LinkedIn has quickly become one of the most popular social networks in the world. Its focus on businesses and professionals makes it one of the best tools for B2B marketing, yet many organisations still aren’t aware of just how powerful the platform can be for them.

Used in the right way, B2B businesses can use LinkedIn to increase brand awareness, engage with current and potential customers, and drive new opportunities for their business. Yet few are truly optimising their LinkedIn marketing strategy to achieve these benefits – and some are neglecting LinkedIn altogether.

Here we’ll be discussing different LinkedIn marketing tactics, use cases for both paid and organic content, how to get started with both, and the benefits that can be achieved when a business optimises its LinkedIn marketing strategy.

Could LinkedIn be your golden goose? There’s only one way to find out.

What happens when your LinkedIn marketing strategy isn’t optimised?

It’s been shown that people are often motivated more by what they could miss out on, rather than what they could gain. So, before we jump into how you build a successful paid and organic LinkedIn marketing strategy, we’re going to start with the why. And it all has to do with what you stand to lose.

Common misconceptions about the purpose of LinkedIn mean that many people are unaware of the power of the platform. Some of the most common ones we encounter are:

1) LinkedIn is only useful for recruitment

2) LinkedIn marketing is all about sending pushy sales InMails

While LinkedIn has become a valuable recruitment tool for many businesses and there is no shortage of unwanted Sale InMails floating around, neither of these statements are even close to the truth.

A failure to explore all the marketing opportunities LinkedIn offers can leave business missing out on a lot of great things. Most commonly, we see:

Lack of engagement

Mistakes such as sharing unengaging content or not starting conversations with commenters mean that many posts will fall flat. Audiences that don’t find value in the posts they’re seeing on their feed will be quick to unfollow.

No brand awareness

Whilst posting organically is a great start, using paid content to reach wider audiences is key to increasing brand awareness and starting new conversations. If businesses opt out of using paid advertising, they’ll find their reach greatly reduced.

Poor ROI

Whether it’s due to a misunderstanding of the platform or not knowing how to optimise content, many businesses won’t see ROI and will give up too early. This leads to further disillusionment of LinkedIn and a lack of proper investment in the platform, all of which hold businesses back from reaching their marketing and sales goals.

So how can businesses optimise their content to see a return on investment?

The what, why, and how of organic LinkedIn content

What is it?

Organic posts are the most popular content on LinkedIn, and these are the posts that you can post for free on your company and personal pages, as well as Industry relevant groups you are a part of. Companies can post a variety of content as organic posts, including images, polls, videos, documents, job advertisements, and more.

Use cases for organic LinkedIn posts

Organic posts are used to communicate and engage with your current audience, as well as position your brand or company.

Examples of organic posts:

  • Sharing company news and achievements
  • Writing and sharing thought leadership articles
  • Employer branding to promote yourself as a desirable place to work

How to optimise your organic posts:

  • Use hashtags to increase your reach
  • Keep an eye on post activity and engage with commenters
  • Tag relevant employees to promote post engagement
  • Experiment with different content and angles to see what resonates with your audience
  • Post at least three times a week, with a goal of increasing this to daily posts
  • Make sure to have an up-to-date company profile and utilise the free CTA button on your page

The what, why, and how of paid LinkedIn content

What is it?

Paid content includes boosted organic posts, sponsored ads and even lead generation forms, consisting of a wide variety of content such as videos, PDFs, articles, and more.

Uses cases for paid LinkedIn content:

Paid content on LinkedIn is used to attract new audiences and increase brand awareness. LinkedIn gives you the ability to niche down to an incredible level when trying to reach new audiences. From targeting specific job titles, excluding competitors, or narrowing down to seniority, you’re able to get your content in front of your perfect audience.

Examples of paid content:

  • Creating a lead generation tool to gather more leads
  • Boosting an organic post that’s doing well
  • Sales content promoting your services
  • Starting a follow campaign to increase your followers

How to optimise your paid content:

  • Utilise filters to niche down to your target audience
  • Be aware of character limits to avoid copy being truncated
  • A/B test elements like buttons, images, and headline copy
  • Don’t be afraid to get clickbaity with your copy – but don’t actively mislead your audience
  • Use images that are specific to your audience
  • Your paid content should always be trying to sell the next step – get people to download the asset or go to a landing page, rather than buy your whole suite of services

Bringing it all together to optimise your LinkedIn marketing strategy

It can be time-consuming and intimidating for businesses to start using LinkedIn without any plan or content ready to go. So, what should your first steps be?

For organic content, we recommend that you create a plan for the next 1-3 months. Start with post ideas – check out our examples above – and slowly fill a calendar up. You can start with 1-3 posts a week and build up to daily posts once you gain momentum.

For paid content, we recommend including this whenever you want to promote a new service or product to a new audience. Valuable pieces of content like case studies make for great paid content. While Ads can be used more sporadically, we recommend you always give each new campaign a three-month trial before making a decision to continue with it or change and to always have a campaign running as part of your overall marketing strategy.

LinkedIn contains a goldmine of potential when the platform is used right. Businesses that invest in their LinkedIn marketing strategy can achieve goals and results such as:

  • Increased brand awareness
  • Higher conversion rates
  • A secondary (or tertiary) source of traffic
  • More MQLs

Work with the experts to perfect your LinkedIn marketing strategy

LinkedIn is one of align.me’s favourite platforms for B2B, and we utilise a wide range of organic and paid content on the platform. Just like any marketing tactic, it takes time, commitment, and a bit of know-how to gain real results.

Our in-house experts have spent years researching and testing various LinkedIn tactics, and we have a clear and proven process that can help you meet your sales and marketing goals.

If you’re interested in learning how we can help you make the most of a B2B LinkedIn marketing strategy, you can get in touch with our expert team here.

 

Thank you to our LinkedIn specialist Nick Steffens for his expert contribution to this blog.