Episode web page: https://tinyurl.com/4rymcmrs ----------------------- Rate Insights Unlocked and write a review If you appreciate Insights Unlocked, please give it a rating and a review. Visit Apple Podcasts, pull up the Insights Unlocked show page and scroll to the bottom of the screen. Below the trailers, you'll find Ratings and Reviews. Click on a star rating. Scroll down past the highlighted review and click on "Write a Review." You'll make my day. ----------------------- In today’s crowded digital world, standing out on LinkedIn is more challenging than ever. With users scrolling through 300 feet of content daily and 1.5 million pieces of content being engaged with every minute, how can marketers cut through the noise? In this episode, Nathan Isaacs sits down with Purna Virji, a LinkedIn marketing expert and author of High Impact Content Marketing, to discuss proven strategies for LinkedIn success. From blending organic and paid content to leveraging thought leadership and short-form video, Purna shares valuable insights on building engagement, trust, and brand loyalty on one of the world’s most powerful professional platforms. Key Takeaways: 🔥 Why Consistency Matters: A common mistake brands make is only showing up when they have a big launch. Purna emphasizes the importance of continuous engagement—whether through organic posts, paid ads, or a mix of both. 🌱 Paid vs. Organic: Why You Need Both: LinkedIn research shows that users exposed to both organic and paid content are 61% more likely to convert than those who only see paid ads. Organic content nurtures your existing audience, while paid ads help you reach new ones. 📊 Testing and Learning: Your LinkedIn page isn’t just a broadcasting tool—it’s a dynamic testing ground. Brands should experiment with different types of content organically before investing ad dollars to boost their top-performing posts. 🎥 The Rise of Short-Form Video: Video consumption continues to surge, with LinkedIn seeing a 34% increase in video uploads year over year. Purna recommends embracing short, engaging videos to build trust and humanize your brand. 💡 Leveraging Thought Leadership: People follow people before they follow brands. Thought leader ads allow companies to boost employee and executive content, making it a powerful tool for credibility and reach. 📣 Beyond Vanity Metrics: It’s not just about likes and shares—success on LinkedIn should be measured by pipeline impact, engagement quality, and long-term brand trust. Episode Links: 📖 Purna Virji’s book: High Impact Content Marketing 💡 Follow Purna on LinkedIn: Purna Virji 📊 LinkedIn for Marketing: LinkedIn Business Page 🎧 More episodes of Insights Unlocked: UserTesting Podcast
Chapter 1: How can brands stand out on LinkedIn in 2025?
Welcome back to the Insights Unlocked podcast. In this episode, we're diving into the world of LinkedIn marketing with Perna Virjee, principal consultant and global program manager at LinkedIn and author of High Impact Content Marketing. With millions of posts competing for attention every minute, how can you make your brand stand out?
Perna shares expert insights on blending organic and paid strategies, leveraging thought leadership, and the rise of short form video. Get ready for actionable takeaways you can use today. Enjoy the show.
Welcome to Insights Unlocked, an original podcast from User Testing, where we bring you candid conversations and stories with the thinkers, viewers, and builders behind some of the most successful digital products and experiences in the world, from concept to execution.
Welcome to the Insights Unlocked podcast. I'm Nathan Isaacs, senior manager for content production and user testing. And our guest today is Purna Virji. Purna is the author of High Impact Content Marketing and is principal consultant and global program manager at LinkedIn. Prior to joining LinkedIn, Purna previously led global learning and thought leadership programs for Microsoft.
She's been named by Adweek on their Young Influentials list. She is a columnist and top-rated international keynote speaker who has been featured in The Drum, Marketing Land and Adweek. Welcome to the show, Perna.
Oh, thanks, Nathan. I'm delighted to be here.
Perna, I'm excited to have you on the show and do some of the research prior to, you know, as preparation for the interview. I came across a couple of stats and I think it's a good foundation for our conversation today. And I want to just kind of cite those two statistics. And the first was from a presentation you made at Be To Believe.
in 2022, and I'll add a link to that in the show notes for listeners. But in there, you said at one point you said people scroll through about 300 feet of content on their phones each day, you know, thumbing up and up and up. And the other stat comes from Microsoft, which owns LinkedIn in a recent earnings release.
