With over 660 million registered professionals, LinkedIn is the largest resource for B2B marketers to tap into. So if you’re not on the platform already or if you haven’t been using it to its full potential, it’s time you reconsider. The right LinkedIn marketing strategy can work wonders for your personal brand and eventually, your business too.
In this post, you’ll discover some of the best ways to improve your LinkedIn marketing efforts–whether you’re marketing yourself or your company. Let’s begin.
Why LinkedIn marketing?
But why market on LinkedIn in the first place? This might be the first thought that pops into your head. And it’s understandable because you want to make sure your efforts go into a platform that delivers real results. So here’s a quick look at the benefits of marketing on LinkedIn:
- LinkedIn has helped 45% of marketers with customer acquisition.
- Compared to Facebook, it generates leads 277% more effectively.
- LinkedIn accounts for 80% of B2B leads.
- It also accounts for more than 50% of the total social traffic coming to B2B sites.
- LinkedIn is the top choice for professionally relevant content, with 91% of executives choosing the platform.
These are just some of the many reasons why you should focus your efforts on LinkedIn marketing and optimize any existing strategy you might have.
How to market on LinkedIn
Now let’s move on to the most important part of the post–how to market on LinkedIn. Although you can absolutely build your LinkedIn marketing strategy from scratch, these tips will serve as an inspiration for your campaigns. Check out these seven tips for marketing on the platform.
1. Optimize your profile
This may seem like the most basic step, but it’s easy to overlook when you’re focusing your efforts on the more advanced LinkedIn marketing tactics. Whether you’re marketing through a company page or your personal account, it’s crucial that you make certain profile improvements that’ll increase your chances of getting noticed.
Start with a high-quality profile picture that’s relevant to your brand. A photo on your profile gives you 21 times more profile views. While company pages can use the brand logo as a profile picture, high-resolution professional headshots are ideal for personal profiles. But this may vary based on your industry and brand personality.
Other ways to optimize your LinkedIn profile include adding your current position, which can get you up to five times more connection requests. And don’t forget to include at least five relevant skills, as this might help you get 31 times more messages from recruiters and other LinkedIn members alike.
For those setting up a company page, our detailed guide on how to build the perfect LinkedIn page shows you the step-by-step process.
2. Publish content that adds value
Marketing on LinkedIn is less about creating sales-y promotional messages and more about adding value to the lives of your audience. In fact, B2B marketers who put their audience’s informational needs first make up 88% of the top performers in content marketing.
So you should use LinkedIn to create, share and publish content that serves some purpose–whether it’s to educate, inform, guide, inspire or entertain your audience. This improves the chances of getting your audience to engage with your content and building a connection with you or your company.
And when someone engages with your post, there’s a chance it’ll also show up in the feeds of their connections, further increasing your reach. Here’s an example:
Note that you don’t necessarily have to share only your original content. But don’t hesitate to share insightful and informative content relevant to your industry even if it’s from a third-party. This will establish that you’re the go-to source for valuable industry-related information. But try using the native LinkedIn publishing platform every once in a while.
3. Get your employees involved
LinkedIn is all about the connections you make. And as the most reliable advocates of your brand, your employees can play a critical role in broadening your reach and strengthening your network on the platform. So your LinkedIn marketing strategy requires heavy involvement from your employees.
Encourage your employees to add your company to their personal profiles. This automatically turns them into followers and helps your company get noticed on the platform. Plus, it’ll make it easier for your employees to engage with your company updates and share them with their connections. They can share news, articles or round-up posts featuring your brand, like in the following example from Moosend.
Additionally, you should encourage some of your top employees to participate in relevant LinkedIn Groups and establish their expertise in the field. LinkedIn Groups are designated pages allowing people in the same industry or with shared interests to interact with each other.
