Over the years, LinkedIn has transformed from being that social media platform everyone thought is suitable for job hunting into the one where brands are eager to promote their products or services.
And this is why investing in LinkedIn marketing is crucial to make sure your brand gains the attention it deserves.
In what follows, we will find out more on how to use LinkedIn for marketing on social media and what tools can help ease your work.
LinkedIn marketing guide
- What is LinkedIn marketing
- Benefits of doing LinkedIn marketing
- How to do LinkedIn marketing: key strategies
- 3.1. Define your goals
- 3.2. Know your audience
- 3.3. Post relevant and engaging content
- 3.4. Build brand awareness
- 3.5. Use polls to increase brand awareness
- 3.6. Promote your LinkedIn page through ads
- 3.7. Learn about the LinkedIn algorithm
- 3.8. Encourage your employees to become brand advocates
- 3.9. Mention people in your posts
- 3.10. Upload more videos
- 3.11. Measure your LinkedIn performance with analytics
- 3.12. Study your LinkedIn competitors
- 3.13. Keep your captions short
- 3.14. Use LinkedIn live feature
1. What is LinkedIn marketing
LinkedIn marketing is the act of leveraging LinkedIn as a platform for social media marketing.
Through this channel, you can stand to expand your network, gain visibility, increase your brand’s reputation and build trust within your community.
But for all that, you need a strategy to guide you through the process of promoting your brand’s products and services on LinkedIn and keep you accountable.
You also need professional LinkedIn analytics tools to help you track your performance and make data-driven decisions for your business.
2. Benefits of doing LinkedIn marketing
The better question is: why shouldn’t you do LinkedIn marketing? In many ways, you could say LinkedIn is the ideal platform for brands (particularly, but not limited to, B2B ones) because it is so heavily business-focused.
LinkedIn provides a professional environment where they can promote their services, reach more users and connect with their audience.
That being said, let’s go over the main benefits of LinkedIn marketing:
- Strong network
For anyone, but especially for a founder, C-level executive or someone in any other decision-making role, networking is very important. And LinkedIn is the right place to do it, as it allows you to connect with top voices in your industry, encourages you to discover more and more people and expand your influence.
- Targeted audience
LinkedIn allows you to cut through the noise and get through to the people that are most likely to be interested in the products/services you’re promoting.
- Thought leadership
If there’s one place where thought leadership has really taken off, it’s LinkedIn. On behalf of your brand, you can connect with subject matter and industry experts. Also, you can establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry, which will in turn help your brand gain more visibility and be perceived better.
- Brand awareness
Because it’s so business oriented, LinkedIn marketing offers a huge opportunity for brand awareness. By sharing quality content, leveraging employee advocacy and participating in LinkedIn groups, you can boost the number of impressions your content generates and build your brand awareness.
- Employee advocacy
Employee advocacy is something unique to LinkedIn, although some other platforms have tried to adopt it as well. By inspiring your team to post on behalf of your company, you can really start to build your brand’s image, reputation and credibility.
3. How to do LinkedIn marketing: key strategies
Being present and consistent on your brand’s LinkedIn page is just as important as showing up to work every day.
To succeed at marketing on LinkedIn, you need to have a strategy, establish your goals, and track your performance. Those are most crucial steps.
Let's explore a few other important steps you should complete in order to achieve your LinkedIn marketing goals:
3.1. Define your goals
If you don’t know where you’re going, you will never know what’s your next step. Therefore, after setting up your business’ LinkedIn page, make sure you establish your goals.
This is how you will also come up with ideas regarding how you will be accomplishing them.
Develop a list, together with your marketing team, but make sure you write realistic, attainable goals.
3.2. Know your audience
At first, when you set the pillars of your brand on LinkedIn, you tend to connect with everyone since you want to increase your following.
However, you should ask yourself who is your target audience and what are they searching for. This way, you will know exactly how to craft your content to win over their hearts.
Besides learning what kind of content they’d prefer, you also have to ask yourself who is your ideal customer.
Think about the fact that you need to connect with the right audience to trigger conversion and lead generation on LinkedIn.
3.3. Post relevant and engaging content
If you don’t have a hook and a catchy story for your reader, you lost them. Time is precious.
You have to draw your audience’s attention and make them relate to your story.
Post quality content and carefully split the paragraphs because no one will read a bulk of text.
Your carousels should have an eye-candy design and every slide to offer a valuable insight.
