12 Easy Steps to Create a Successful LinkedIn Marketing Strategy
Step By Step Linkedin Marketing Guide
When LinkedIn was launched in May 2003, it was mainly perceived as a professional networking site. However, in less than two decades, LinkedIn has attracted 660 million users spread across 200 countries.
Today, it is not just a platform that connects job seekers with prospective employers. Rather, it has transformed into an extremely useful marketing tool.
It has become important for every business to develop an effective LinkedIn marketing strategy. When executed properly, it can help you build brand awareness and forge long-term professional relationships. It can also be effective for lead generation.
The Importance of a LinkedIn Marketing Strategy
The biggest advantage of LinkedIn is that it is frequented by many senior-level influencers, decision-makers, and thought leaders. If you want to grab the attention of top-level executives, then you should work on your LinkedIn marketing strategy. You can use LinkedIn marketing strategy templates that are easily available on the web, to make the process easier.
Unlike other social networking sites such as Facebook and Instagram, LinkedIn offers a goldmine of opportunities for B2B marketers. Take a look at the following infographic published by LinkedIn. It is evident that a robust LinkedIn marketing strategy is crucial for the success of your business. It can help you build brand awareness, increase website traffic, generate quality leads, and much more. In addition, it can also help establish yourself as an industry thought leader.
However, promoting your brand on LinkedIn requires a set of clearly defined goals and tactics. Developing an effective LinkedIn strategy also demands a deep understanding of your target audience.
Now, let’s now take a look at the steps for creating a successful LinkedIn marketing strategy.
1. Define Your Goals
The type of content you publish and the approach you use to distribute it on LinkedIn depends on your final objective. That is why it is crucial to outline your goals at the onset of your LinkedIn marketing strategy.
Typically, you may want to target one or more of the following goals:
- Build brand awareness
- Generate qualified leads
- Strengthen brand reputation
- Engage with your target audience
- Sell your product or service
2. Understand Your Audience
Once you have a clear idea of your marketing goals, it is time to define your target audience. That’s a prerequisite for developing a solid LinkedIn marketing strategy.
You can outline your audience on the basis of different parameters such as job title, geographic location, industry, etc.
Let’s say your goal is to sell an ebook on influencer marketing for brands. In this case, your target audience may consist of marketing professionals. They may have job titles such as “social media manager,” “social media executive,” etc.
In addition to defining your target audience, it is also important to have a deep understanding of your existing audience. A successful LinkedIn marketing strategy focuses on understanding who your audience is and what they like.
You can use the analytics section on your Company Page to learn more about your followers and page visitors.
It can be useful to help you gain meaningful insights about your audience and the type of content they prefer. This, in turn, will help you tailor your LinkedIn marketing strategy to cater to the needs of your audience.
3. Create a Captivating Company Page
Your LinkedIn Company Page is one of the biggest assets of your LinkedIn marketing strategy. It is one of the first interactions your target audience is going to have with your brand. As such, it should help them learn everything they want to know about your business. This includes your information about your products/services, employees, and headquarters etc.
Make sure you provide your company logo, website URL, industry, company size, and other details. Adding these details builds your company’s credibility and can indirectly help make your LinkedIn marketing strategy stronger.
In addition, you should craft an appropriate description that conveys crucial details about your company and your offerings.
You can add a cover image that resonates with your brand. A comprehensive and up-to-date Company Page strengthens your brand’s image by reinforcing your credibility and professionalism.
Take a look at the LinkedIn Company Page of Schneider Electric. It is noteworthy that the Overview section functions as a one-stop destination. It provides all necessary information about the company including their website URL, specialties, social media profile links, etc.
4. Optimize Your Company Page
Just like your website, you should also optimize your LinkedIn Company Page for search. In fact, it is an integral part of your LinkedIn marketing strategy.
