Editorial TeamWith 58 million companies and 810 million registered users, LinkedIn is the most important social media platform for businesses and entrepreneurs. To engage prospective clients, however, you’ll need to employ a quality, tailored LinkedIn Content Strategy.
7 Tips for Creating the Best LinkedIn Content Strategy
Did you know that 49 million people use LinkedIn to search for jobs weekly? Or that marketers report seeing up to 2x higher conversion rates through LinkedIn, versus any other social media app for B2B companies? Given this, it’s no surprise that LinkedIn is no longer just a place to search for jobs.
LinkedIn is among your greatest resources as a B2B enterprise or those offering high-quality B2C services. But to get the most out of LinkedIn – to establish yourself as an authority worth listening to, and to increase your reach to prospects and customers – you need an effective LinkedIn content strategy (also known as a content marketing strategy).
Content is King, Queen, Prince, and Princess. Here are our 7 Top Tips to The Best LinkedIn Content Strategy in 2022/23:
Determine Your Goals
Far too many businesses and individual entrepreneurs joining LinkedIn for the first time make the mistake of diving headlong into the stream of content and media without first making a plan. As with most things in life, however, prior preparation prevents poor performance!
There are myriad avenues for growth on LinkedIn. With an effective LinkedIn content strategy, you’ll be able to successfully increase sales, expand your brand’s reach, and establish yourself or your company as an authority in your niche amongst your competitors.
To tap into those avenues, it is crucial that you first determine what your goals are for the upcoming content strategy.
Of course, you can have multiple goals – some of the best content strategists like to integrate a few different goals into one strategy, and, to be honest, most successful marketing plans should be constructed with a few different goals in mind.
For example, your goal may be to attract and recruit some new top talent to positions opening up in your company. At the same time, however, you may also seek to cement in the minds of potential clients on LinkedIn the type of work your company offers.
With these two example goals, you have two options when it comes to content strategizing.
- You can choose to establish two different content strategies for these two goals
- You can choose to integrate both goals into one content strategy
In this example, the second option would undoubtedly prove the most complex, and require the most planning, but either option remains valid.
Whatever your goals are for joining LinkedIn and engaging with its 800,000,000+ members, establish those goals clearly and in the most concise possible language so that they stick in the minds of you and your team. This way, throughout the rest of the LinkedIn content strategy process, you can always refer back to these goals to keep yourself on track.
Top tip: Draft up a list of KPIs (key performance indicators) related to your business’s specific marketing goals. This way, you can measure your campaign against clear metrics to determine areas of success as well as areas of weakness, and thus improve and repeat until you’re fully satisfied with the results.
Know Your Target Audience
LinkedIn may not be the biggest social media platform in the world, but it is still used by millions and millions of people every single day, all trying to make their voices heard at the same time.
What this means for you – the prospective marketer – is that there is already a vast ocean of content available on LinkedIn, and if you add to that ocean without tailoring your content to a very specific audience, your words will quickly be lost to the waves.
LinkedIn, like any other social media platform, operates on complex algorithms designed to increase user engagement with the site by offering the user a unique, personalized, and valuable experience.
The way that the LinkedIn algorithm does this is severalfold, but for our purposes, it’s most important to note that it will promote content adding original, insightful value to niche areas of expertise over content that aims to appeal to as broad an audience as possible.
In other words, you have to know exactly who your target audience is if you want LinkedIn to provide you with any audience at all. Knowing your target audience in-depth is the only surefire way to ensure that your content will appeal to them, and thus encourage them to engage with it and, by proxy, you.
Hopefully, you’ll already have access to datasets that provide you insight into your business’s current demographic. Important factors which you might wish to consider include age, location, wealth bracket, interests, gender identity, sexuality, and so forth. Not all of these data points will be available to you, of course, but those you can access may prove invaluable in tailoring content later on.
We recommend building an avatar of your preferred target demographic (even if this is a new demographic and not your current one). Think about what this ‘dream customer’ or ‘dream company’ would look like, be interested in, and want to know. Research the online communities and conversations they’re already active in; research their industries.
Establish and Strengthen Your Brand
You can post the most original, engaging, and informative content LinkedIn has ever seen, but if no one can tell who you are, or your brand’s profile seems messy and confused, it won’t matter.
It’s crucial in any LinkedIn content strategy that you establish a strong sense of self from the outset. For B2B and some B2C LinkedIn users, this means establishing a strong brand statement, vision, and appearance.
Doing so helps prospects, clients, and customers to feel like they know you long before they ever actually get in touch about recruitment, services, or products. You’ll enable LinkedIn users to identify you, your core beliefs, your services/products, and your area of expertise as soon as they stumble upon your profile.
Establishing a brand is crucial, but it’s not always easy. It requires introspection, and sometimes it reveals that you may not have such a clear idea of what your brand is or does. This can be a great opportunity to fill in those gaps and cement your position in your industry.
If you’re uncertain of your brand identity, ask others around you – including existing customers and clients – to describe you, your brand, and your services in just a few words. Using those words, you’ll have a much clearer picture of the invaluable assets and characteristics you bring to the table, and thus the ones you should promote as USPs on LinkedIn.
Better still, once you’ve established your brand, strengthen it by investing in the creation of a logo, brand fonts, and brand colors. Use professional designers and work closely with them to ensure that what they come up with captures your brand identity in an immediately emotive way.
Customize Your Content
Now that you’ve established the goals for your LinkedIn content marketing campaign, as well as your brand, and your target audience, it’s time to create the actual content which you’ll be using to drive this campaign.
