Are you regularly posting content on LinkedIn?Over half of B2B decision-makers will look at your LinkedIn content when deciding whether they will work with you. Additionally, 20% of investors use the platform’s content to learn about topics.If you don’t have a LinkedIn content strategy in place, you might lose out on dozens of quality leads and buyers.Use this guide to start building a LinkedIn content strategy that aligns LinkedIn’s content capabilities with your marketing goals.
Half of marketers used LinkedIn in 2021 because it’s the top B2B marketing platform filled with millions of key business professionals and generates high-quality leads.One of the best ways to engage with these prospects on LinkedIn is by creating quality content and interacting with business leaders on their LinkedIn content. In addition, the content you develop ranks in search engine results and internal searches, increasing your brand awareness.While ecommerce is popular on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, LinkedIn isn’t the place to directly sell products. That’s why a content strategy is essential to have in place. Your strategy will subtly lead your audience through the sales cycle and direct them to your website, where they can complete a purchase or other desired action.
The audience you address on LinkedIn is the foundation of your content strategy. Their pain points and needs will inspire your content topics, content formats, and your content calendar.Here are a few statistics on LinkedIn’s demographics and platform usage to guide your content strategy:
Image from LinkedIn
LinkedIn is compatible with most types of content, sizes, and formats. This flexibility allows you to be creative by combining content types and creating unique experiences through your LinkedIn content writing. For instance, you can write long-form articles with images and videos embedded, just like a blog post on your website.Videos are the best performing content on LinkedIn and can receive over 300 million impressions in a year.Here are the five examples of the best content for LinkedIn:
Where you publish your content plays a strategic role in how well the content performs. Consider these four locations in your LinkedIn strategy.
Your business page will be the center of your content marketing strategy. A complete profile builds trust with your audience through transparency and industry-leading content. In addition, you can customize your profile’s appearance to emphasize your content and increase your impressions.However, you don’t need to limit your content only to your main page. LinkedIn also offers an option called Showcase Pages. These affiliated pages highlight smaller sections of your company or brands under your business.For example, Microsoft has its main business page, but it also lists affiliate brands in the sidebar. Now its audience can follow specific brands associated with Microsoft, like Skype or Microsoft 365. This segmentation allows Microsoft to post more relevant content to smaller audience groups since Microsoft would otherwise have a very broad audience under their main business page.
Image from LinkedIn
You can either create short-form posts or write a long-form article on LinkedIn. However, a comprehensive content strategy should include a mix of both. Adding video and images to your posts and articles also improves their appeal to your readers.These posts will appear in your follower’s newsfeeds. While you might want to use this format of content for promoting your products, LinkedIn is not the place for sales pitches. Instead, it’s best to educate your audience and establish yourself as a thought leader.Thought leaders are experts and authorities in their industry with the most innovative insights about topics relating to their business. TED Talks are one example of thought leadership content.
LinkedIn offers several options if you would like to invest in paid content. Paid content marketing can give your page a temporary boost in traffic or help you disperse an important and timely message. For instance, you might sponsor a big news update article so that it appears in the feed of a relevant audience.Sponsored content can also appear in private chats, or you can personalize the message for each viewer based on their profile information instead of posting the same content for your entire audience.
LinkedIn Groups are smaller communities of like-minded individuals. Often these groups are places for professionals to discuss topics in their industry, learn tips, and receive answers to questions.You can manage up to 30 groups on LinkedIn. These groups are a means to break your audience into smaller segments so you can reach them according to similar interests or needs. They can also be a place to perform market research and gather insights into how your audience is thinking and feeling.However, sometimes you’ll want to join a group instead of managing the group. You’re allowed to join up to 100 groups on LinkedIn. Each group is a chance to network with other professionals and position yourself as an authority figure through the content you share in the group.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Get more insights about LinkedIn to help you build a better content strategy:
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Use these five steps to lay the foundation for great content on LinkedIn.
What do you want to accomplish with your content? Are you looking to increase awareness, or do you want to generate leads?Start with your overarching marketing goals and move backward to identify a path for your LinkedIn content strategy to help you achieve your marketing goals. For example, if you want to fill your sales pipeline with quality B2B leads, you can make your LinkedIn content’s objective to generate new leads through thought leadership content.However, when you choose an objective, make sure you make it specific and measurable, so you have a benchmark for measuring your success and avoid wasting resources on low-value strategies.
Combine the audience personas you outlined to your objectives to create a collection of data that will guide your decision of what type of content for LinkedIn post you make and where to publish that content.For example, your audience might be male tech marketers, and your goal is to generate 1,000 new leads in a month. In this instance, you can look at groups that tech marketers frequent, their pain points, and what times and days tech marketers are most often on LinkedIn. This research will guide your content strategy to maximize your content’s relevance to your target audience.
Consistency is vital on LinkedIn to establish your business as an authority. Posting whenever you feel inspired won’t build your credibility. However, creating a content calendar and sticking with that schedule will help you make regular, quality content. It will also help you juggle your LinkedIn content strategy with other social media strategies.
Creating content to post on LinkedIn shouldn’t be an isolated strategy. Instead, you should be building your content strategy alongside the content strategies from your other social media platforms.By connecting your social media strategies, you ensure a unified omnichannel experience across your platforms. An omnichannel experience is essential today because customers no longer follow a linear path through the buyer’s journey. Instead, they interact with various online platforms in different orders.The seamless online experience means your audience might visit your Facebook one day but check out your LinkedIn profile the next day before returning to their Facebook feed. Therefore, if your messaging isn’t consistent, you risk sending contradictory messages or hurting your content strategy on one platform because of a campaign you’re running on a different social media platform.
Your content strategy should go beyond just what you produce and when. It should also include a process for following up with your audience. This might be as simple as replying to comments on your posts or turn into complex nurturing campaigns.For example, if you generate leads from a LinkedIn form, what’s your strategy for responding to those new prospects?When creating your response strategy, remember that most B2B sales teams take 42 hours to respond to a new lead. However, automating messages when someone fills in a lead generation form can decrease that time. Unfortunately, about 38% of those leads won’t respond to your message, which is why you should have a strategy in place to decrease your unresponsiveness rate.Your follow-up strategy might take over four days of back-and-forth communication and nurturing before a lead is willing to schedule a meeting. Creating content for nurturing during this time is just as essential as creating your initial content to attract those leads.
Let our experts help you build a LinkedIn content strategy that accomplishes your marketing goals and increases your qualified leads. Our innovative solutions aren’t just textbook answers to social media problems. Instead, we base them on tried-and-true strategies that we used dozens of times before and saw great results.Contact us to learn more about our content strategy services.
As an Associate Strategy Director I am responsible for leading the development and execution of organic and paid social media and content strategies for our clients at Kubbco.
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