As far as content marketing goes, the most popular types of content educate and help your audience make informed decisions. It’s not enough, however, to simply write a blog article and slap it on your company’s website. All content (great or otherwise) needs syndication of some sort. This could be through newsletters, via social media, or other avenues.

What some people miss, however, is the power inherent in publishing content written by company executives traveling to conferences educating attendees. There is a huge additional audience that may be unable to attend these conferences. In fact, some within the automotive industry estimate that just 5 percent of auto dealers have conference expenses in their budgets. If 95 percent of your audience isn’t attending the conference you are presenting at, how then are you planning on reaching them?

As social media reach continues to decrease and becomes more of a pay-to-play model, there is still one platform that is free - and actually increasing in popularity - LinkedIn. In the B2B world, there has never been a better platform for exposure and connections. Since LinkedIn has adopted a Facebook-style newsfeed and opened up its publishing platform to everyone, rather than just its top members, it has exploded for content marketers.

Daniel Roth, the Executive Editor at LinkedIn, shared in a recent article that LinkedIn now has over 1 million unique writers publishing more than 130,000 posts a week. In addition, he stated that about 45% of readers are in the upper ranks of their industries and the average post now reaches professionals in 21 industries and 9 countries.

Many companies have LinkedIn company pages. These pages are great for sharing relevant product announcements, press releases and other general news. The problem is that the reach is limited to how many followers your company has. Many start-ups, and even larger companies, don’t have significant follower bases. And, even when they do, not many are paying attention.

However, what DOES get attention is articles published under a company executive’s personal LinkedIn account. These aren’t filtered. These are shared. All of that executive’s contacts are notified that they published an article. I’d be willing to bet that most company executives have quite a few personal (or business) connections on LinkedIn. While that post on your company page may go unseen, the articles published by a company executive has a much better chance of being viewed - and not only by their connections. LinkedIn offers the ability to “tag” articles with up to three relevant categories. Think of this as LinkedIn’s version of a hashtag. This allows people to search out content relevant to their industries and provides increased reach. In addition, the way the articles are set up invites readers to comment and can be a catalyst for great discussions and interactions.

Keep in mind, however, that if the content being published strays too much into promotion, there is always a chance that the author gets tuned out. By maintaining some great strategies of content marketing and writing and publishing content that is industry relevant, educational and topical, LinkedIn has now proven to be a very viable platform on which to reach your audience.