LinkedIn Shares The Story Behind Its Morning Talk Show Made Just For Marketers

There’s “The Daily Show with Trevor Noah,” “Live with Kelly & Ryan” and now, thanks to LinkedIn, there’s even a talk show for marketers. “Live with Marketers” is LinkedIn’s own morning talk show, created by marketers for marketers. It’s so good, LinkedIn even won a coveted Killer Content Award for the series at the B2B Marketing Exchange.

“Live with Marketers,” which is broadcasted from LinkedIn’s headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif., aims to tackle issues that are top-of-mind for marketers, including proving ROI, marketing to Millennials and crafting a successful blogging and social media strategy.

This week, I caught up with Alex Rynne, Content Marketing Manager at LinkedIn, to discuss the show, the inspiration behind it, what the LinkedIn team has planned next and more.

“A guest on a webcast that I hosted with a colleague once commented that we should have our own ‘Saturday Night Live’ skit … and it got my wheels turning,” said Rynne. “I thought I could totally host a talk show for marketers by marketers. So, I started channeling my inner Ellen DeGeneres — she’s always having so much fun on her show and I feel the same way about content marketing.”

According to Rynne, the LinkedIn team wanted to take a different approach with this video series and break out of the webinar mold to reach marketers in a more conversational and interactive way. Attendees were even able to answer polls during the videos, as well as submit questions and have them answered by hosts in real time.

“Our team has seen really great successes with standard webcasts in the past, but we really wanted to take it to the next level,” she said. “[We wanted to] move beyond the sometimes really scripted sounding, talking over slides webcasts and develop something a little bit more human and engaging … We also realized that we have this amazing media production team here at LinkedIn that we hadn’t really tapped into yet.”

The risk paid off with the series surpassing traditional webcast benchmarks — the first five episodes of “Live with Marketers” received 12,000 registrants and 5,000 live attendants. In addition, LinkedIn saw a higher projected revenue for deals closed from the series as opposed to those from traditional webcasts.

Rynne credits the show’s success to its innovative and interactive approach to video. She believes that “video is the new headline” and will only become more important for content marketing in the coming years.

“We’re definitely moving from more of a text-based communication style to one that is more visual. In the future, I think we’re going to see a lot of people experimenting with different [content] types and learning that you don’t have to spend a lot of money to produce good video content,” said Rynne. “Folks often actually like the unretouched, unfiltered, raw footage that gives a more real, behind-the-scenes look at your company’s culture, mission and vision.”

So, what can we expect next from the LinkedIn studio? There are two more episodes of “Live with Marketers” season two on the docket. The next episode is set to air in November and the final one will be released in December. Season three is also in the works, but that’s not all — Rynne says she is working on extending the series to other business lines. In fact, the first episode of a new series, “Live with Sales Leaders,” aired in late September.

“I really like to keep our media production team on their toes. I threw out a carpool karaoke idea the other day and they’re actually considering the possibilities with it,” said Rynne. “They definitely encourage me to dream big and no idea is completely off the table.”

You can watch our entire conversation here:

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