Looking to improve your LinkedIn marketing strategy? You have come to the right place! If you are in B2B business, LinkedIn is probably an important marketing and sales channel for you.
But how can you make sure to get the most out of this professional social network? What are some tips to optimize your LinkedIn marketing efforts? How can you master your LinkedIn marketing strategy?
Keep reading to get the answers to these questions.
Source LinkedIn
LinkedIn Marketing Strategy Defined
Implementing a successful LinkedIn marketing strategy is not easy. When setting it up, it is important to define a few crucial things.
Buyer persona
One of the biggest benefits of LinkedIn is precise targeting and segmentation options. There is no other platform where people define their career and professional characteristics in so much detail. So you can target people based on their current and ex-employers, specific job titles, seniorities, interests, education, departments, and much much more.
Ideal customer profile (ICP)
Besides defining your buyer persona, on LinkedIn, it is easy to target companies with certain characteristics as well. Segmenting by company size, investment, location, and industry is all possible on LinkedIn.
Desired goals
It is important to understand what are you trying to achieve with your LinkedIn marketing strategy. Like with any other marketing initiative or campaign, you can look to drive more brand awareness, become a thought leader, generate more leads, or even close more new customers.
Content strategy
LinkedIn is a specific social and professional network. Oftentimes, what you post on other social networks such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and others may not work so well on LinkedIn.
If you want your LinkedIn marketing strategy to work, you need to understand what type of content best resonates with your LinkedIn audience.
Channels
LinkedIn has many different features and functionalities. There’s much more to leverage than just posting regular posts on corporate or employee profiles. Firstly, LinkedIn offers paid advertising that works very similarly to any other paid advertising platform.
It also has groups where people of similar interests come together to share their opinions, thoughts, and experiences. You can have a newsletter on LinkedIn, create an event, or even create a company product page or a mini career (employer branding) site.
Understanding all these features and functionalities is important for getting the most out of your LinkedIn marketing strategy.
Why Every B2B Company Should Have a LinkedIn Marketing Strategy
When looking for new social media marketing trends, LinkedIn is always on most of the B2B marketers’ lists.
Most B2B marketers are well aware of all the benefits LinkedIn marketing offers. But let’s take a look at a few main reasons why every organization should consider investing more resources into their LinkedIn marketing activities.
1. Multiple benefits
LinkedIn is a very popular social network among organizations and individuals because it offers many different benefits. For individuals, it can help them develop their personal brands, advance their careers, find their dream jobs, join communities, and read relevant content.
On the other hand, companies can showcase their products and services, boost their employer brand initiatives to attract talent, and reach decision-makers.
2. Growing audience
Even though it may not be as big as Facebook or Instagram, LinkedIn’s audience is constantly growing, and it is the world’s leading professional network.
According to research, nearly 830 million users in more than 200 countries are on LinkedIn. The platform is also home to over 58 million companies. According to LinkedIn, their growth rate is at two new members joining per second.
3. Precise targeting (decision-makers)
One of the biggest benefits of LinkedIn for marketers is plenty of targeting options. LinkedIn offers more than 200 targeting characteristics. This is much more than any other social network can provide.
As of late 2021, the platform could claim to reach 65 million decision-makers. Furthermore, 4 out of 5 people on LinkedIn “drive business decisions”, and 33% of B2B decision makers use LinkedIn for research purchases.
4. Great conversions
Because decision-makers are on LinkedIn, it is often considered a platform that offers the highest ROIs and conversions. Many marketers prefer it to drive conversions; compared to the average web audience, LinkedIn users have 2X buying power.
Furthermore, marketers who use LinkedIn sales navigator get +18% more pipeline when finding customers. They also get a +7% higher win rate when closing deals.
💡 Also, learn about how to master your organization’s social selling strategy!
5 Tips to Boost Your LinkedIn Marketing Strategy (+ out-of-the-box tricks)
There is a lot of existing content with some tips and tricks to improve your social media and LinkedIn marketing strategy. However, there are a few that not many marketing professionals talk about. Let’s take a look at them!
1. Engage your employees
According to LinkedIn data, employees play a crucial role in boosting an organization’s overall LinkedIn marketing strategy. Data says that engaged employees influence 8x more Company Page views, 4x more Company Page followers, 7x more job views, and 4x more job applications.
For these reasons, many organizations love using LinkedIn for employee advocacy. These organizations are more likely to reach wider audiences, they are more successful in social selling, they are more likely to shape and develop thought leaders in their industries, and they are often seen as great employers to work for.
