LinkedIn is a perfect platform for you and your business to learn how to target the right audience, strategically create content to set your business apart and measure your performance. Let’s dive into how you can use LinkedIn to get your business out there, and market successfully.
What Is LinkedIn Marketing?
LinkedIn marketing uses LinkedIn, a professional networking platform, to promote your business, connect your target audience, and achieve your marketing goals. It’s like networking and advertising rolled into one.
Use LinkedIn To Contribute To Your Business Goals
Once you have your goals in place, you can determine how LinkedIn can help you contribute to those overarching goals. Some benefits LinkedIn is known for are:
- Lead generation: According to Hubspot, audiences that are exposed to brand messages on LinkedIn are six times more likely to convert.
- Recruitment: According to LinkedIn, social professional networks are the number one source of quality hires.
- Brand Awareness: LinkedIn is built on creating a network of connections, which can kickstart your brand awareness by connecting with potential audience members.
- Establishing Authority: LinkedIn’s professional network lets you share information to establish your business authority, which we’ll discuss later in this post.
For example, if one of your business goals is to increase the number of sales leads for your company by 50%, networking on LinkedIn could help achieve that.
How To Set Up A Business Profile on LinkedIn
If you’re a beginner, you can set up your LinkedIn business profile with these simple steps:
1. Sign in to your personal LinkedIn account.
2. Go to the “Work” icon in the top right corner of the homepage.
3. Click on “Create a Company Page” from the dropdown menu.
4. Select your business type: small business, medium to large business, showcase page, or educational institution.
5. Fill in the requested details about your company, such as the name, public URL, industry, company size, and company type. You’ll also need to provide a company logo, tagline, and description.
6. Check the verification box to confirm you have the right to create a page on behalf of that company.
7. Click “Create page.” Remember, it’s important to regularly update your profile with relevant content to help boost your visibility.
Create A Winning LinkedIn Marketing Strategy For Your Business
Now that you are more familiar with LinkedIn marketing and how you can benefit, here’s how to create a great marketing strategy.
1. Set Your LinkedIn Marketing Goals
What do you want to achieve when you market on LinkedIn? Do you want to increase brand awareness, generate leads, or drive sales? Once you know your goals, you can develop a strategy to achieve them. Keep your brand’s values and visions in mind when you create your goals, too.
2. Build Your LinkedIn Network
Get to know your audience on social media. Who are you trying to reach with your LinkedIn marketing? What are their demographics, interests, and pain points? The more you know about your audience, the better you can tailor your content and messaging to resonate with them.
3. Create A Content Strategy
What type of content will you post on LinkedIn, and how often? What tone and voice will you use? Your content strategy should be aligned with your goals and target audience. Here’s how you can create the perfect content strategy to be successful on LinkedIn:
- Define Your Objectives: Start by determining your goals for using LinkedIn. Are you looking to build your personal brand, generate leads, network, showcase your expertise, or something else? Your objectives will shape your content strategy.
- Know Your Audience: Understand your target audience on LinkedIn. Who are they? What are their interests, pain points, and preferences? Knowing your audience is essential for creating content that resonates with them.
- Create a Content Calendar: Social Calendar from CoSchedule is the perfect platform to plan and organize your LinkedIn projects, posts, and campaigns.
4. Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile and Company Page
Make sure your profile and company page are complete and up-to-date. Some things you can include are:
- All relevant business information
- Website link
- Contact information
- Hours of operation
- High-quality profile picture
- Business accomplishments
- Connections
5. Use LinkedIn’s Advertising Tools
LinkedIn advertising can be a great way to reach a larger audience and achieve your marketing goals. There are a variety of ad formats to choose from, so you can find the ones that work best for your business.
6. Track Your Results
Measuring and tracking your results is the most important part. Once you start making connections and posting more on LinkedIn, you’ll want to measure your traffic to see what performs well and what doesn’t.
You can do this through CoSchedule’s Social Calendar and use the analytics reporting integration for LinkedIn.
Establish Your Company As An Expert In Your Industry
LinkedIn is a great place to help you establish credibility in your industry. Let’s go over how you can reach expert-level status on LinkedIn.
Solve Problems Your Customers Are Experiencing
You can establish authority in your industry by showing how your company can solve specific problems better than your competitors.
How can you stand out to your potential audience? See if your content answers the following questions:
- Is our content empathizing with their problem?
- Is our content creating an emotional connection to where our potential customers are in their buyer journey?
- Is our content connecting our audience members’ problems to our solution?
If your content doesn’t answer these questions, revise it to show why your company is the best choice for your audience.
Freely Share Your Knowledge
To truly establish your authority on LinkedIn, you should freely share your industry knowledge.
Share your knowledge when:
- It’s basic. Information you share with your audience may not be common knowledge within your industry.
- Your customers are experiencing a problem that you can show them how to fix. This saves them time, and you can focus on solving bigger problems.
Don’t share your knowledge when:
- It’s a company secret. If your company or brand has a secret way of doing something, you should keep that to yourself.
- The topic is going to put their audience in over their heads. If your solution is complex and challenging to do without industry knowledge, keep that to yourself.
Share The Most Valuable Content Possible
What does the best content on LinkedIn look like? The best content out there should be:
- Well-researched. Well-researched content is backed by a plethora of different credible sources.
- Highly informative. Roger Bryan states your content must be unique and valuable to your target audience. If you’re creating content that just rehashes what others have said, you’re not informing your audience of anything new.
- Authoritative. Authoritative content is the authority of your content overall, not just a single post. You can build that credibly through publishing reliable, well-researched content.
Utilize Your Highly Informative Content To Successfully Target Your Audience
There are three key pieces that your content needs to follow for your company to target your audience on LinkedIn successfully.
According to Content Marketing Institute those types of content are:
- User-generated content: Content that comes directly from your target audience.
- Expert content: Content that comes from industry experts.
- Branded content: Content that comes from your company.
Is This Content Focused On a Topic That My Audience Cares About?
The most important thing to consider is finding topics your audience cares about and are worth their time.
Most of these tools will have in-form analytics, allowing you to gather data on your audience’s responses. Some common questions you could add to the survey are:
- What topics are we talking about that you enjoy us covering?
- What would you like to see us cover more?
- What would you like to know about our products and or our company?
Publish LinkedIn Marketing Campaigns With CoSchedule
In Social Calendar, you can create a Marketing Campaign to send out your marketing content for LinkedIn. First, you can hit “+Create” in the top right corner of your calendar.
From here, you can name your campaign, select a date, add a description, and assign whatever tags you need to this specific campaign.
After you hit “Create Marketing Campaign,” you can plan out projects, tasks, and social messages included for your LinkedIn Marketing Campaign. You can assign color labels, chat in discussions, and use AI to help you write social messages for LinkedIn.
Next, you can create social messages to schedule and send out on LinkedIn and use AI to help create content and ideas for your social messages.
From here, you can schedule your social messages with best time scheduling, so it can arrive at the right audience at the right time. Social Calendar is the best place to schedule your LinkedIn projects, campaigns, social messages, and more.
Now that you’ve learned how to successfully market on LinkedIn, you can make new connections, watch your posts flourish, and master your social media strategy.