If the reader scrolls through your LinkedIn post and doesn’t get value from the start, they will leave your page.
3.4. Build brand awareness
Keeping in mind the fact that you are not the only one in your niche and industry, you have to do something to stand out from the crowd.
One way to do it, besides sharing top-performing content that sets you apart from your competitors, is to invite people to follow your page.
You should be creative and personalize your request to increase your chances of success.
This LinkedIn marketing strategy will broaden your horizon and increase the number of connections who might want to follow your business.
If you want to increase your LinkedIn page connections, this is something you should try:
- Invite your connections to follow your page
- Promote your LinkedIn company page on other social media channels like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter
- Mention your LinkedIn page in your emails
- Personalize your connection requests - As a company page, you can't send LinkedIn connections, but your employees can. Make sure they mention your brand in that note.
3.5. Use polls to increase brand awareness
By posting LinkedIn polls a few times per week, you manage to keep in touch with your community.
Polls help increase brand awareness. Also, any time the user is given the opportunity to interact with your poll, your engagement increases.
And guess what: according to our fresh 2024 LinkedIn Benchmarks, polls generate the highest impression rate of all post types!
Moreover, if you use the following trick, you will build a solid community around your brand: As a last choice in your poll, ask readers to offer you their opinion in the comment section.
In this way, you will not only engage with your audience, but you will also display the human side of your brand.
3.6. Promote your LinkedIn page through ads
If your LinkedIn marketing strategy would be a cake, then LinkedIn Ads would be the cherry on top.
Consider investing in your LinkedIn posts if you want your content to reach as many people as possible. This way, all those interested in your industry will get to see your ads from your brand.
You could also boost some LinkedIn posts which are relevant for your followers. Besides posts, LinkedIn ads also consist in sending your community direct messages about your latest products or achievements.
Through targeted advertising, you increase your chances of getting noticed, reaching more people.
You can target followers by industry, location, job title, name and many more. Depending on your goals, you can use:
- text ads - that appear on search results, notifications, group pages and profile pages.
- sponsored InMail - for personalized messages.
- sponsored content - to spread your posts to a larger audience.
3.7. Learn about the LinkedIn algorithm
When posting, scheduling and developing new content, you need to know how the LinkedIn algorithm works.
Firstly, LinkedIn bots will check your content to make sure it’s not spam.
Then, your post will be shown to a trial audience to see how interested they are in the topic. The post will appear in more users’ feeds if it gathers enough interactions.
Lastly, Linkedin editors will oversee your work and then show it to an even wider audience.
If you place several links in your posts, you should know that LinkedIn’s algorithm will hide that content as much as possible. External links can only distract users' attention to other websites.
This social media platform will overlook your choice of adding links and consider you should keep your community engaged with just your content.
Moreover, if you tag too many people in your content, the chances for virality will drop.
LinkedIn's algorithm is continously changing and you will always see announcements about new updates.
Some of the newest updates indicate that viral strategies to maximize the number of likes and followers will be less effective in the updated LinkedIn environment.
3.8. Encourage your employees to become brand advocates
You should know that your brand's best ambassadors are your own team.
And you can do that by asking them to share articles from the company's blog, new features, events, - mentioning the company name in the post.
Make your employees your brand ambassadors and the face of your company. People engage 10x more likely with employee profiles than with company pages. - Dr. Natalia Wiechowski, Personal Branding Coach
LinkedIn even has a separated section dedicated to employee advocacy where you can see your employees' posts' performance.
If your employees are happy to share posts about your brand's milestones, then it is clear that more users will be interested to find out about your brand's mission.
3.9. Mention people in your posts
Tagging people you’ve quoted or you’ve referenced in the content you're sharing is an essential step in your LinkedIn marketing strategy.
The people you've tagged will be notified, along with their connections, and people who follow them, so your content will be seen by more people.
However, it is really important to not abuse this feature. Mentions are not meant to be spammy. The key here is to provide value to both your content and to the people you tag in your LinkedIn posts.
This LinkedIn algorithm will make your posts become more visible and ultimately contribute to the increase of your page engagement.
3.10. Upload more videos to get shares
Videos are the type of content that really stands out nowadays, so they are vital in any LinkedIn social media marketing strategy.
If one of your goals on LinkedIn is to make your content more shareable, trust videos to do the trick.
