Posted by LinkedIn is a strange platform. It’s a social media channel but for serious things. It’s a job search site, a recruiter’s heaven, a social media site, and a networking platform — all rolled into one.
On LinkedIn, you post about your job, the school you went to, and your professional details. Most of these details aren’t very relevant on Facebook or Twitter.
That calls for a different approach on LinkedIn.
Promoting on LinkedIn is different. Adding updates and engaging with the network through comments and content is part of a successful LinkedIn strategy. LinkedIn is one of the most important channels for B2B marketing.
1. Post LinkedIn-friendly video updates
Just like other social media platforms LinkedIn values video. Video posts do better than textual content on the platform. So make videos a major part of your marketing strategy.
The types of videos are different on LinkedIn than on other channels.
The videos should be both engaging and interesting to watch. The platform is however more serious than anything else so post videos that show your office culture instead of videos showing you doing a prank on your coworker to gain attention.
Try a hand at these videos for LinkedIn promotion:
- A job video
- Product update video
- Industry expertise video
- Company culture video
You can make use of templates and whiteboards to create branded videos and use an online video editor to keep editing quick and easy. These templates are designed with a professional audience in mind. However, it’s not always easy to create videos on your own and you may want to outsource the task or hire a freelancer for the same.
In short, create videos that drive action. Mention your landing page at the bottom of the video or try building your email list with videos for email marketing.
2. Optimize your personal profile
It doesn’t matter what business you want to promote on the platform, your personal profile is where you start. To attract potential partners, you need to start with a good portfolio of links, testimonials, and images of work done before. This gives potential prospects ample reasons to connect with you.
You may use a banner, headline, or profile summary that tells others what you do. You can be a handyman, a plumber, a scrum master, a professional SEO, crypto marketing professional anything.
I find that finance and SEO professionals get the most reach on LinkedIn. So if you talk about money, blockchain, cryptocurrencies, credit cards or SEO tools for e-commerce LinkedIn is the place to be.
Your profile is the rock on which you’ll build the rest of your LinkedIn marketing strategy. Investing time in refining it now will put you in a much stronger position later. If you want to optimize your profile, start by learning from others. If you don’t want to make it too obvious, visit competitor LinkedIn profiles in LinkedIn private mode and see how they’re doing things.
3. Create a company page
As a marketer or business owner, LinkedIn gives you the ability to tell the world about your business with a custom business page.
Your business name plus its logo appears on the top of a LinkedIn company page. There’s a follow button nearby that anyone can click to follow your page. Below, there’s an about us section that you can populate with information about your company and post a link to your website.
The about us section best serves as a page where you talk about problems you solve, and the benefits of working with you. Google works by indexing the first 156 characters of your description. Make the LinkedIn page SEO-friendly and start with the most important things you can. This makes it easy for you to tell the most important things to people who matter.
The company page is your home on LinkedIn. If you want people to follow you and be around post regular updates on these specific items:
- Show behind-the-scenes: Specific industry jargon may not always interest your audience on LinkedIn. A business strategy to be more interesting is posting a few pictures, writing an update, or uploading a video about what’s going on behind the scenes.
- Share industry news: Share what’s new in the industry with a larger audience. Are there interesting updates people have to know about? Tell us about what’s happening in the background.
- Ask questions: The key to successful engagement revolves a lot around the conversation you create. Start by asking great questions about their problems, things they find annoying, and more. This helps you create better content and position yourself as someone who is great at building trust.
- Share free resources: Want to attract new leads to your business? While you don’t want to over-promote your products and services on social media, LinkedIn is a great channel to share helpful guides and resources with your audience. If you’re in the plumbing industry, share resources like a Plumber Salary Guide to educate your audience and attract new leads to your site.
4. Create LinkedIn posts
Blog posts can engage audiences, solve a problem for them and teach them something about the industry as well as play an important role in your marketing efforts as well.
Here’s a good example:
This is a good way to position yourselves by creating better LinkedIn posts about your audience and what they care about most.
For post-creation, there are two big routes. You can syndicate content from existing posts or create fresh articles that solve a problem your LinkedIn audience faces at present.
