing and branding efforts. Whether you’re asking direct questions about people’s opinions of your brand or launching bigger and more general queries, it’s valuable to have a way to take the pulse of your industry quickly and with virtually no overhead.

Content Creation Fuel

Your LinkedIn poll results don’t have to be an indirect inspiration for your content; they can be the direct seeds for specific posts. This is a strategy we use at Brafton. We run polls on specific topics in the content marketing world, then write new posts directly inspired by what we’ve learned. Here are a couple of examples:

Once we write up our findings, we blast the resulting article out to our social followers and email subscribers. We can also share a link to our new post as a comment on the original poll. This means the poll can have engagement value even after it closes, because people curious to learn more about the results can check out a whole blog post or infographic breaking them down.

Lead Generation

If you work in a field that requires nurturing leads along a funnel, LinkedIn polls can have a special meaning for you: They can serve as early steps in courting new clients. A poll response can be an early interaction with someone who becomes a strong prospect.

Optimizing your content marketing to focus on attracting and nurturing leads means offering potential clients many ways to keep interacting with your brand. Once they’ve answered the poll, for instance, they could sign up for emails on similar subjects, allowing you to guide them down the funnel.

Cost-Effective Marketing Performance

The ROI scales for LinkedIn polls tend to be very lopsided. Not only do they provide a variety of positive outcomes for your brand, but they also require virtually no spending on your part. While there is an expenditure of employee time and effort in setting up a poll, the process is quick and frictionless.

Considering how little strain goes into the creation of a LinkedIn survey, the rewards can be overwhelming. Delivering both engagement and audience intelligence, these polls are a great piece of content marketing collateral. Most of the investment comes well before you launch any given poll — when you’re building your LinkedIn audience in the first place.

How To Set Up a Poll on LinkedIn

There’s no extra software needed to make a poll on LinkedIn. It’s simply one of the built-in tools available on the platform. The low barrier to entry means you can get started using this tactic right away. However, keep in mind that taking the time to write out your poll question, answer choices and intro text ahead of time will make the process much smoother.

Step-by-Step Setup for Your LinkedIn Poll

Creating a poll is intuitive, and you’ll likely get it down to a science after a few tries. We have suggestions to share about the content of your polls, but first, it’s worth going through the creation process.

The general steps to follow are:

• Start creating a new public LinkedIn post.
• Choose the “create a poll” option.
• Craft your poll, including the following elements:
  • Question: Your question should be engaging and encourage answers. Due to the 140-character limit, you have no choice but to be brief.
  • Answers: You can include up to four answers as poll vote options, which should cover just about every possible response, so viewers won’t skip the question. These have a 30-character limit, so each answer option must be concise.
  • Poll Duration: Set how long the poll will be open; your options range from one day to two weeks.
  • Results visibility: By selecting whether to display live results as soon as people respond or to keep them hidden until the end of the poll, you can choose whether to give instant gratification or make respondents come back later.
• Set your post live and get ready for the results to roll in.

Of course, simply posting a poll isn’t enough. It needs to be appealing to your target audience and optimized to deliver compelling insights. That sounds like a tall order, but it’s simple if you follow a few best practices.

What Makes a Good Poll?

To produce a truly useful, ROI-driving poll, focus on two specific areas: the question and the possible answers. Tuning each of these can deliver more valuable results, along with enhanced engagement among your target audience.

Here’s what to know:

• Your question: The query at the heart of your poll should be short and clear, potentially much shorter than the 140-character limit. Viewers should be able to grasp exactly what you’re asking. To that end, the question should also be specific, unambiguous and aimed at a particular audience. You know who your target customers are. Ask something they’ll immediately comprehend — and have opinions about.
• Your answers: Each poll option, like the question, should be easy to understand. When there’s no ambiguity, respondents can click with confidence. Remember, if they get confused, they may just leave instead of picking an answer. The response options should have no overlap with each other, so each individual will have an easy time making a selection. They should also be worded in neutral ways, rather than goading readers into choosing one or the other. This helps you receive honest results that reflect what your audience is really thinking.

With a good question and strong answer options, you’re all set for success. Now, don’t forget to promote your poll across social media channels to draw in the biggest possible audience segment.

What’s Next? How To Use Data Gathered from a LinkedIn Poll

A LinkedIn poll’s usefulness doesn’t end when the poll closes. You get to choose how to use the results in your ongoing marketing content creation efforts. That could mean:

• Establishing your industry authority: Your poll data can act as fuel for informative content that addresses challenges and trends in your industry. You can be sure you’re providing original insights instead of regurgitating commonly known facts because you’ve just polled your audience.
• Informing your product development strategy: A LinkedIn survey is a great way to test the waters around a new product or service. Since LinkedIn polls have basically zero overhead, you can gather useful feedback about which avenues to pursue before you commit any budget to the project.
• Creating tailored content for your audience: The results of a poll can do more than give you numbers to cite in a story. They can also reveal the concerns and interests of your target audience, allowing you to generate relevant content that targets the real and present concerns in your industry.

The LinkedIn polls feature is just one tool in the wide world of LinkedIn marketing — and the even wider world of B2B marketing in general. Their low cost and versatile value, however, set polls apart.