As for video ideas: be as creative as possible: give some advice in your niche, share an opinion about the latest trends or share a few tips & tricks to determine your followers to engage with your content.
3.11. Measure your LinkedIn performance with analytics tools
Another thing to include in your LinkedIn marketing strategy is evaluating your work.
Keeping an eye on your LinkedIn analytics dashboard can help you make informed decisions that lead to better results.
Remember that your LinkedIn marketing strategy should be based on data, with your content tailored on what you saw your audience resonates to.
Track LinkedIn KPIs - followers demographic, number of followers, impressions and reach, engagement rate, profile views by job title, etc. It will help you increase your reach in your industry.
Diving into deep waters without guidance might be hard. This is why it’s better to use an analytics tool like Socialinsider that provides you with the data needed to properly analyze your performance and grow your company page. Plus, you have the following benefits:
- Measure your LinkedIn performance and track analytics for your business page
- Track key metrics of each post on LinkedIn
- Understand your demographics on LinkedIn
3.12. Study your LinkedIn competitors
When building your LinkedIn marketing strategy, inspiration comes in many forms. Sometimes, you find it when looking at your competitors.
You just need a close look at their posts to see how they interact with their audience, what type of content they use most and what’s their tone of voice.
Luckily, LinkedIn native analytics offers you a handful of insights that you can use to adapt your LinkedIn marketing approach.
When creating your LinkedIn page, the platform will allow you to add some of your LinkedIn competitors, and then it will display data about their progress.
In this section in the native app, you can see data like follower metrics, organic content metrics, like engagement and total posts.
Lastly, you can also check trending competitor posts to get inspired.
3.13. Keep your captions short
The LinkedIn algorithm is changing periodically, morphing once every few months.
Our LinkedIn Benchmarks report tells us that short captions (up to 19 words) coupled with multiple images perfom best (in terms of engagement) on LinkedIn.
So next time you're refining your social media strategy for this platform, consider this insight.
3.14. Use the LinkedIn live feature
Making use of all the features LinkedIn has to provide can really help your brand be seen. Since we're speaking about being seen, when people associate a face to a brand, they tend to pay more attention to their posts.
Scheduling to go live once in a while can boost your engagement and increase your community.
LinkedIn live events are a great opportunity for you to make your brand heard and engage with people who are interested in the same topics as you are.
Plan ahead some topics that could be of great interest for your audience and invite people from your industry to discuss those aspects.
You will be surprised at how many people would want to interact with your brand.
4. How to use Socialinsider for best LinkedIn marketing results
Being on top of your LinkedIn is not easy work. You have to constantly keep your eyes on your LinkedIn analytics to check your performance.
Sometimes you have to face it that your LinkedIn marketing strategy was not perfect from the start. Adapting is always a good idea as long as you score greater results.
To make sure you're always on track in your LinkedIn marketing endevour, you need a tool to track performance and deliver insights that will help you make the best data-driven decisions.
Enter Socialinsider.
In Socialinsider, you can see all your key LinkedIn metrics at a glance:
Depending on what you need to report on, you can explore a large variety of insights regarding engagement, reach & impressions, audience, campaigns.
To dive deeper into your LinkedIn performance insights, try benchmarking against your direct competitors.
All these insights about your on-going LinkedIn marketing can help you craft a strategy worth the effort, which will in turn produce better results.
When you have the chance to see exactly what works and what doesn’t work for your current LinkedIn strategy, you will know how to use the actionable insights in the dashboard to improve your marketing game.
The in-depth analysis on your LinkedIn posts can help you find patterns and discover more metrics about your audience.
With the data you gather from Socialinsider, you can easily develop your weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual reports.
Final Thoughts
At the end of the day, to succeed at LinkedIn marketing is to play at the platform's strengths and generate more brand awareness, engagement and leads for your business.
We hope the tips included in this guide can shape your approach to LinkedIn marketing and eventually help you grow your Linkedin presence.
Frequently Asked Questions about LinkedIn marketing
1. Is LinkedIn marketing expensive?
If you decide to go into LinkedIn paid advertising, LinkedIn marketing might get a bit expensive. Experts estimate that the CPC (cost-per-click) has a average cost of $2.00 – $3.00 and the CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) is about $5.01 – $8.00.
2. How successful is LinkedIn marketing?
LinkedIn is a highly reliable platform for many marketers. According to research, more than 70% of them count on LinkedIn to deliver the best organic results.
