LinkedIn is the world’s premier business network, with 722 million users as of January 2022. That’s a lot of business professionals all in place. If you’re a B2B company, you must be thinking:
- How can I use LinkedIn for my business?
- How can I use LinkedIn for my marketing?
- How can I use LinkedIn to promote my brand?
- How can I use LinkedIn for networking?
- How can I use LinkedIn to generate leads and conversions?
If you’re asking these questions, you’re on the right track. LinkedIn is a great marketing and sales tool. According to Sprout Social:
- LinkedIn has helped 45% of marketers with customer acquisition.
- Compared to Facebook, LinkedIn generates leads 277% more effectively.
- It also accounts for 80% of B2B leads and nearly 50% of the total social traffic going to B2B sites.
Got FOMO already? Run, don’t walk—we’re dishing out four effective LinkedIn marketing strategies to help you reap the benefits too. Let’s get started!
First Step: Build a Business Page
Before jumping into LinkedIn marketing strategies, you need to build a business page first. To do that, log into your account and then click on the Work icon at the top right of your browser. Scroll to the bottom of the pop-up menu and press “Create a Company Page.”
Source: Business Insider
Then, choose the type of business page you wish to create and provide your company details—like the name, logo, and tagline. Once you’re done, click “Create page.”
Voila, you’re ready to use LinkedIn for your business! Here are four effective strategies you need in your marketing toolkit.
1. Optimize Your Company Profile
Anyone can create a profile—but the best businesses will optimize them. Luckily, this LinkedIn marketing strategy is so easy to do.
What exactly is optimization? Optimization is making the best or most effective use of a situation or resource. Here’s what that means when it comes to your LinkedIn business profile:
- Use a high-quality profile and banner photo: Your profile photo should be a high-resolution image relevant to your brand. Typically, this means your company logo. (Did you know that an optimized profile photo could score you 21 times more profile views?)
Your banner photo is also important for catching your audience’s eyes and building credibility. So make sure it’s on brand and sized correctly. Currently, 1128×191 pixels is recommended.
- Complete your profile: Don’t just fill out the bare minimum. When you fill out all the fields in the additional information area, you clarify what you offer users. This boosts your LinkedIn SEO.
In addition to adding links and CTAs, don’t forget to target relevant hashtags and communities to boost visibility. Companies with complete profiles get 30% more views. So yeah, it’s worth it.
Example: Nike
Nike’s LinkedIn business page checks off all the boxes:
- A crisp profile photo
- Links to its website and affiliate business page (Converse)
- A fully-completed profile
Take note of its Specialties section. It doesn’t just list “athletic shoes” and “apparel,” which is what the brand is most known for. It targets other related topics, like “innovation,” which helps their LinkedIn SEO and increases brand visibility.
2. Create and Post Valuable Content
LinkedIn marketing should not be overly promotional—trust us, this will do more harm than good. LinkedIn users use this platform to make relevant connections, access helpful resources, and find credible products and services. To demonstrate that your business offers all three, you need to create and post content that drives value.
This LinkedIn marketing strategy falls under content marketing. Content marketing involves creating and sharing online material (such as videos, blogs, and social media posts) that does not explicitly promote a brand but is intended to stimulate interest in its products or services.
Here are three steps to creating valuable content for your LinkedIn audience:
1. Create a buyer persona and identify your target audience’s problems and pain points.
2. Build problem awareness. Your audience may not be aware of all their problems yet—and they certainly won’t search for a solution if they don’t know they have a problem.
3. Provide tips, resources, and advice for solving their problems. Again, you shouldn’t be promoting your business. The intention is to provide credible, valuable information. This will position you as an expert in the field, which in turn will stimulate interest in your products and services.
To help you identify useful topics for your target audience, check out LinkedIn’s new Content Suggestion feature. This nifty tool populates trending topics for your audience. Learn how to use it in this quick two-minute video.
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We recommend creating a content calendar to keep your LinkedIn posts consistent, organized, and intentional.
Example: Headspace
Time and again, Headspace nails all three steps for creating and posting valuable content. Let’s deconstruct this example.
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Headspace has clearly done the work when it comes to audience targeting. Here, they target two. The first is transgender folks who are struggling with their mental health. The second is people who are responsible for providing mental health support, like HR and People Ops professionals.
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Headspace draws attention to a problem in this post: mental healthcare for trans individuals is essential—and should not be overlooked or dismissed.
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This post highlights a solution: a Headspace webinar to help attendees navigate the mental healthcare system. This content doesn’t promote Headspace explicitly but positions the brand as a knowledgeable source for mental health resources.
3. Find Ways to Increase Engagement
If you want to leverage LinkedIn for business, you can’t take a backseat. You need to play an active role and continually engage your audience. If you can increase engagement with your target audience and employees, you’ll increase brand visibility and awareness—an essential piece of the marketing funnel.
