Best LinkedIn Marketing Strategy For Growing Companies

LinkedIn is at the forefront of everyone's mind when it comes to professional digital networking, and is the primary social network for B2B marketers, professionals, and recruiters.

A recent survey revealed that 91% of executives rated LinkedIn as their go-to network for professionally relevant content. 

From such data, it is evident that LinkedIn is a fantastic marketing tool for your B2B brand. With the right strategy, you can make meaningful relationships that will help in building your business. 

Why Your Business Should Have a LinkedIn Marketing Strategy 

LinkedIn has tremendous benefits for any business and can help you achieve your business goals when used right. 

Below are some of the reasons you should have a LinkedIn marketing strategy. 

• Lead Generation: HubSpot statistics show that LinkedIn users convert 277% more often than users of other social media platforms. How amazing is that? 

• Hires: LinkedIn data shows that it is a top source for recruiters 

• Brand Authority: B2B buyers are always on the lookout for authority brands. LinkedIn can help in building a brand authority through sharing useful content other users can benefit from.

• Awareness: LinkedIn's fundamental purpose is connecting professionals. The platform can help you boost brand awareness by linking you with relevant users that are beneficial to your business. 

• Business Goals Realization: LinkedIn can help you achieve the goals you set for your business. For instance, if one of your objectives is to boost your sales leads by 50%, networking on LinkedIn can quickly help you hit that goal. 

Here is a summary:

Determine Lead Performance   

In order to know how your LinkedIn strategy is performing, you need to have a baseline that determines what a lead is and what it is not. For instance, if a prospect completed a contact form on your LinkedIn page, that would be termed a lead.  

So, anytime you acquire a lead, you will be able to put a performance percentage to your LinkedIn marketing strategy. If in the last month you got 1000 leads and want to increase your lead count by 26%, you will need to target 260 leads. 

LinkedIn makes this process easier by providing lead generation forms, which are an excellent way to obtain prospect information right from your profile. 

Determine Your Audience Before You Begin Marketing on LinkedIn

Having a marketing objective is redundant without knowing who precisely to aim for. You can create content for everyone on LinkedIn, but that practice rarely yields results. You need to know who your target is. 

Determining your audience is a critical aspect of your LinkedIn strategy as it shapes what kind of content you churn out. 

It is also important to note that LinkedIn is strictly a business-to-business platform. Therefore, reusing the content you post on Facebook or other social media platforms may not yield the desired results. Your LinkedIn audience requires specific content crafted for them. 

Here are a few questions you need to ask when figuring out who your audience is: 

1. What is your audience’s industry? 

2. What challenges do they experience? 

3. Where is your audience’s location? 

4. When do they experience such challenges? 

5. Why do they encounter these problems? 

After you have successfully answered these questions, you can then proceed to craft an audience persona. These personas will be based on the characteristics of your audience.

For example, does the user experience the kind of challenge your product or service solves? If yes, you should create content to target such users. 

Identifying an audience persona puts your LinkedIn strategy into perspective. You are not just taking blind swings but calculated moves targeted at a specific group of people. 

Establish the Tone and Voice of Your LinkedIn Business Strategy 

The next aspect of your LinkedIn business strategy is establishing a professional tone and voice. 

What does that mean? Your voice reflects the personality of your brand, while your tone gives a special touch to your voice based on varying situations or factors. 

Your voice displays the character of your brand. Is it thoughtful, informative, purposeful, or political? 

The first step to getting your voice right would be to have your team put down seven adjectives that best define your brand and then pick only three adjectives that your organization will embody online. 

Here is a list of adjectives to consider: 

After you have chosen the three adjectives that best reflect your brand's voice, you can move on to create your unique tone for LinkedIn. 

If your brand uses a conversational voice, how would you want LinkedIn users to perceive it? Would you want it to have a friendly or a strictly professional tone? 

You can choose the tone depending on the kind of audience you intend to reach out too. 

So, from the three adjectives you initially picked, you can now choose one that will be used in the majority of your posts on LinkedIn. 

Your tone may switch in certain conditions, but ultimately, it should remain consistent. Now, to help you understand how to maintain a professional and personal tone balance in your posts, let us have a look at three examples: 

1. Target

2. Adobe

3. Ulta Beauty

Target 

This LinkedIn post from retail giant Target maintains a professional voice while still managing to insert a human touch by revealing their team culture to the audience. 

Adobe 

The post from Adobe reaches both of their audience types - technical and nontechnical users. The post appeals to their technical audience's passion for design but manages to maintain a conversational language that non-tech people can understand.