Content can take countless forms, and though it is the word of our Zeitgeist, there’s no one concise way to define it, other perhaps than to say: Content is any consumable piece of entertainment or education delivered virtually.
On TikTok, content is short videos. On Instagram, content tends toward still images. On Facebook, content is largely text-based posts. On Twitch, content is gaming live streams, and on Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video, and the like, content is streamable cinema and television.
The interesting thing about LinkedIn is that many of these different forms of content can be tailored to the business-minded platform. And the interesting thing about tailored LinkedIn content – and content marketing in general – is that whilst that content adds value to a user’s day, it simultaneously adds value to your brand by encouraging its further engagement with your brand’s page.
You can create content in-house, as many individual entrepreneurs and B2Cs do. Or, as is arguably much more worthwhile and time-efficient, you can outsource your content creation to an online global marketplace of influencers, filmmakers, copywriters and editors, voice actors, and more.
However you make your content, there are some key things to keep in mind:
- Ensure the content utilizes your brand colors, fonts, and tone of voice
- Make the content as niche and relevant to your target audience as possible
- Content with images reaches twice as many people on LinkedIn than content without
- Remember your goal(s), and make them the driving focus of your content
- Create content in addition to this goal-led content, which simply adds value to the reader/viewer’s day (i.e. don’t make all your content all about yourself/your brand)
- Diversify, diversify, diversify the type of content you post, whilst retaining its niche angle and maintaining focus on your LinkedIn content strategy goals
- Post some content on LinkedIn at least once a day (1-5 times is a good goal to set yourself)
Actively Engage With Your Audience
Hopefully, the content you put out on LinkedIn has now been tailored to such a high degree, and your brand identity solidified concisely and clearly in the minds of LinkedIn users, that you’ll begin to see improvements in reach, engagement, and the KPIs linked to your marketing goals.
Still, a content marketing manager’s work is never done, and now is no time to rest. In short, if you want prospects, leads, customers, and clients to engage with you, you better engage with them as well.
LinkedIn was established to fulfill the role in which Facebook was founded but in a more strictly business sense. The idea is simple: networking over the internet, rather than at convention centers and AGMs. As such, the best way to strategize your LinkedIn content is to treat the platform as you would an industry-wide networking event.
If you stand at your digital booth all day, waiting for people to come to you, you’ll be sorely disappointed. Whereas, if you walk around introducing yourself to other people on the platform, you’ll find those same people will come back to you later.
Actively engaging with your audience on LinkedIn means a few different things:
- Commenting on posts relevant to your niche with insightful thoughts and information
- Using #hashtags that others in your niche are using to start a conversation
- Encouraging your employees to share your posts so that your reach is widened exponentially
- Tagging relevant people and brands in your posts to encourage their engagement, and thus tap into their audience and demographic
- Join groups engaged with by your target demographic and add to the conversation
Use LinkedIn Ads to Increase Organic Traffic
LinkedIn, just like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, has made significant efforts in recent years to attract marketers to its site. To do so, it has created LinkedIn Ads, which marketers and marketing companies can take out to reach a specific demographic of professionals working on the platform.
LinkedIn’s AI algorithm determines which of the platform’s 800+ million users would find your advertisement most interesting and useful, and shows it to that subsect of the digital population specifically.
What this means for you is that, unlike the adverts of yore, LinkedIn Ads reach only people who might be interested in them, thus vastly increasing your chances of seeing heightened organic traffic to your page and site.
It’s for these reasons that 75% of B2B content marketers use LinkedIn Ads.
Review Analytics for Conscious Improvement
Your LinkedIn content strategy has, by this point, checked all of the boxes. You’ve set your goals, researched your audience, built your brand, curated your content, engaged with LinkedIn users, and boosted your posts’ organic reach with targeted LinkedIn Ads.
But how do you know if any of it has worked? That’s where this very last step comes in. Tip #7: Review Analytics for Conscious Improvement. Let’s unpack that.
LinkedIn provides business accounts the tools they need to analyze their posts – in terms of engagement, among other metrics. You can use these free tools to determine the impact the content from your LinkedIn content strategy has had against the KPIs you established way back when determining the strategy’s goals.
If you’ve met all of your goals, then great! Your LinkedIn content strategy was a roaring success. If, on the other hand, you’ve fallen short of those goals, please don’t panic! The whole point of this final step is to acknowledge that not everything works on the first try (in fact, most things don’t).
Review your analytics to determine which posts didn’t work as well as you hoped they would, as well as which elements of your brand identity and/or language didn’t appeal to prospects and customers as much as you thought they were going to.
Having identified the problem areas, rework them for the next content strategy, and try again. Repeat this process until you’re happy with the results.
Conclusion
LinkedIn provides an excellent space for B2B and some B2C content marketers to boost the overall exposure of their brand to new prospects, clients, and customers. Whether you’re a mom working in a marketing department, or an independent mom setting up your own business, tailoring a LinkedIn content strategy to your specific needs is fundamental to your success.
Short Description
A comprehensive guide to the importance of clear, concise content strategizing on LinkedIn. Tips to building a LinkedIn content strategy are outlined in seven steps which, if followed, will enable individual and corporate readers to tailor the content they publish on LinkedIn to a niche target demographic to help them meet their goals (whether those goals be increased sales, brand awareness, recruitment or something else).
Bio: Veselin Mladenov is the Content Manager of ThriveMyWay. He has more than 10 years of experience in the field of corporate marketing and sales and decided to pursue his passion – digital marketing and content creation.