💡 Extra tip: Run an internal marketing campaign to tell your employees about the importance of employee advocacy on LinkedIn. As a part of this campaign, help them optimize their LinkedIn profiles and provide ready-to-share content to make it easier for them.
📺 Before we move forward, tune in and watch our online session The Marketing ROI Battle: Social Ads VS Employee Advocacy
2. Use LinkedIn to build trust
In the B2B world, LinkedIn is the most trusted social network out there. Not only that people believe their data and privacy are protected by LinkedIn, but they also trust recommendations from their LinkedIn networks.
According to Demandbase, social media, peer reviews, and paid ads influence a buyer’s decision-making journey. 52% of those surveyed in the research said that LinkedIn had the biggest impact during their research.
The good thing about LinkedIn is that people use it to browse existing discussions about products and services. They ask for recommendations, and they also use it to connect with individual leaders to get their opinions.
💡 Extra tip: Motivate your employees to become thought leaders in your industry by regularly posting the company’s content on LinkedIn. The more thought leaders you have, the more trust your organization builds.
3. Amplify your content on LinkedIn
According to the Content Marketing Institute, 97% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn as part of their content marketing efforts. Furthermore, for 94% of B2B marketers, LinkedIn is the first channel they use when they want to distribute and amplify content to various social media sites.
On LinkedIn, however, long-form content performs better. Instead of just posting a link to your website, try to tell a story through the post. Okdork research showed that posts with word counts between 1900 and 2000 words performed better and got more engagement.
To see even better results, encourage your employees to become authors on LinkedIn. Compared to links to external sources, LinkedIn articles can reach a much wider audience and get more clicks.
💡 Extra tip: Comment on relevant posts on LinkedIn! You can follow relevant topics and hashtags, and comment with your own content on posts with high engagement. If you have a piece of content that is relevant to the audience in an existing discussion, don’t be shy to share it!
4. Learn the LinkedIn algorithm
There’s no secret sauce that will bring you more LinkedIn followers and drive more engagement to your posts. Here, the number one piece of advice will always be to focus on high-quality content.
However, understanding how LinkedIn’s algorithm works is also very important.
In the previous section, you learned about how LinkedIn prefers long-form content. Its algorithm also has quite a few characteristics that are pretty different compared to other social media networks. While, for example, Instagram is all about images and videos, this is not always the case for LinkedIn. You have probably realized that, oftentimes, posts with no multimedia at all perform better than posts with video and images.
To get the most out of your LinkedIn marketing strategy, take your time to test different content formats and get a good sense of how LinkedIn’s algorithm works.
💡 Extra tip: Be careful with some tips and tricks people suggest to boost engagement on LinkedIn posts. In the past, you have probably seen many posts that sound something like: “Link in the comments” or “Leave a comment if you want to receive [a piece of content].”
While this technique is still quite popular for boosting the popularity of a post artificially, LinkedIn has recently announced that it has decided to tackle these kinds of posts.
5. Experiment with paid ads
Even though quite expensive, LinkedIn is popular among B2B paid marketing professionals. This is mostly the case because of its powerful targeting options. As mentioned earlier, there is no other platform that allows such precise targeting.
Similarly to other social media platforms, LinkedIn ads offer various ads options so it is important that you understand all its features and functions. If your goal/objective is to just drive more awareness, an awareness campaign may be enough. On the other hand, if you are looking for conversions, you may consider a website conversion or a lead generation campaign.
💡 Extra tip: besides various ads objectives, LinkedIn also offers various ad formats and it keeps expanding its offerings. If you are, for example, into account-based marketing, personalized message ads may be your best bet. If you are organizing a local event, then you may want to go with an event ad.
💡 Also learn about the best alternatives for paid ads!
Master Your LinkedIn Marketing Strategy Today
One of the most untapped LinkedIn marketing tactics is employee advocacy. Yet, employees are 14x more likely to share content from their employers than other types of content on LinkedIn.
Therefore, your company’s employees play a crucial role in mastering your LinkedIn marketing strategy. Without their engagement, it is just impossible to get the most out of this professional social network.
To help employees become LinkedIn advocates, however, companies need to have a formal ambassadorship program. They need to have the right technology to make advocacy easy and intuitive. They need to have a recognition and rewards system to motivate their people to act as ambassadors. And they need to be able to prove the ROI of advocacy.
If you are looking to improve your LinkedIn marketing strategy with a powerful and intuitive employee advocacy solution, schedule a demo to learn about why companies choose Haiilo!