Ulta Beauty

Ulta Beauty is a brand whose objective is to help its customers gain confidence in their physical appearance. They need to be approachable because they work in the beauty industry, which is usually light-hearted and fun. This is why they choose an approachable voice for their posts on LinkedIn, and it works perfectly for their audience. 

The post showed their audience that the Ulta team cares about their clients enough to ensure that they are confident and feel beautiful and inspired. 

Carefully Craft Your LinkedIn Content Marketing Strategies

Data shows that executives of various brands go through LinkedIn in search of content relevant to their organization in order to make well-informed buying decisions. 

Statistics even show that 45% of LinkedIn users are in the upper management of their respective companies. 

This tells you that LinkedIn content goes far beyond publishing random posts and keeping your fingers crossed that it somehow is relevant to your audience. Instead, you need to create content that is relevant to your audience persona and your business objectives for LinkedIn. 

It even goes beyond just creating relevant content. The method you use to distribute your content is crucial. 

Let us see some of the most important types of content you should be sharing on LinkedIn: 

• LinkedIn Pulse posts 

• Blogs

• White papers 

• Infographics 

• YouTube Videos 

• Slide Decks 

These are examples of the kind of content types that excel on LinkedIn. So you will need to figure out what kind of content best explains what you offer the best and use it. 

You will also need to know the right time to make your posts, as your target audience may not be online during specific hours of the day. 

When it comes to messaging someone outside of your LinkedIn network, the InMail feature does the job. If you're stuck thinking about the perfect message to send, you can use some of the LinkedIn InMail templates and examples and customize them to suit your needs.

Using Content in the LinkedIn Business Strategy

A great way to establish brand authority in your niche is to elaborate on how your organization can solve industry problems better than the competition. 

Data shows that 82% of B2B buyers are conducting more research in order to evaluate services before a purchase. This makes the conversion process a lot longer. 

Hence, you will need to stand out from your competition in order to pull LinkedIn users to your direction. Over 20 million posts are made every day on LinkedIn. That is a lot to compete with. If you want your LinkedIn to stand out, ask yourself: 

• Is your content relatable to the problems of your audience? 

• Is your content relevant to your potential customer's position on the buyer journey? 

• Is your content leading potential prospects to the solution of their problems? 

If the content you churn out on your LinkedIn page is not accomplishing these requirements, you may have to revamp your piece in order to attract quality leads. 

A perfect example is the Hilton Hotel chain post about their travel app for business travelers. It offers a solution to business travelers, who are their target audience, right off the bat. 

Such content boosts the quality of leads as the hotel builds its posts around the solution it offers.

Number 1 LinkedIn Profile Strategy For Growth

Building your LinkedIn profile is as important as building your brand because it goes a long way to determine how the public perceives your brand. 

A weak LinkedIn profile can negatively affect the marketing and publicity of your brand. If a person visits your profile and is not impressed, there is every possibility that they will not recommend your brand to anyone, as there is nothing that differentiates it from others.

Your LinkedIn profile is a significant part of your personal branding. It is a personal marketing platform that you can use to your advantage. 

If you have questions on how to make sure that your LinkedIn profile is excellent, below are some steps that will help you create a good LinkedIn profile:

1. Have a good LinkedIn profile picture

2. Use a relevant background image

3. Create an eye-catching headline

4. Avoid using buzzwords

5. Craft a good summary. Use our LinkedIn summary examples to come up with the best one.

6. Sync LinkedIn with email

7. Keep the profile updated

8. Follow industry influencers

Have a Good LinkedIn Profile Picture

Humans are visual creatures. Since your profile picture is the first thing to catch the attention of your audience, you need to choose an appropriate headshot for your profile. 

Upload a recent picture of you. Also, make sure that your face is clearly visible in the photo and that it takes up about 60% of the image. Do not upload profile pictures with distracting or overwhelming backgrounds.

Studies have shown that LinkedIn profiles that have photos perform better than those without a profile picture. They get 21 times more views and up to 36 times more engagements than profiles with no pictures. 

Use a Relevant Background Image 

You also need to upload a background image that is perfect for your brand. A good background image will help your audience remember your profile.

Create an Eye-Catching Headline

Do not just write your title at the top of your profile, include more details. Including a summarized, but detailed headline about your brand is a very good way to utilize the heading. 

Having a clear heading also makes it easy for a prospect interested in your product or service to identify you.

Avoid Using Buzzwords

Buzzwords are sometimes used in the headlines and good LinkedIn summaries of LinkedIn profiles. 