Here are several LinkedIn marketing strategies that can help you increase engagement:
1. Post polls, quizzes, and contests: Social media platforms are what they sound like: platforms for people to be social. Use your posts to open up discussions, engage in friendly competition, or ask for feedback. Don’t forget to respond to comments and shares!
2. Call out your audience: Oftentimes, people are mindlessly scrolling through their feed. Name your audience in the first sentence to catch their attention. For example, “Calling all marketers,” or “Are you a working parent?”
3. Tag people and pages mentioned: A common mistake is forgetting to tag people and pages mentioned in your post. Tagging them will prompt them to engage with your content. Ideally, this will put your brand in front of their networks. It’s a simple act that could go a long way.
4. Include videos and images: While long-form posts certainly perform better on LinkedIn than any other social media platform, don’t forget to add some visuals to catch your audience’s attention and invite engagement. LinkedIn posts with images get 2x the engagement.
5. Involve your employees: Your employees are one of your biggest assets—especially for your LinkedIn marketing. A great first step is having them add your company to their profile. This automatically turns them into followers, so they’ll see your content on their feeds. We also recommend providing them with branded cover photos to use on their profile.\
Did you know that companies get 30% of their engagement from employees? To boost engagement, make it a habit to feature your team in your posts. It shows you value them, which will impress job seekers and potential customers. (Nobody wants to support businesses who treat their team poorly.)
6. Send personalized InMails: While InMail is not a free feature, it’s a feature worth paying for. LinkedIn InMail allows you to send personalized messages to folks outside of your network—and it gets three times more responses than regular emails!
Whether you’re reaching out to prospects or influential personalities, LinkedIn Mail is one of the top ways to get noticed and start a conversation.
Example: Plenty of Fish
Employee-centric posts are a key ingredient for LinkedIn marketing. As you can see, you don’t need a full production to create this content. In fact, we love the organic feel of Plenty of Fish’s employee appreciation posts.
From a glance at their LinkedIn business page, it’s clear that they showcase their employees often. And the example below demonstrates that it has gained traction among the team—they’re sharing similar posts in their own feeds! We love that Plenty of Fish re-shared this post and shouted out the featured employees. Chef’s kiss!
3. Use LinkedIn Ads
As a business owner, you’re looking for LinkedIn marketing strategies with the best ROI, right? Well, that’s precisely what you get with LinkedIn Ads. Because four out of five people on LinkedIn drive business decisions, you can place your ads directly in front of people with buying power. And these stats show that the payoff is huge:
- Marketers see up to 2x higher conversion rates on LinkedIn.
- Brands see a 33% increase in purchase intent from ad exposure on LinkedIn.
- 79% of content marketers say LinkedIn Ads produce the best results over other social media platforms. Behind LinkedIn comes Facebook at 54%.
Convinced? Let’s dive into LinkedIn Ads for your business.
Whether it’s to generate leads, drive website traffic, or build brand awareness, LinkedIn’s advertising platform has a solution for you.
For top-of-funnel campaigns (like building brand awareness), you can leverage LinkedIn Ads’ robust targeting capabilities:
- Ad Targeting: LinkedIn data is different from other social platforms because users have professional incentives to keep their profiles accurate and up-to-date. You can combine targeting criteria to build your ideal persona and feel confident you’re reaching the right folks!
- Audience Expansion: Remember who you targeted above? With Audience Expansion, LinkedIn will target users with similar attributes to them. Let’s say your campaign targets users with the skill “Online Advertising.” LinkedIn may expand your audience to users who list the skill “Interactive Marketing” on their profile. You could uncover new quality prospects and automatically drive them into your funnel!
- Lookalike Targeting: Wish you could target people just like your best customers? This feature does just that. To get started, you need to upload a list of companies or contacts (such as your email list), and LinkedIn’s algorithm will create a lookalike audience up to 15 times larger than the original audience size.
For middle to bottom-funnel campaigns (like scoring high-quality leads and conversions), you can use LinkedIn Ads’ remarketing feature:
- Matched Audiences: Like Audience Expansion, the first step to using this remarketing feature is to upload lists of website visitors, people, accounts, or companies that have already engaged with your brand.
How do you collect website visitor data? All you have to do is add the LinkedIn Insight Tag to your website, and you’re good to go.
Yes, advertising takes work—but it’s oh-so-worth-it. If you don’t have an internal paid media specialist, it may be in your best interest to work with a team of experts.
Ready to See What LinkedIn Can Do for Your Business?
LinkedIn is the place to be for professionals and businesses. If you’re not using LinkedIn for your business, you could be missing out.
But that’s why you’re here today. You don’t want to miss out! With these four LinkedIn marketing strategies, you know just what to do to use this platform to your advantage. Now it’s time to drive those results up and to the right.
