LinkedIn Marketing: Why Should You Have a LinkedIn Strategy?

Why Should You Include LinkedIn Marketing into Your Social Media Strategy?

LinkedIn is a smart choice for marketing because it’s where all the professionals are. It’s particularly good for B2B companies looking to connect with industry leaders and decision-makers. You can share useful insights and solid content that showcases your expertise, which really appeals to people interested in industry trends and professional growth.

Here are some benefits of creating a LinkedIn strategy:

1. Relationship-building
2. Reaching a specific audience
3. Outperforming your competitors
4. Increasing ROI
5. Maintaining the brand image

1. Relationship-Building

The long-term view is essential in content marketing strategy. Sure, running one-time ads and campaigns can be beneficial, but nothing compares to the importance of cultivating genuine, long-lasting professional relationships outside of your own walls. 

LinkedIn is amazing for lead generation, as it connects you to prospects, colleagues, peers, influencers, and business leaders worldwide.

2. Reaching a Specific Audience

LinkedIn has a global community of more than 700 million professionals. Your B2B customers, no matter who they are, are almost certainly on the platform. 

With the breadth of filters and targeting parameters available to orient campaigns, you have an unrivaled ability to refine the scope of your messaging.

3. Outperforming Your Competitors

Using social media to communicate with your customers is an excellent way to stay ahead of the competition. You can take that to the next level with a social media marketing strategy that evaluates what your competitors are doing and identifies gaps that you can exploit. 

You can determine which groups you should target in order to increase traffic and what you should do better than your competitors in order to steal their customers.

4. Increasing ROI

Posting on social media is great, but it’s difficult to justify your efforts if you’re not seeing any real results. 

Your strategic LinkedIn presence can assist you in determining which aspects of your company pages should be measured to determine success. If you are not meeting your objectives, you can improve your results by expanding or adapting parts of your strategy.

5. Maintaining the Brand Image

Being active on social media will help you establish yourself as a credible and authoritative figure online. However, if you’re working across LinkedIn and other social media platforms and have multiple people posting, it’s easy to lose sight of your brand voice. 

Because brand image is so important, a social media marketing strategy for your LinkedIn company profile can help to ensure that your image is consistent from one platform to the other.

How to Create a LinkedIn Marketing Strategy 

1. Optimize your LinkedIn company page
2. Build a network of connections
3. Create and join LinkedIn groups
4. Create authentic LinkedIn content
5. Use LinkedIn ads
6.  Post frequently
7. Use hashtags

1. Optimize Your LinkedIn Company Page

One of the best LinkedIn marketing tips is to create a company page on LinkedIn.

With LinkedIn being so popular, it’s viewed as the voice of your organization. You communicate with your audience through it, grow your followership and drive business results. Of course, if your brand is your personal one, you can stick to having personal LinkedIn profiles in that case.

So, having company pages properly set up is important. In your Linkedin page, you need to be direct about what you do, what you offer and introduce them to your product or service. Like with your brand on other channels, you need to have everything in order.

Here are some tips to take into consideration for optimizing your LinkedIn page:

• Add a branded profile image and banner need to your LinkedIn page
• Write a thorough “About Us” section, focusing on the company description
• Use relevant keywords so that users can find you easier
• Check the list of employees and encourage people to add your company and job titles to their profiles 
• Fill in the basic info about your company such as the address, company size, niche, an adequate URL

Building a business page is also a great way to showcase your professionalism and company culture. You can use the company page to recruit the best talent, and you can even learn how to post jobs on LinkedIn for free.

An optimized profile helps you keep profile visitors. First impressions are important, and some users might bounce if they feel that your profile doesn’t look very professional.

2. Build a Network of Connections

In the business world, meeting people and making connections are essential. It allows you to find new partners, generate new leads and acquire potential clients by asking for referrals. It’s the same for LinkedIn, but easy and fast. 

You’ll be surprised how many people you know have LinkedIn. Start by adding employees, partners, clients, etc. Follow industry influencers, send connection requests to all your peers, and always grow your connections.

The more connections you have, the larger the network, the bigger your reach. People also have a certain fondness for numbers, so having your company page have a large number of connections means that you are doing well.

When you build your network with a lot of connections, it boils down to you sending a lot of connection requests. However, there’s a limit of presonalized messages that you can send in a single day. 

Remember, LinkedIn doesn’t allow you to send a message to a large number of profiles, since they want to protect their users from bots and spammy messages. But, you can still avoid these rules; you just need to learn how to automate messages on LinkedIn. It can allow you to grow your network and increase your outbound sales prospecting, without getting banned on LinkedIn.

3. Create and Join LinkedIn Groups

The best way to work on your LinkedIn marketing strategy is to try to use its organic benefits as much as you can. You do this by joining groups, making connections by being active in discussions, or by creating your group. You’ll connect with a lot of potential customers to whom you can later send messages and propose your offer.