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Chapter 2: Why is an integrated organic and paid strategy crucial for LinkedIn?
And that was that LinkedIn members are engaging with 1.5 million pieces of content every minute on the platform. Now, given all that, how can marketers in 2025 cut through all that noise and connect with their audiences on LinkedIn, one of the most important social platforms and professional platforms out there, especially for B2B businesses?
Well, thank you. It's definitely the most important platform in my world.
Yeah.
You know, but isn't that number bananas to think about? That's 300 feet. Like, doesn't your thumb just get tired listening to that? Just to put it into context, you know what is 300 feet? It is the Statue of Liberty in New York. It's also the Big Ben in London. Like, that's how much we're scrolling. It's... There's lots of content out there. Ignoring content or scrolling past it takes no effort.
Even just that scrolling, it is just stopping to think about it. And if you want to get people to stop and engage with you, it really comes down to two things. It's all about what you say and then how and how often you're showing up.
A big mistake we see lots of folks doing is like, oh, we've got this big important launch happening, so let's just go in and throw a little paid campaign beyond it, and then we'll just disappear for a while until we have something else. And then they say, why isn't anything happening? Or then you see the other side where people are like, well, I'm just...
feeding into my LinkedIn page all the time and posting content organically. We're not seeing too much. I guess that's it. What else is there? And people, they're just missing out on this incredible field of gold because they aren't being there consistently enough to really build and nurture their community on LinkedIn.
And so some of the ways that they can do that is you really need to think about taking a more integrated approach to social media, I mean, A, regardless of platform, but especially so on LinkedIn, where it is built on trust. Now, I like to think about this, Nathan, in just a simple three-step formula. It's like people need to get to A,
know you exist know who you are then they need to get a feel of they like you they connect with you and then third is when you really built that trust with them and then once you've built that trust you get so incredibly powerful and that trust isn't just built overnight right rome wasn't built in a day neither is trust it takes showing up consistently now
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Chapter 3: How can testing organic content improve LinkedIn marketing?
If I look back on my career as a marketer, we kind of talked about metrics and stuff like that 10 plus years ago. But now, as a marketer, you need to know. You need to know the effectiveness of that organic that you're pushing out, but also that paid and how it works together. And knowing those sort of stats is just incredible.
You know, we talk about organic, and you've talked about user testing, and we talk about brands. And what you've said in the past presentation is that brands' pages and their posts, organic posts, is a dynamic laboratory that they can test and learn from. What are some practical ways that brands can experiment with organic posts to gather insights that inform and improve their paid strategies?
That is a great question. So if you think about your company's page or an organization's page, typically the earliest or the most followers of that page will tend to be employees, prospective employees, or really diehard customers. So these are the customers who are really, really loyal. They really like you.
And so if you can test different creative to a very warmed up audience and see how they react in a way, then that's a good sort of measure and benchmark for how you can reach more and more people. On your company page, many people just think that it's just there's a one way megaphone to just like blast out like we have this update or we are doing this. And that's such a missed opportunity.
Like, yes, it's a it's a company page and it's there to share your updates. But you're also it's a company page on a social media platform. Don't forget to put the social in social media. Your company page on LinkedIn should be an authentic extension of your brand still in service of your audience.
So if I could ask people to make one mental switch, whether it's your company page, whether it's your organic post, whether it's your paid post, your content is not for you. Your content is for your audience. audience. And so instead of thinking about what do I want to say, it's like, what do they need or want to hear?
And if you take that approach, you'll find that you can take some of the more formal updates and then launch it in a way that is of interest. I'll give you an example. So this is one of my favorite posts from a few years ago, but it really stuck in my mind. It's from Samsung.
This was a post around the time of CES, or the Consumer Electronics Show, which tends to showcase, as most people know, just the coolest and hottest and most revolutionary new tech. Most of the tech that tends to get showcased at CES is so cool and sexy, the product would speak for itself. So Samsung could easily have gone out and be like, this is the cool stuff that we are showcasing.