5. Get active in LinkedIn groups
LinkedIn groups are a magnet for attention. How to use them optimally?
Start engaging in these groups and create awareness about your business. Start networking on a relevant LinkedIn group and create relevant content to get more followers. If you are a recruiter you can talk about the challenges of talent management.
You can use the LinkedIn search to discover groups that work for you. There are several hundred groups that appear for any search query you can think of. For example, searching for content marketing gives me over 1000 groups to join.
You can build a reputation by being part of genuine conversations. Look for groups that are about more than simply self-promotion. If you don’t see what you want build your own community. It’s easy to start your own Linkedin group.
6. Post engaging updates
Updates are a necessary part of your content strategy on LinkedIn. It’s how we communicate the latest aspects of our lives to our LinkedIn audience. It’s how we talk about brand updates. It works too.
Let’s say you’re a tax compliance software startup. Tax compliance is not the most engaging of niches. However, you can post funny images and post updates to make engaging updates.
Things like the addition of new templates to your email marketing software or the deal you clinched do not sound self-promotional and can invite conversations from like-minded people who care. These sound like small wins in your business you’re proud of. For example, let’s say you got the highest possible scores on your ESG assessment that millennials care about. That’s an achievement worth sharing.
LinkedIn’s platform shows content that gets a lot of likes. It stays visible there for longer than on any other social media platform. When you create this content, focus on generating more engagement from it. Tell interesting stories, share facts, or ask questions. Anything goes.
7. Find highly targeted customers and connections
Targeting on LinkedIn comes in the same league as digital advertising. Small businesses can look at the industry, product, or service they’re selling and know who to target.
If you’re retailing customer service software for businesses in the U.S. you can set up advertising campaigns dedicated to companies just in and around the United States. You can target companies with less than 100 employees, you can target companies with more employees higher market sizes, and more.
8. Stay on customers’ radars
You can generate high-quality leads with LinkedIn. You can search for people who fit the criteria set by you and do the work they require.
Stay in touch with anyone who expressed interest. Write blog posts and keep the client’s name in the network. Create monthly emails that share problems that you can solve for the clients and make offers with webinars or whitepapers.
9. Grow your email marketing list
You can use LinkedIn and write a post saying that the followers can connect on your email list. You can market to them with your messages and personalize your content for them. Add 300 or more people to your list with these strategies.
10. Post high-quality content
Great content can help solve problems for your target audience and should be highly targeted. It should tell others how they can do their jobs better, how to solve problems, and how to establish themselves as a thought leader in your space. Taking care of all the above things helps you get great results. Post some content on LinkedIn and provide a link to your landing page that has more content on the subject.
Directly creating and posting content to LinkedIn is powerful. Chances are your posts may start going viral and if it does you will gain thousands of new eyeballs to your content and high-profile visibility as well.
And don’t forget, you can repurpose existing content, too. If you have a blog from a few months ago that did particularly well, turn that into an infographic to share on LinkedIn.
11. Give a face to your employees
In addition, if you have a large company give it more visibility by getting employees to finish their profiles ad upload the same on LinkedIn. That gives you better visibility. You can include a description of the business, professional connections, and more such details.
Groups help you hone into your target demographic. You can listen to what the audience talks about and it is a great way for businesses to message you and you offer business advice to them. You can connect to LinkedIn Inmail too.
Winning at LinkedIn marketing
As you set up your profile and fill your feed with updates, join new groups, and post more content that leads to half of the equation on LinkedIn. The real factor beyond your success is to come across as a living human being. So here are ways to sparkle up your content.
- Be a person: Don’t start by spamming your connections by sending them promotional messages in bulk, don’t simply keep promoting your own stuff. Engage and promote others’ content as well. That’s being social.
- Offer value before you ask for something: if you want to approach someone/ If you want to talk about potential partnerships talks about what’s in it for them. When you use email to reach out, use their first name.
- Ask for references and recommendations: Social proof is important here as it’s elsewhere. It shows trust and helps you build connections.
- Network: Don’t shy away from approaching people and creating a genuine connection
- Be yourself: Start by showing potential clients and customers who you are and make sure your profile, update, and interactions talk about these things more than anything else.
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