With 930 million members worldwide, LinkedIn has become a marketing goldmine. But how do you master this professional playground without losing your humor and sanity?
Fear not, fellow marketer!
This comprehensive guide is here to help you create a killer LinkedIn marketing strategy.
LinkedIn marketing isn't just for the stiff corporate types. Anyone with a serious responsibility, be it academic, corporate, or business, can start building their presence on LinkedIn and create a professional brand.
Here are a few examples of industries and individuals that can benefit from LinkedIn marketing:
LinkedIn is a networking haven for businesses looking to connect with other businesses.
For example, Salesforce is a CRM solution designed to help sales teams organize and streamline their customer data. Their company page has around 5M followers, and they’re quite active on the platform.
Their strategy: posting content around the behind-the-scenes activities of their organization—an event they’re conducting, team lunches, new launches, etc. This helps their followers connect with their company and potential employees understand their work culture.
And most important, their LinkedIn page helps the Trailblazers community stay updated on upcoming events and summits.
Calling all headhunters and HR professionals! LinkedIn is your playground for finding and connecting with top talent. Besides sourcing relevant profiles from the platform, you can signal trustworthiness to your potential candidates. And you can do this by creating a profile that reflects your professionalism and experience in the recruiting space.
This profile is an excellent example of an approachable recruiter who has put together an impressive profile.
Other than maintaining a complete profile on LinkedIn, you’ll find him sharing interview tips for his target audience, i.e., job seekers, which makes the profile more attractive and valuable.
Show off your expertise, build your network, and find potential clients on LinkedIn.
How? Let’s take an example of how Kat leverages LinkedIn as a client acquisition platform:
Stand out from the crowd by showcasing your skills, experience, and personality on LinkedIn. You can follow a similar approach to Kat in the above example. The key is to maintain an active LinkedIn profile that displays your achievements, experiences, and your process clearly, which is all recruiters want to know!
To get your creative juices flowing, let's take a look at some real-life examples of brands rocking the LinkedIn marketing game:
• IBM: IBM’s LinkedIn page is a treasure trove of engaging content, from thought leadership articles to live events and webinars. Plus, they humanize their brand by highlighting employee stories and achievements. This helps them present IBM as an amazing place to work and showcase their work culture and values to potential employees and customers.
• HubSpot: Marketing software giant HubSpot excels at sharing valuable content that resonates with their target audience, including blog posts, e-books, and case studies. Their LinkedIn presence showcases their expertise while also providing a touch of humor.
• Dunder Mifflin: Okay, this one might be fictional, but who can forget Michael Scott's hilarious marketing antics on The Office? Making up personas and getting into the characters to help your colleagues understand the persona well—pure genius!
Lesson learned: don't be afraid to show your personality on LinkedIn, and who knows? People might dig it!
Ready to dive into the world of LinkedIn marketing? Follow these steps to create a killer strategy:
LinkedIn's algorithm can be a fickle beast. To get your content seen by the right people, focus on two key factors: relevance and engagement.
Make sure your content is tailored to your target audience's interests and encourages interaction (likes, comments, and shares).
Follow these best practices to keep up with the evolving algorithm:
Before you start posting, make sure your LinkedIn profile and company page are up to snuff:
A picture is worth a thousand words, so use custom images and videos to capture your audience's attention. Remember, LinkedIn native videos autoplay in the feed, giving you an extra engagement boost. Consider utilizing tools like VEED for enhancing your content accessibility. VEED offers an add subtitle to videos feature, an auto subtitle generator and a video caption generator. These tools will be especially useful for viewers in a noisy environment or for those with hearing impairments.
For example, Salesforce often leverages videos and images to promote something or share a company update on their page, all the while boosting their marketing and employer branding in tandem.
Here, they are simply promoting a blog post about third-party cookies while using cookies falling off the sky as a video, which immediately stops the scrolls and engages the audience.
Another excellent example of creating visuals on LinkedIn- launching a new feature and explaining how it works via a Loom video. Absolute genius!
Oh, and that’s not it! You can also leverage carousels to attract your target audience. Catchy (not click bait-y) headlines, stunning visuals, and powerful content usually do the trick!
Ditch the sales pitch and focus on providing value to your audience with informative, entertaining content. Use niche hashtags, post at optimal times, and experiment with different formats like infographics and text-only posts.
You can create high-value visuals (as shown in step 5) or publish the classic old text posts that still work like a charm.
Just make sure to structure your posts well and be as succinct as possible—do not ramble!
Get your employees involved in your LinkedIn marketing strategy by encouraging them to follow your company page, share content, and engage with posts. It helps you reach a wider set of audience (yours and your employees’), which is a great way to increase your brand awareness.
Boost your reach with LinkedIn ads, targeting users who have engaged with your website or whose contact details you already have.
Focus on conversions, as these users are already familiar with your brand.
Track your performance using LinkedIn's native analytics dashboard, focusing on engagement, conversions, and web traffic. Adjust your strategy based on the data to maximize your success.
Track metrics including:
Use Inlytics for comprehensive insights into your profile data!
Now that you've got the basics down, let's dive into some lesser-known tips and tricks for LinkedIn marketing success:
There you have it, folks! With this comprehensive guide in hand, you're ready to conquer the world of LinkedIn marketing.
Now go forth and engage your way to success!
Remember to keep your sense of humor intact and never be afraid to show your personality. After all, LinkedIn is a platform for people, not robots.
Happy networking!