But what they did was... Their post was a human interest story. They said, oh, why don't you hear from the product managers who actually built these products that we're showcasing to learn about how they approach it, how they built it, what do they think about it. Now, instantly, it went from being a promotional piece to a human interest story. And that gets a ton of engagement.
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Chapter 4: What role does thought leadership play in LinkedIn marketing success?
There's a whole bunch of different metrics, but there's three I want to call out for organic. These are just different analytics that you can get within the platform as well. So the first one is cumulative metrics, which is just understanding if any of the boosted content, so if you are boosting some of your organic content, is having an impact on your followers or your influencers following.
Another one is you want to look at your content engagement metrics to understand if the audiences that you want to engage with your content are engaging. And then, of course, within campaign manager, you can go ahead and look at your performance metrics against your other paid and other side. But really, at the end of the day, it just goes beyond some of the metrics that you can capture.
So let's say like a really popular, both organic and paid strategy that people can do comes with thought leadership. Nathan, you've heard that buzzword all over now. And it's making sense. Buying cycles are getting longer. There's economic uncertainty. People, competition is so much. And often, very often, within a couple of different offerings, there's not much difference.
I'll ask you this question. OK, Nathan, if we had to think about how many average companies there are that sell a CRM system in the US today, you'd probably guess above 1,000, I would say, right?
Oh, absolutely.
But if people who are going to evaluate, like if you and I started a new job and they were like, Nathan, you're tasked with choosing the next CRM system for our company, like you and I are going to be like, well, which company should we look at? And then we'll probably look at this list of under 10, maybe under five. And so what happens if I'm number like 20 or 30 on that list? How do I stand out?
And so executive thought leadership and building that
presence is so important and so increasingly, whether it's executives, whether it's subject matter experts going out there, you know, a great example, Rand Fishkin with SparkToro and formerly Moz, you know, what you are doing with user testing, where you're building this podcast and going out there, it's like it's putting people in front and you can even sponsor it with thought leader ads, etc.
But Some of these will not always result in your like, oh, what did this do for my reactions? What did it do? But what you will see later is, is my CEO getting more invitations for different podcasts? Is my page getting increased followers? Are my posts getting more engagements? Am I getting, you know, yes, of course, you'll see MQLs, but sometimes that's a lot later.
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Chapter 5: How can customer feedback optimize LinkedIn ad spend?
Our sort of tolerance for mediocrity is at the lowest ever levels, right? If we binge watch Netflix all night, right? Hello, guilty, so many times we'll watch like three hour long movies or we will watch trilogies of movies in a night. We watch what interests us. And so your content has to interest your audience.
And so make sure you're checking, of course, your engagement, your reach, your sort of sentiment scores as well.
Well, I think that just speaks to the next question I want to ask about, and that is something that you emphasize in your book, High Impact Content Marketing, and that's quality. And can you share examples of high-quality content that directly influences the effectiveness and efficiency of paid campaigns?
Of course, exactly. Great content can move mountains. I think if we just pause and take a second and we'll think about so many things in our day-to-day life is a result of content marketing campaigns. So I don't know about you, but have you ever had orange juice for breakfast?
Sure, sure, sure.
Right? So many of us do. It's so common, but it wasn't always so common. It was these orange growers had this surplus of oranges, and they didn't know what to do with this fruit, and they're like, we're going to lose lots of money because there's no way we'll sell it all. And so it was their ad agency who came up with this additional use of the fruit.
Like, well, just juice it, and we'll speak to and extol all the virtues of orange juice, and now we all drink it for breakfast so commonly. Same thing with with diamond rings, right? And during, just about 100 years ago now, the Great Depression in the 1930s, Debussy was having a lot of trouble selling diamonds because... Survival, diamonds, very different things.
And so it was their marketing company that came up with a diamond is forever associated with eternal love. And now decades later, it's common to use diamonds in engagement rings, right? That's what we'll propose with. So it's so funny. There's so many examples of this. And every single day you'll see it.
So whether it is a Monzo Bank, for example, is a British bank, and they'll have incredible organic content, and then they'll promote it as well. So they'll use a lot of humor. Surreal, which is one of my favorite accounts to follow. You've probably seen those.
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