There is nothing wrong with such phrases or words, but stuffing them into every part of your headline or summary will affect the quality of what you have to say. 

Examples of Buzzwords are: passionate, certified, experienced, strategic creative, etc.

The reason why most people stuff these words into their headlines and summaries is that they think that the words will convince the reader that the owner of the profile is highly qualified.

You cannot convince people by stuffing your profile with words. You only have 120 characters in the headline, so use them wisely.

Do Not Leave Your Summary Field Empty

Your summary is content marketing real estate because the summary section is where you get the chance to tell your story which can be a detailed explanation of your skills and how they can benefit your clients. 

Take the time to create a neat, detailed, and straight to the point summary.

Sync Your LinkedIn Profile with Your Email 

Synchronizing your profile with your email address is an excellent way of growing your network. LinkedIn can help you with suggestions of the people you can connect with, and also send you notifications, which is very important when dealing with leads.

The chance of you being able to see potential clients and connect with them is higher when you link your email to your profile. 

Keep the Profile Updated

It is not just enough to have a long list of skills in your profile. You need to occasionally clean out some skills that are dormant and irrelevant to who you are and what you do. From time to time, go through your headline and summaries and clean out irrelevant skills. 

Follow Influencers in the Industry 

No brand is an island. Potential customers like brands that have loyal communities around them since they view it as a chance to connect with like-minded peers and grow their businesses.

They want to know who influences your brand and whom you are dealing with. That way, they will be able to ascertain how credible your brand is. You can also endorse notable brands in the industry, this will increase the visibility of your brand also increase your chances of being endorsed by other brands.

The Importance of a LinkedIn Social Media Strategy 

There are millions of people using different social media platforms on a daily basis and your ability to reach the bulk of them will determine how many leads you can generate. 

LinkedIn works hand in hand with other social media platforms. A study revealed that about 94 percent of B2B marketers that use social media depend on LinkedIn for the publishing of their content because LinkedIn is a platform that is excellent at lead generation. 

As a matter of fact, LinkedIn is responsible for the generation of eighty percent of business-to-business social media leads.

LinkedIn is the leading social media platform for B2B relationships. However, this does not mean that you should neglect every other social media platform. 

There is a mutually beneficial relationship between LinkedIn and other social media platforms. 

Research has shown that a large percentage of LinkedIn account owners also use other social media platforms; 90% are on Facebook, 49% have Pinterest accounts, 94% are actively on YouTube, while 57% of them have Instagram accounts. 

The majority of them are active on every social media platform they use. This shows that people on LinkedIn are also actively involved in other social media platforms, hence the need to unite LinkedIn and social media. 

Spend some time researching. See which social media platforms your audience uses. After locating where the major bulk of your target audience is, you can make these social media platforms overlap with your LinkedIn account. 

Let's look at three very powerful social media platforms that you can use:

1. Twitter

2. YouTube

3. SlideShare

Twitter 

Twitter is a beehive; it is full of activities. You can link your Twitter account to your LinkedIn profile. Connecting your Twitter and LinkedIn accounts will enable you to simultaneously share updates on both platforms.

YouTube 

YouTube has millions of users. You can increase the visibility of your brand by adding YouTube videos to relevant sections of your LinkedIn profile. 

LinkedIn allows you to add videos into the experience and summary section of your profile. This does not just give your target audience clarity on your brand; it also enables you to make your video available to valuable groups and connections on LinkedIn. YouTube has a share function that makes this possible. 

SlideShare 

Since LinkedIn purchased SlideShare, it is now very easy for you to integrate SlideShare into your LinkedIn profile. The number of active LinkedIn SlideShare users is at about seventy million on a monthly basis and it is rapidly increasing. 

That is a lot of users, right? You can take advantage of this large user base by linking your LinkedIn account to SlideShare. Connecting both of them will help you easily incorporate your slides into your LinkedIn profile. 

You can make your published PDF presentations available to your target audience via your LinkedIn account. 

You can also link other social media platforms to your LinkedIn account. This will increase the reach of your brand. However, bear in mind that it is not just enough to link your LinkedIn account to them; you need to be active, as well as share and publish posts on a regular basis.

Conclusion 

LinkedIn offers your brand the ability to connect with B2B buyers and the right strategy can ensure you take full advantage of the relationships the platform offers. 

Using the tips listed above you can take the guesswork off the table and create an effective strategy that allows you churn out authoritative and high-quality content, which will ultimately put you ahead of your competitors. 

For any B2B brand, Linkedin is a great place for generating leads, offering valuable content, and building brand awareness.

What has been your major challenge with marketing on LinkedIn?