As the largest professional network in the world, LinkedIn is a valuable tool for your business’s B2B marketing strategy. With a well-defined LinkedIn marketing strategy, you can generate leads, build your brand identity, grow your professional network, and showcase your brand’s personality. Here’s a guide to successfully marketing your business on LinkedIn.
Define Your Objectives
Effective marketing on LinkedIn starts with defined goals. While LinkedIn is well-known for strengthening B2B connections—it also presents opportunities to interact with potential customers and new talent, so you’ll want to consider all audiences when developing your objectives. Your LinkedIn marketing strategy will vary depending on whether you aim to attract new employees, grow brand awareness and authority, build leads, or increase engagement with your target audience. Once you’ve determined your marketing goals, you can refine your approach.
Determine Your Target Audience
Identifying your target audience is essential to any LinkedIn marketing campaign. Consider who you want your LinkedIn page to reach, whether it’s other businesses, potential employees, or customers. Investigate the kinds of content they’re already engaging with or creating. Look into your desired audience’s demographics, industries, job titles, and interests. Keep in mind that millennials are LinkedIn’s most prominent demographic, so your strategy for LinkedIn may differ compared to your other social media platforms. Being aware of the characteristics that make up your target audience will help you narrow in on content that is relevant for them, and ultimately guide your overall LinkedIn marketing strategy.
Optimize Your LinkedIn Page
A LinkedIn page represents a company rather than an individual, and a completed company LinkedIn page gets 30% more weekly views, so you’ll want to claim and optimize yours. Adding your company’s logo, a branded banner, contact information, website links, social media profiles, and bio will allow users to quickly learn about your business. Additionally, including keywords on your company page that are relevant to your business, the industry you work in, and the services you provide can help your business’s LinkedIn page show up in search engine results and reach the right audience.
Develop Your Content Strategy
When developing your content strategy for LinkedIn, prioritize the kinds of content that your target audience engages with—such as valuable information, industry expertise, or common pain points, and begin planning your content calendar.
A good rule of thumb to follow is to post two to five times per week, no more than once a day. This posting schedule will allow your brand to remain relevant and build trust, without overwhelming your audience. Additionally, you’ll be able to capitalize on LinkedIn’s algorithm. The algorithm prioritizes weekday posts, posts with tags, short-form videos, and posts that receive thorough responses.
When it comes to the types of content you post, think about following the 5:3:2 rule—where five posts of every 10 are curated or reposted from others, three feature original content, and two are for fun. Utilizing this method will help diversify your page, showcase your authority, and express your company’s personality. LinkedIn’s native publishing platform makes it easy to both create content and repurpose content for your LinkedIn page.
Consider these additional tips for generating engagement on LinkedIn:
- Vary the length of your posts
- Tag relevant industry professionals
- Include appropriate hashtags
- Utilize polls to prompt responses
Generate Leads
Using LinkedIn is a great way to generate leads—and you can do so by incorporating lead generation forms and call-to-action buttons directly on your page. You can also use LinkedIn’s advanced search to find and connect with potential prospects. The ability to narrow your search based on filters like job titles, interests, geographic location, and more will help you find profiles and companies that match up with your target audience’s characteristics to begin connecting with.
Rather than trying to sell your brand on LinkedIn, focus on building relationships by crafting personalized InMails, which see more responses than identical mass messages. Try to keep InMails below 400 characters, as the response rate for short InMails is 22% higher than the average InMails response rate. Additionally, LinkedIn users are more likely to respond to a message sent Sunday through Thursday, so it’s best to avoid sending InMails on Friday and Saturday.
Engage with Your Network
Continue to grow your following, strengthen relationships, and increase your exposure by frequently engaging with others on LinkedIn. Interact with existing connections, industry influencers, and your target audience through comments, likes, and shares. Because these interactions can be seen by anyone following the people you respond to, this strategy can help get your LinkedIn page in front of new audiences. Similarly, when posting original content, be sure to tag any people or businesses you’ve referenced, as this will also share the content with their following.
Another way to connect with your network, and simultaneously establish your brand’s authority, is to join LinkedIn Groups. Engage in thoughtful dialogues with like-minded professionals to further relationships within your industry. You can even choose to create and lead a group with other industry leaders. However, it’s important to ensure you have adequate time to participate in research, contribute to articles, and share information that is meaningful to your audience to help build an engaged community.
Encourage Employee Engagement
Your employees are the best advocates for your brand. In fact, nearly 30% of engagement on a post made by a brand comes from its employees, who are the most likely people to share content from your company’s page. Encourage your employees to interact with your content through likes and shares. Also, be sure they tag your page when making posts that celebrate their successes, work anniversaries, projects, and more. Share content from your employees that would resonate with your audience. Employee engagement strengthens your brand’s visibility and credibility, which is especially valuable if your goal is to reach a wider audience or attract more talent.
Explore LinkedIn Advertising Options
LinkedIn Advertising works only for a business’s LinkedIn page, not a personal profile. Using LinkedIn ads can help increase brand awareness and generate more conversions. To advertise your business on LinkedIn, consider using one of the platform’s four advertising options:
- Sponsored Content: paid posts that show up on feeds beyond your page’s followers
- Sponsored Messaging: direct messages sent to users outside of your LinkedIn network
- Text Ads: pay-per-click ads that can direct LinkedIn users to your page or website
- Dynamic Ads: personalized ads to engage prospects
Once you have chosen your desired ad format, determine your budget and schedule. LinkedIn Advertising allows you to target campaigns with filters specific to your business, including job titles, industries, and more. Focus your campaign on the people and businesses who are most likely to interact with your ad.
Check Analytics & Track Metrics
LinkedIn Page analytics allows you to evaluate the success of your page more generally. This tool can show insight into page visitors and followers, as well as content performance. Conducting a thorough audience analysis and learning about the demographics of the users you’re attracting can help you adjust your strategy to create content that lands.
For LinkedIn Advertising campaigns, you can track analytics and insights spanning a variety of metrics with LinkedIn Campaign Manager and LinkedIn Reporting. Regularly check your analytics to see who your ads are reaching, and how the audience is interacting, evaluate KPIs, and learn about overall campaign performance. Consider whether your ads are reaching the right people and if they’re effective at driving conversions. If they’re not, it may be time to try a new approach, using these insights as a guide.
Need help with your LinkedIn marketing strategy? Hurrdat Marketing offers content marketing, social media marketing, and paid advertising services to boost your business’ LinkedIn visibility. Contact us today for more information!
