From content promotion to prospecting, advertising or engagement, how can you take your LinkedIn activity to the next stage?
6 LinkedIn Marketing Tips
According to Hubspot’s State of Inbound survey 2016, 80% of marketers use LinkedIn professionally. LinkedIn is also the most used social media channel for professional purposes across the globe (with the exception of Latin America).
80% of marketers use LinkedIn professionally.
Clearly, LinkedIn is an invaluable marketing asset, and achieves best results when activity is aligned with wider marketing goals. So from content promotion to prospecting, to advertising and engagement, here’s how to take your LinkedIn activity to the next stage.
1. Optimise your company page
Not sure where to begin? Before jumping into ads or group engagement, make sure your company page is presentable, up-to-date and ready to generate trust with visitors. We’ve previously explored the best ways to optimise your personal profile, as well as how to optimise personal profiles for social selling. However, when it comes to a company page, good tips are to:
Make the most of your banner image
Your banner image is one of the first things visitors to your profile will see, so make sure it reflects your company branding and specialisms, and is high quality. If you have any company certifications or other relevant details, consider including them:
Complete all sections
Just like your website, your company page should contain all the detail that someone interested in your organisation may need (contact details, industry specialisms, location etc). Make sure your positioning statement is outlined in the summary section, and include a few points of difference/ buyer challenges that you can help to solve.
Pin important content/ updates to the top of your page
If you have posted valuable content such as a new report or eBook, don’t make your audience search for it - pin it to the top of your company page. Make it visible and easily accessible to see more interaction!
Regularly share persona-relevant, image-based content
According to Hubspot, visual content generates up to 94% more views. Make the most of that statistic when creating and distributing content. From infographics, to videos, to articles with a strong visual element; create and share content that looks engaging, and ensure content themes resonate with the challenges your persona's experience.
According to Hubspot, visual content generates up to 94% more views.
2. Encourage your team to optimise their personal profiles
Of course on LinkedIn, people won’t just be looking at your company page. With the growth of social selling, each individual at your organisation has become a potential touchpoint for clients and prospects. To make the best of this and to expand brand influence and reach, encourage everyone in your company (especially sales staff) to optimise their personal profile to reflect your company culture and message. If possible, ask staff to share company content through their individual networks.
3. Regularly share and promote relevant content
With a solid content strategy in place, you should already be creating buyer-mapped, relevant content to support your marketing campaigns. Great content, designed to help buyers solve their challenges, forms the foundation of successful marketing strategies. But no matter how buyer-resonant a piece of content is, it won’t achieve much without effective promotion and distribution.
When it comes to everyday promotion on LinkedIn, regularity is important. But unlike faster-paced channels such as Twitter, LinkedIn company updates are best done at a volume of around once a day. If your team are willing, encourage them to share company content via their own LinkedIn Pulse channels.
4. Consider paid promotion
If you have budget, content promotion can go further than company updates and pulse posts. Offering a highly advanced level of targeting, LinkedIn’s paid promotion options are ideal for precise, relevant marketing, particularly when promoting content such as eBooks or webinars.
Which paid method you choose depends of course on your message, target audience and budget, but as an example;
Sponsored Updates allow you to natively promote a company update (typically around an eBook, event or webinar etc) and target it to a specific audience segment. This means you can share updates with your exact buyer personas, in their newsfeed. Assuming your content themes resonate with your target audience, this is a great way to boost relevant views and engagement - especially as sponsored updates can be shared. Sponsored updates can also form a valuable part of Account-Based Marketing strategies.
Sponsored Text Ads differ from Sponsored Updates in that they appear to the right-hand side of the newsfeed, are smaller, and are more clearly ‘ads’. Unlike sponsored updates, text ads can’t be shared, but still allow refined persona targeting.
Sponsored InMails are a more personalised, direct way to communicate with people. Sponsored InMails appear in the same way as regular InMail; receivers will get a mail notification and can access messages via their LinkedIn inbox. Note that sponsored InMails will always be marked as ‘sponsored’:
5. Start social selling
Is your team social selling yet? As over 70% of B2B purchase decision makers use social media to help them decide, they should be.
At the core of social selling, your team should be working to position themselves as trusted, accessible advisors. Regular social engagement and interaction with the right potential buyers forms part of this, and on LinkedIn, encouraging employees to publish buyer-resonant content via their LinkedIn profiles is key to expand your reach.
Over 70% of B2B purchase decision makers use social media to help them make decisions.
As a brief guide, a few best practice LinkedIn social selling tips include:
Developing relationships with the right prospects
Making LinkedIn connections is important, but remember that quality is always better than quantity - if contacts aren’t relevant, your content and message won’t resonate. However, if you’re relevant and authentic in your actions, you should start to attract a good-fit audience.
Personalising connection requests
Do you accept connection requests from complete strangers out of the blue? No? Not many people will. So if you really want to gain that contact, you need to earn their acceptance; use a personalised connection request that either outlines the context of how you know a prospect, or the problem-solving value you could offer them (without being ‘salesy’) - or shows your authenticity by offering both.
Joining and engaging in groups and comments
Want to get to know your relevant audience? Then go out and speak to them! Engaging in the right groups and chats on LinkedIn can boost your reputation as an expert, build trust, and bring you few relevant connections and opportunities along the way.
Look at your LinkedIn SSI score
LinkedIn’s free Social Selling Index (SSI)tool is a great way for your sales team to judge how effectively they are social selling. LinkedIn describes the SSI score as “A measure of a sales professional’s activity on LinkedIn. It’s designed to measure a company’s individual adoption of the four pillars of social selling.” These pillars are:
- Create a Professional Brand
- Find the right people and connect
- Engage by joining groups, making comments and sharing posts
- Building meaningful relationships with connections
When using SSI as a measure of social selling success, keep in mind that it only takes LinkedIn activity into account. You will need to measure social selling activity on other channels in a different way.
6. Consider upgrading to Sales Navigator
For best social selling insight, and especially if you are using LinkedIn as a prospecting tool, you may want to upgrade your LinkedIn subscription to include Sales Navigator.
Helping to enhance social selling activity, Sales Navigator provides in-depth, real-time insights about the prospects and contacts you speak with, and offers SSI insight to improve your activity across the network.
Adding LinkedIn To Your Marketing Toolkit
Of course, as it’s ever-changing, by no means is this a complete list of LinkedIn marketing tips. But, if used effectively, LinkedIn is a great B2B tool that offers strong lead nurture and lead generation potential. Make sure your company, and your team are prepared to make the most of it.