With this information, consider establishing an employee advocacy initiative for your organization on LinkedIn. Encourage employees to share content, highlight accomplishments and get the word out. With goals and a strategy set in place for employee advocacy, your organization can expect to see its reach expand, if done correctly. Thermo Fisher Scientific is a prime case study example of employee advocacy on LinkedIn. Not only is this a great change for your marketing organization to expand its reach, it also creates opportunities for employees to flex their expertise as thought leaders and gain exposure.
4. Send out personalized InMail
In the same vein of employee involvement in your LinkedIn marketing, consider taking it one step further with sending personalized InMail. Although this feature is only available to individual Premium accounts, and not through a LinkedIn Company Page, this would be the opportunity to tap into the expertise of other individuals in your organization.
So whether sales representatives or recruiters are reaching out to prospects or connecting with influential personalities, delivering an InMail directly to their inbox can often do the trick. Because it’s more personal, the recipient is likely to notice it and even respond to it. In fact, LinkedIn InMail gets three times more responses than regular emails.
This makes it great for promoting your products and services to highly relevant prospects. Send out offers, share your new content and provide updates about your latest services that might be of interest to the recipient based on their profile.
Consider this as a great way to reach out to influential members on the platform and build a connection with them. Accompanying your connection request with a personalized InMail, for instance, is a great way to capture their attention and possibly get them to accept the request.
In addition to InMail, Premium accounts have access to other features as well, including built-in analytics so you can gain insights on how different types of messages are performing and how to and generate more impressive results.
5. Run ads using the Matched Audiences feature
Another excellent LinkedIn marketing strategy is to target the most relevant users when you run ads on the platform. The Matched Audiences feature lets you do exactly that by allowing you to retarget people who have visited your website as well as people who are on your existing account or your email contacts.
Since these people have some familiarity with your company or your personal brand already, there’s an increased chance that you’ll covert them. This feature makes a whole lot of difference to your LinkedIn advertising efforts because most people will not convert on their first interaction with your business. But if you retarget them, you’ll gently remind them of your existence and gradually nudge them toward a conversion.
6. Use rich media to create a bigger impact
Although LinkedIn is a professional platform, that doesn’t mean you should strictly confine yourself to text-only posts. Just like on any other social media platform, adding visually appealing elements like photos and videos can help you capture the attention of your LinkedIn target audience more effectively.
Adding custom images can get you twice as many comments on your posts, significantly driving up your overall reach and engagement rate. And video also drives up your engagement rate by five times, which makes it a critical part of your LinkedIn marketing strategy. The most impressive number is with live video, which helps you gain a whopping 25 times higher engagement rate.
So you should really consider including rich media content in your LinkedIn marketing efforts to generate an even bigger impact. This goes for both organic and paid efforts.
Don’t hesitate to share illustrated stories and comics if it helps you explain your narrative more effectively. Here’s one such post from VaynerMedia’s CEO, Gary Vaynerchuk, which got over 14,000 reactions and 500+ comments.
Our guide on the LinkedIn algorithm highlights the other types of content that work on the platform as well.
7. Feed your efforts with analytics data
Finally, it’s crucial that you don’t just jump into LinkedIn marketing without some research. Otherwise, you’ll blindly publish hundreds of posts without getting any viable results and all your efforts would go to waste. The native LinkedIn analytics data gives you an in-depth look at how your posts are performing. So check your performance data regularly and look for any scope for improvement.
For Sprout Social users, the LinkedIn integration gives an even better insight into your performance analytics. Besides analyzing the growth and engagement rate of your company pages, it also provides detailed audience demographics data to improve your targeting efforts. It even lets you compare how your organic content fares against your paid promotions so you can better assess the impact of your investments.
Growing with LinkedIn marketing
With the right strategy, LinkedIn can be a powerful engagement hub for both companies and entrepreneurs. The tips we’ve provided above will give you some idea of how you can rev up your LinkedIn marketing efforts.
But don’t forget that it all starts with targeting the right people. None of these tips will have the kind of impact you expected unless you can reach the right audience. So make sure you download our guide on LinkedIn targeting to master this part of the LinkedIn marketing process.