Even though LinkedIn was founded in 2003 as a professional networking site, it has gone further than that over time. In today’s business world, LinkedIn has become one of the most powerful marketing tools.
This transformation required companies to develop an effective LinkedIn marketing strategy to gain a competitive edge in their industries.
What differentiates LinkedIn from other social networking sites is that LinkedIn is extremely beneficial for B2B marketers. A significant portion of B2B leads generated by social media come from LinkedIn. It is partly because the platform is used by many top professional influencers, industry decision-makers, and thought leaders. LinkedIn marketing is a useful way to make a room for yourself.
Developing Linkedin Marketing Strategy for Brands
A robust LinkedIn company strategy can help you build brand awareness, increase website traffic, generate quality leads, even establish you as an industry leader. However, promoting your brand on LinkedIn requires well-defined goals and some tactics.
Here we will provide some LinkedIn marketing ideas to help you think about how to develop a successful strategy.
Set Your Goals
There is a myriad of ways to approach LinkedIn for your business. But the type of content you publish and the methods of distributing your posts depend on what you want to achieve for your business.
So, it is crucial to think about your goals before designing your LinkedIn digital marketing strategy.
The most common goals of using LinkedIn marketing include building brand awareness, generating leads, increasing sales, enhancing brand reputation, engaging with the target audience. You should clearly define what your brands need the most at the time.
Your goals should be realistic, relevant, measurable, and time-bound. Achieving your goals might take time, but it is not hard if you provide consistent and quality content, stay up to date in your industry. And very importantly, you should brainstorm and come up with an effective work plan following the goals you have set.
Your work plan might contain some general strategic considerations and scope constraints.
Understand Your Target Audience
To publish great LinkedIn content, you must know who you are targeting it toward. Developing an effective LinkedIn strategy requires a clear understanding of your target audience.
You can segment your audience based on different parameters like title, location, industry.
LinkedIn helps you explore and target the right people for your business through advanced search methods. You can also scroll through the lists of your connections to see other possible connections.
Keeping in mind that LinkedIn is mostly a B2B channel, you need to be specific about your audience. Once you explore your target audience, you should focus on the problems they are experiencing, including the questions when and why are they experiencing those problems.
To understand your target audience, you can use analytical tools and learn more about your followers and page visitors.
Analytics sections will give you some insights into what your target audience is doing. You can then take further steps like designing your company page and creating content that will satisfy their specific needs.
Create An Effective Company Page
Your company page will be the first interaction that you will have with your target audience. With the help of a well-designed company page, you will be able to provide a way to promote your products and services and build brand recognition.
Your company page should help your visitors learn important information about your business including your products and services, employees, and headquarters. To increase your credibility, you should provide your website, company size, specialties, and other details.
Along with a catchy description text that mentions your added value to your industry, your company logo of an appropriate size is quite important as the visual elements will make your page stand out.
LinkedIn allows you to preview how your page looks, so you can always look at yourself from a third-person perspective.
Remember that a comprehensive and dynamic company page is the first step that strengthens your image and enhances your professionalism.
Publish Engaging Content
Content is the key to your LinkedIn marketing strategy. High-quality, fresh, and original content will make you gain a lot of followers, and more importantly, it will help you keep them and engage with them. That is why you should share meaningful content that will resonate with your audience.
Creating content for LinkedIn is much more than publishing promotional posts. If you are willing to increase the engagement of your page, your posts should contain helpful tips, tricks, and information related to your industry. Studies show that LinkedIn users react well to educative content.
You can focus on the subjects about which you can give good insights and provide useful information. How-to-do articles can be an effective way of providing educative content. Also, remember to use relevant hashtags for visibility.
Your content should also help your followers stay up to date with the most recent developments in your industry. Moreover, you can devote some time to thought leadership articles. You can share your take on the latest developments in your industry or novel solutions for your target audience’s common problems.
While thinking about the quality of your content, you should remember that too much self-promotion might affect your marketing campaigns negatively.
When it comes to the type of content you will provide, you can get help from social media agencies. Agencies know how to present your original thinking most interestingly.
Case studies, white papers, infographics, and pulse posts are some examples of the types of content that work well on LinkedIn. Remember that visuals are essential. You should include graphs and pictures to be catchy.
Also, LinkedIn has recently introduced “Stories”, a feature that has become popular on many social media platforms. It is an excellent idea to utilize it.
You can use LinkedIn Stories to share your behind-the-scenes moments and your work on your current projects. Holding a Q&A session is another way to come up with interesting content using this new feature.
Establish Relationships
To appeal to a larger audience and increase your growth opportunities, it is essential to expand your network on LinkedIn. After all, it is your network that reflects your business’s net worth.
Establishing relationships is a great marketing strategy if you form and manage your relationships in the right way.
Some tips to widen your network include sending personalized connection requests to prospects, connecting with people you have recently met offline through personalized requests, connecting with influencers, and joining LinkedIn groups of your target market.
LinkedIn groups are significant for LinkedIn marketing strategy for business because it is a great way to find your ideal clients.
Growing your network increases your visibility, but it is not enough. You should further engage with your connections and prospects to build a trust relationship. You need to take wise steps to make people turn to you when they are ready to purchase a product or a service.
What you can do is to get to know your connections by connecting through a private message, commenting on their status updates and articles, offering them help in a kind manner.
Another nice point could be sharing your prospects’ content when they post something useful and engaging. Forming a connection through each other’s content will help you build relationships with other brands. All these tips mentioned above might take time, but in the end, it will help make your LinkedIn marketing strategy more effective.
Measure Your Success
The final part of your LinkedIn strategy is to track your analytics to see if your strategy is working. Thus, you can make informed decisions about your marketing targets.
Understanding key information such as your demographics, key metrics of your posts, engagement rate, profile views by job title will help you see what you should achieve more.
LinkedIn has in-app analytics on the Manage Page. You can reach information about your visitors, updates, and followers there. Through further analytical tools, you can track your engagement, how often your audience likes, comments, or shares your content, your conversions, how often one of your audience members are doing something for your product or service, and web traffic, how often your website is clicked.
However, for a comprehensive analysis of your strategy, you might need some guidance. So, it is better to use a professional analytics tool.
You can have a look at social media tools to explore their analytics sections. Through professional help, you can have your LinkedIn marketing performance properly analyzed and get further tips for your strategy.
Conclusion
LinkedIn carries great potential to help brands stand out in the business world. With a well-designed marketing strategy, you can use this platform’s potential to your brand’s advantage. Digital marketing agencies can also easily support your LinkedIn marketing strategies depending on what is affordable for your business.