A well-optimized Company Page will help you gain increased visibility in search results, both on and off LinkedIn. This makes it easier for people to learn about your company using search engines as well as LinkedIn. You can optimize your Company Page for search with the following techniques:
Use Keywords
Keywords are crucial to your LinkedIn marketing strategy. Don’t limit the usage of your targeted keywords to your website and blog.
Identify the terms and phrases that your target audience is likely to use when searching for your products or services. Then incorporate them into your company description as well as your list of specialties.
Link to Your Company Page
One of the most important factors that dictate the search engine ranking of a page is its inbound link profile.
Therefore, you need to optimize your LinkedIn Company Page for the search to solidify your LinkedIn marketing strategy.
The simplest way is to provide links to your page. These could be on your website, blog, newsletters, social media profiles, etc. In addition, you should encourage your employees to complete their personal LinkedIn profiles and add your company as their employer.
This creates more links to your Company Page and ultimately, boosts your inbound link profile. As a result, your LinkedIn marketing strategy gets a boost.
Publish Relevant Content
In addition to helping you engage with your audience, uploading and sharing relevant content regularly allows it to be indexed by Google. This, in turn, improves your search engine rankings and helps your Company Page climb up on the ladder of search results.
5. Analyze Competitors’ Company Pages
To amplify your LinkedIn marketing strategy, you need to know how you fare up against your competitors.
LinkedIn provides a feature called “Companies to track” that reveals a list of companies similar to yours. It also gives you access to a few key metrics. These include the total number of followers, follower growth, and social media engagement.
Evaluating these pages can help you understand how your own Company Page fares in comparison. You can identify what is working well for them and integrate those tactics into your own LinkedIn marketing strategy.
6. Promote Your Company Page
Creating a compelling Company Page is of no use unless you can attract followers and grow your audience. In addition to optimizing your Company Page for search, you should also encourage people to follow it. Increasing your visibility is crucial to creating a successful LinkedIn marketing strategy.
This ensures that all of your updates show up in their LinkedIn Feed which, in turn, increases the reach of your content. In addition, a high follower count also reinforces the credibility of your company.
The easiest way to do this is to ask all your employees and colleagues to become followers of your Company Page. You should also add a “Follow” button in your email signature and newsletters as well as on your blog and website.
This allows your subscribers and website visitors to become followers with a single click. Additionally, you can invite your existing customers and collaborators to follow your Company Page.
7. Create Relevant and Engaging Content
Attracting a significant number of followers to your Company Page is a difficult task. However, achieving a high follower count doesn’t mark the end of your LinkedIn marketing strategy.
Retaining your audience and engaging with them is a challenge in its own right. The only way to achieve this is by publishing and sharing meaningful content that will resonate with your audience.
The quality of your content can make or break your LinkedIn marketing strategy. Publishing content on LinkedIn requires a thorough understanding of why people spend their time on the platform. You must also understand what they would like to read.
Typically, the following types of content perform well on LinkedIn and can amplify your LinkedIn marketing strategy:
Industry Trends and How-to Articles
In 2017, BuzzSumo conducted a study in which they analyzed 10 million articles shared on LinkedIn.
One of the most significant findings was that the top phrases used in headlines of the most popular articles fell into two categories:
- Industry trends — “the future of,” “in the world,” “the power of,” etc.
- How-to articles — “X ways to,” “X things you,” “X tips for,” etc.
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These statistics clearly indicate that LinkedIn users are interested in content that educates them. They are also interested in content that helps them stay up-to-date with the latest developments in the industry.
Publishing these types of content will help you meet the needs of your audience. As a result of this, your LinkedIn marketing strategy will get a boost
8. Use Images and Videos
It’s crucial to maximize audience engagement on your LinkedIn updates for your LinkedIn marketing strategy to be successful.
One of the best ways to grab the attention of your audience is to use images and videos. This should be done in addition to text-based articles.
In fact, according to LinkedIn, images lead to a 2x higher comment rate and LinkedIn videos are 5x more likely to start a conversation. In addition to images and videos, you can also upload SlideShare presentations and PDFs to make your content more attractive.