The important thing to know when creating your own is that it should be relevant for other users so they would join, and it should be related to your product. This way you can create open discussions about your offer, get crucial feedback and learn about your audience. On the other hand, they can share their opinions, suggestions, and concerns. Just remember, you can’t just create a group without taking care of it, or it could disappear quickly.

If you join groups that are closely related to your product, you can get relevant info there too. Listen to the audience, what they like about the competition and what problems they are facing. You could join the discussion and maybe even provide a solution that your competition couldn’t offer.

4. Create Authentic LinkedIn Content

You can’t just drop links on business LinkedIn and expect engagement.

If possible, social platforms do not want you to bounce users off-site. This explains why content repurposing is such an important aspect of LinkedIn marketing. You need to create and share engaging content.

Many brands, for example, will divide or consolidate blog content into smaller, text-only LinkedIn posts. Others will make a slideshow or infographic instead of an external link.

If you want to create quality content, it is important to share various types of content. 

Here are some types of company content you can share on LinkedIn:

• Reshares from your company’s blog
• Educational content about your industry
• Engaging content about thought leadership
• Quizzes & polls
• Video content
• Latest trends

5. Use LinkedIn Ads

LinkedIn invites business professionals, which isn’t the case with other social networks. This is a perfect environment for B2B companies to generate leads, increase traffic and get more conversions. 

It’s important to understand that LinkedIn marketing is an integral part of your social media strategy. Additionally, LinkedIn offers advertisements so you can make sure your ads and offers are shown to your prospective clients.

While LinkedIn is a platform full of industry experts, it’s still populated by a diverse demographic. To be effective, you should use the precise targeting that LinkedIn offers. 

If you include ads in your LinkedIn strategy, you can target users by:

• Location
• Experience
• Company size
• Groups
• Interests
• Gender
• Age
• Job title and function
• Language
• Industry

It’s also pretty neat that you can retarget relevant visitors with ads after you’ve collected some data.

LinkedIn marketing is more expensive if compared to other channels in your social media strategy. But, the leads you get from other channels are often less relevant since you don’t have the same targeting options as those that LinkedIn offers.

Video ads get the best results as far as to reach and impressions and social network platforms also seem to push this type of content. Popular amongst the B2B industries, social media testimonials can be a powerful tool for attracting new customers. We recommend you consider adding them to your LinkedIn marketing strategy.

Depending on factors such as targeting, audience group, and objectives, you can choose the right ad formats for the best possible results in your LinkedIn marketing strategy.

6. Post Frequently

On LinkedIn, as on any other platform, consistency and frequency are important. Therefore, they should also be an important part of your LinkedIn strategy.

We rarely see multiple posts per day on brand accounts (or even daily). Those who post on a regular basis receive the most engagement during the weekday mornings and early afternoons.

If you have a personal LinkedIn profile, however, posting multiple times per day is completely acceptable. 

Here are some recommendations for posting times from social media experts:

 It will take some testing to determine what is “optimal.” For example, you can take a look at your LinkedIn analytics and understand when your network is most active before you create your LinkedIn marketing calendar. Thankfully, when you use a tool like SocialBee, you can both schedule your posts and keep track of the analytics of your LinkedIn account.

If you want to schedule your content on LinkedIn, SocialBee is a tool that can help you do that.

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The Best Social Media Posting Times Cheat Sheet

Learn when and how often to post various content types, from fun to educational and more.

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7. Use Hashtags

Hashtags are commonly used to emphasize your LinkedIn post, but they actually serve a purpose that can improve your marketing strategy. 

These simple phrases, followed by a hashtag symbol, are goldmines for reaching new audiences, industries, and niches. However, using too many, or worse, the wrong ones, can limit your reach.

That means conducting hashtag research on LinkedIn to strike a balance between relevant and popular hashtags. First, use the search bar to look for a broad hashtag. If you work in growth marketing, for example, start by searching #growthmarketing to see how many people are following the hashtag and how frequently it is used.

Are You Ready to Shape Your Own LinkedIn Strategy?

LinkedIn proved to be the best place for business professionals, so your B2B company needs to quickly design its LinkedIn strategy. Not only can you increase your brand awareness, but you can also make connections and build a network of potential clients.

You’ll be able to create or join groups with them and be proactive in discussions so you can learn more about your target group. Listen to feedback and concerns from your audience, but also your competitors. It’s a quick way to discover what your industry needs and how to provide a solution.

If you want to have a successful LinkedIn marketing strategy, don’t forget how important it is to schedule your content. Thankfully, with SocialBee, you can schedule, edit, and publish all your LinkedIn posts from one dashboard. Start your 14-day free trial now!