Getting to grips with LinkedIn is a must for B2B marketers and brands.
The conversions and traffic that a LinkedIn presence can achieve are impressive.
With more than 433 million professional users, some statistics show that 80% of business leads come from LinkedIn.
Generally speaking, those brands that are not entirely convinced by the powerful potential of LinkedIn will dismiss it as a social tool for employment – but this couldn’t be further from the truth.
If you’re a business to business marketer or brand, you could benefit significantly from having a dedicated approach to marketing on LinkedIn.
Here are our top 10 tips on creating a successful LinkedIn marketing strategy.
1. Identify your audience
The key to any successful marketing is through knowing your audience – the same applies for using LinkedIn.
LinkedIn offers a tool known as Website Demographics, which can be used for understanding your audience better.
You can use its Insight tag (by inserting a snippet of code on your site) and can discover the professional traits of your website visitors.
You’ll be able to see what types of professionals are viewing your content and use this data to create engagement goals.
2. Set goals and engagement targets
Whether you’re using LinkedIn’s demographics tool or not, you will need to set up social media marketing goals and engagement targets for your marketing campaigns.
The LinkedIn analytics tool can be used to see your current interaction rate and decide on a realistic goal for your campaigns over a set period of weeks or months.
You can also monitor post engagement within your MavSocial dashboard.
3. Build your brand persona
Your LinkedIn profile and/or company profile will have its own voice that will entice businesses to view your brand’s content.
To do this, your tone will be important.
Make sure you decide what angle to take when posting content so that it accurately represents your brand.
A buyer persona is a detailed profile of your ideal customer and should provide meaningful insights into customer behavior and how customers engage on social media.
Creating a persona will enable you to create highly targeted content.
4. Optimize your profile or page
Most importantly, an effective brand presence on LinkedIn will feature a complete profile.
You can create personal profiles for high profile executives or employees, as well as company pages – deciding on which will depend on whether your brand voice is to be attached to individuals or the business, or both.
Optimize your profile or page by including photos, your key employee details, logos/headers, and other relevant content that will make your brand appear more approachable and human to viewers.
For example, pages with logos get six times more views according to LinkedIn – it pays to be optimized!
You should consider search engine optimization (SEO) as part of the profile process because Google previews 156 characters of your page description.
Increase B2B conversion by making sure your descriptions are laden with keywords that will grab your target audience, and the most important phrases appear first in your page or profile.
5. Post valuable content
What you post will play a big part in how many B2B leads you can generate.
Why?
Because it creates engagement, hype, word of mouth and also gives you brand exposure.
However, posting content that has little value or interest to your target viewers will over-saturate your page and follower feeds – doing harm instead of good.
LinkedIn has a publishing function that allows you to create lengthier content pieces that can help you reach audiences outside of your immediate network and position you as an influencer.
Marketers have also noted a trend towards status updates that are short, sweet and to the point.
Your content shouldn’t be too sales orientated and should focus on topics that fit your brand image.
Marketing experts say content should be relatable and build a human connection – a good way to do this is to share insider knowledge (see below for further information).
Attaching documents, videos or incorporating hashtags will dramatically improve your posts’ visibility too, so be sure to include these where appropriate.
6. Create videos
Arguably, written content in LinkedIn publisher is on the decrease in terms of views and interaction with the increasing popularity of video posts.
Updates with videos tend to have a 75% share average.
The best way to make videos on LinkedIn is through advertisements which we’ll discuss later on in the post.
7. Share insider knowledge
So when we say share insider knowledge, let’s be clear.
We’re not talking about sharing proprietary or commercial in confidence information, we’re talking about providing useful tips and tidbits.
You don’t need to share your brand’s best-kept secrets but you can look at simple issues businesses may be having that you can resolve via content.
This creates a relationship of trust, favorability, and reputation, and hopefully leads prospects to use your business when they are in need of the products or services you offer.
8. Create a posting schedule
Your posting schedule can make or break your content and marketing campaign.
Having a schedule allows your company to maintain a presence without being too little or too much.
According to experts, posting 3-4 status updates weekly, alongside 1-2 longer pieces of content per month maintains an ideal balance for your network connections.
It’s also important to be aware of the time you schedule updates, this will depend on what part of the world your audience is based in.
Generally speaking, the best posting time for LinkedIn is Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday at 5-6pm EST or Central Time.
9. Create a strong network
Your content and campaign should help build a solid referral network.
Having your employees’ details connected to the page will broaden your potential to invite others to connect with you and your brand via LinkedIn.
LinkedIn has good tools for capturing potential network friends, so make sure you use their suggestions.
You can also nurture your LinkedIn connections via direct messaging.
10. Give LinkedIn Ads a try
LinkedIn’s ad platform offers powerful targeting options and pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns that drive brand awareness and lead generation.
There are 6 types of LinkedIn ads with the most popular ad formats being Sponsored Content, Sponsored InMail and Text Ads.
And depending on your marketing goals, each format has their advantages.
Some businesses report great success in sponsoring their updates.
By paying a small amount to sponsor your update, it will have a higher priority in newsfeeds to encourage interaction and generate sales leads.
The newest addition to LinkedIn ads is in video format.
In the words of LinkedIn “use sight sound and motion” to tell stories about your brand and share it through the sponsored content channels.
LinkedIn is a must for any savvy B2B marketer due to the direct access to a huge pool of professionals and businesses.
Creating a LinkedIn marketing strategy is relatively easy if you stick to the tips of relevant, well-timed content with an optimized profile and a commitment to building and nurturing a strong network.
