Make LinkedIn work for your content marketing
Among all social media platforms, the one that seems most suited for striking up a B2B communication is LinkedIn. Out of the 706+ million LinkedIn users in early 2020, nearly 100 million are decision-makers, opinion leaders, and C-suite executives – in their official capacity, no less. Besides, there are over 30 million companies have LinkedIn presence. Complementing this stellar presence is the incredible reach that the platform provides.
Companies with an engaging LinkedIn presence
TED Conferences, currently the most followed corporate page on LinkedIn, has developed content that is an instant hook for business leaders. Thought leadership coming from the horse’s mouth is the highly topical and authentic content that professionals don’t want to miss out on. Tech-driven giants Google, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM etc., along with FMCG majors Unilever and Nestle, feature in the list of the most popular LinkedIn pages.
Closer home, a look at Tata Consultancy Services’ LinkedIn presence displays a wide range of audio, visual, and textual content. With an impressive 4.5 million followers, TCS showcases its leadership, runs its ‘Transforming India’ stories, organizes forums, and highlights its achievements regularly. Even smaller businesses, just by doing the basics right, stand to gain a lot of mileage out of their LinkedIn presence. It includes building a good profile, connecting and engaging astutely, and positioning their expertise well.
Companies, both big and small, are using LinkedIn to market themselves more effectively. Let’s find out how LinkedIn enables better results out of your content marketing campaigns and posts.
Initial efforts
As mentioned earlier, it all begins with getting the LinkedIn basics right. While building the profile, little factors like selecting the right category, incorporating other social media presence, logo, and tagline are essential. To ensure initial organic growth, the profile has to be circulated among employees, clients, customers, and other stakeholders. Adding the LinkedIn button in correspondences is another effective way of ensuring initial reach.
Building the strategy
Content marketing is a part of the larger marketing strategy that you need to devise for LinkedIn. Coming out of your larger organizational goals, the content marketing goals should be tied to measurable parameters. The need for marketing expenditures like LinkedIn Ads and Premium accounts are decided at this stage. Content marketing efforts should be conscious of the demographics being targeted. LinkedIn Website Demographics gives you this understanding so that you can target your content better.
Developing the content
Content can be developed in a variety of forms. It can be images, audiovisuals, LinkedIn posts, long-form articles, blogs etc. It is seen that posts with images and videos are often more successful on all social media platforms. LinkedIn native videos are a commonly used content form that can be created on the platform itself. Webinars, live events, SlideShare, infographics including statistics, and company-related information are other popular channels and themes of content marketing.
Frequency
Although it is important to stay relevant to your social media presence, content should be planned well in advance. The LinkedIn Calendar is an efficient way of managing your LinkedIn content. By adopting a content calendar, you can create a workflow, a content library, and a common forum for review and assessment of your content. Thereafter, you can upload or schedule your post as per your content strategy. There are particular times of the day and days of the week when a LinkedIn post performs better. Finding out the best time to post is an essential part of your analysis.
Analyze and optimize
LinkedIn Reporting and Analytics is another tool on offer that helps you track how well your content is performing. It captures information like event registrations, lead generations, and sales figures, and also reports the traffic figures. You can identify trends and target preferences by comparing the clicks and impressions they receive. These analytics help you take a better look at the demographics that you are targeting and what type of content works on them.
While marketing your content on LinkedIn, it is important to understand how the LinkedIn algorithm works. Your post on LinkedIn doesn’t just float in cyberspace anymore. The LinkedIn algorithm evaluates your content and tests its relevance on a sample audience, increasing it with its positive response. To ensure that the LinkedIn algorithm ranks your posts high, use correct language. Avoid multiple links, tagging too many people, posting too frequently, and generic hashtags. After posting an easy-to-read and engaging content, it is important to respond regularly to continue the generated engagement.
Advertising
Reaching out to the professional upper crust is easier now, with an expansive suite of LinkedIn advertising products. These products help you to track your conversions, target and retarget, generate leads, run account-based marketing campaigns, and so on.
Speaking for the brand
It is not just the company profile page that can be used to market content on LinkedIn. Giving a voice to prominent employees gives the company a human face and makes the content narrative more relatable. While LinkedIn profiles of Sir Richard Branson and Bill Gates command a massive following, the Marketing Heads, HR Directors, Vice Presidents and CEOs of the world too can aid brand positioning through LinkedIn.
If BankBazaar CEO Adhil Shetty discusses topics like technology and entrepreneurship, CRED founder and CEO Kunal Shah discusses work culture, productivity, and his popular post on a two-year start-up road map. HDFC Bank’s LinkedIn page even puts the spotlight on lesser-known voices like that of its branch manager from far off Arunachal Pradesh’s Tawang branch. Employees and business leaders bring authenticity and genuineness to the content, be it through a thought leadership article or an audiovisual piece.
LinkedIn continues to introduce new features that make it one of the most sought-after content marketing platforms within social media. It allows data-driven and measurable tools to run an effective content marketing strategy. Whether it’s for a company or its key spokespeople, LinkedIn facilitates ideation, research, engagement, and analysis of content, making it a holistic content marketing platform.
Related Links
Marketing your business with LinkedIn
References
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/298409
https://blog.hootsuite.com/linkedin-for-business/
https://neilpatel.com/blog/linkedin-strategies-b2b-marketing/
https://blog.hootsuite.com/linkedin-statistics-business/
https://business.linkedin.com/marketing-solutions/ad-targeting/account-targeting
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/linkedin-algorithm-explained-how-make-work-you-courtney-johnson/
https://www.bluleadz.com/blog/how-to-create-a-linkedin-content-calendar
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/linkedin-top-voices-2019-india-linkedin-editors-india-/
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