LinkedIn now allows you to upload videos directly onto the platform. It is likely that LinkedIn will prioritize their native videos over links from other platforms. You can make the most of this feature by uploading videos directly to the platform rather than sharing YouTube links.
LinkedIn recommends that you create short 1–2 minute videos with proper subtitles. Make sure the videos are authentic and reflect the vision of your brand in an appropriate manner.
Despite being easy to implement, many marketers overlook this LinkedIn marketing strategy. If you want to get ahead of your competitors, you need to leverage this strategy.
9. Create a Content Calendar
Consistency is the key to retain your audience and keep them hooked to your LinkedIn Company Page. It’s an essential element of any successful LinkedIn marketing strategy.
If you publish engaging content on a regular basis, it helps builds a sense of anticipation among your followers. It results in higher levels of engagement and further increases the reach of your content. This can help you attract more followers and grow your audience on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn recommends that you post daily in order to retain your connection with your audience. Because of that, and in order to maintain consistency, I recommended that you create a content calendar as part of your LinkedIn marketing strategy. Establish a timeline for content publishing along with the types of content that you will create.
Another important aspect of your LinkedIn marketing strategy is to post your content at times when it will get maximum traction. This means you have to find out the times when your audience is most likely to be online.
An easy way of doing this is by taking a look at your click-through rates in the “Updates” section of your Company Page analytics. Experiment with different posting times and analyze the CTR to find out when it peaks.
10 Automate Your Outreach
To grow your LinkedIn account, you need to create more relevant connections during the initial stages. For this, you need to do a lot of outreach.
However, manual outreach can be challenging and time-consuming. That’s why automating your outreach is a great idea.
Dux-Soup LinkedIn Automation makes it easy for you to automate these prospecting stages so that you can focus your efforts on the more important stages. This can help improve your engagement and drive more sales.
So, what does Dux-Soup do?
This tool automatically views your prospects, endorses them, and even sends personalized messages on your behalf, all automatically. It’s also possible to set up a drip campaign for your prospects.
11. Get Help from Your Workforce
Your employees and colleagues can be immensely helpful in growing your audience and increasing your reach on LinkedIn. Therefore, it is imperative that you make them an essential part of your LinkedIn marketing strategy.
In addition to following your Company Page, you can also encourage them to like and share your updates. Make sure you notify them whenever you post an important update on your Company Page.
You should also ask them to fill out all of the necessary details on their personal LinkedIn profiles. Make sure they mention your company as their employer and provide a link to your Company Page.
This will help your brand gain visibility in their networks. This, in turn, will boost brand awareness and help make your LinkedIn marketing strategy more successful.
Complete Your Own LinkedIn Profile
While you are at this, make sure you also have a complete and updated personal profile on LinkedIn. It may not have a direct impact on your LinkedIn marketing strategy. However, your personal LinkedIn profile showcases the human side of your brand.
Creating a promising personal profile can help make your brand image even more powerful. Don’t forget to mention all of your special skills and professional achievements.
Utilize LinkedIn Analytics
A crucial aspect of your LinkedIn marketing strategy is to evaluate it on a regular basis. We have already discussed how your Company Page analytics can help you learn useful insights about your audience.
It can also help you analyze the performance of your updates. In order to do this, you have to know how the “Updates” section of your Company Page analytics works.
You get to see a table that reveals different parameters such as impressions, clicks, engagement, CTR, etc. for each of your posts. This information can be used to find out the type of content that is receiving maximum engagement.
This will help you refine your LinkedIn marketing strategy and create content that is likely to receive more traction.
12. Track Website Traffic
When you share content about your brand on LinkedIn, you might also add links to your website or blog. Many people might find your content interesting and may visit your website to check it out.
However, it’s very likely that they may not end up on your landing page and fill out the form. As a result, you will lose those leads. But, if you track your website traffic, you might be able to tap into this audience as well.
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