Over the past few years, LinkedIn has emerged as a key marketing channel. Always a favorite among B2B companies due to its professional audience and proven ability to drive website traffic, LinkedIn is now being leveraged beyond B2B marketing for consumer brands, recruiting, and personal brand building. Use these LinkedIn marketing tips below to grow your own brand on LinkedIn:
Setting up a company page and filling in all of the sections is the first step to leveraging LinkedIn for marketing.
LinkedIn posts offer multiple opportunities to add helpful detail for readers, and to increase the likelihood of the post being discovered and shared:
Check out this blog post that breaks down the anatomy of a LinkedIn post in detail to learn all of the post features at your disposal, or our blog post on LinkedIn post examples to see how top brands are leveraging these features.
If you are going to leverage LinkedIn for marketing, consistent post publishing is key. Buffer found that LinkedIn pages that post at least once per month saw 6x as much growth as pages that did not. Once you decide upon your own publishing schedule, use social media automation tools like Buffer, Sprout Social, and Hootsuite to schedule LinkedIn posts in advance and manage your content calendar.
The platforms mentioned above allow you to schedule posts in advance, track page and post analytics, and offer additional tools like social listening and suggested content topics for future posts. Use these platforms to manage your LinkedIn presence, and refine your strategy based on their reporting tools.
Understanding your LinkedIn audience and when they are most likely to be busy will help you schedule posts for more optimal time windows. For example, if your target audience is B2B, they are more likely to be busy during normal working hours, meaning posts in the early morning and late afternoon have the best chance of being seen. HubSpot breaks down LinkedIn publishing strategies per industry to help guide your publishing schedule. Using these tips as a guide, experiment with different post schedules to see what delivers the most engagement for your LinkedIn page.
Not traditionally thought of as a video marketing channel, LinkedIn’s video posts are delivering proven engagement with ROI stats like videos on LinkedIn earning an average of 3 times the engagement of text posts. Create and share video content to deliver information and promote products, while simultaneously boosting your LinkedIn post and page engagement.
Take video marketing on LinkedIn a step further by taking advantage of the platforms live video feature. Similar to the livestreaming features on platforms like YouTube and Instagram, LinkedIn Live enables you to connect with your followers in real-time to deliver updates, host live Q&As, and to share a behind-the-scenes look at your business. This feature is delivering, too, with LinkedIn live videos receiving 7x more reactions and 24x more comments than traditional video on the platform.
LinkedIn is responsible for 50% of all B2B website referral traffic from social media platforms. Leverage the platform’s value as a source of potential customers and employees by promoting your blog content and landing pages to drive website traffic.
Demonstrating industry thought leadership is an impactful LinkedIn strategy. Sharing articles, images, and video content that explains industry trends, delivers industry news, or addresses problems are examples of content you can share to establish a reputation as a thought leader on LinkedIn. Try sharing 3rd party content like articles from respected sources, and then work on creating your own thought leadership in the form of blog posts, whitepapers, and videos.
LinkedIn Ads are just like regular LinkedIn posts, but you pay to have them placed in the newsfeeds of people who do not currently follow your page. LinkedIn’s campaign manager allows you to create video, image, and text based ads, and you can set unique campaign objectives for each ad like brand awareness, consideration (web traffic and engagement), and lead generation. LinkedIn ads are powerful because they enable you to set specific audiences to ensure you reach the demographic that best aligns with your target customer.
Commenting on popular posts in your network is an opportunity to show your industry expertise and add value to conversations. Share insights, respond to questions with your take questions, and ask your own thought provoking questions. LinkedIn comments can be made with your personal account, or your brand page depending on which you want to promote, and which seems to be the best fit for the situation.
LinkedIn Groups are a valuable marketing channel because they are inherently targeted, as they are a niche group brought together to discuss a common industry topic. Finding a LinkedIn Group relevant to your brand’s niche, and engaging people there will build a valuable audience for your brand.
Through providing value in LinkedIn Groups, and sharing your brand’s content where applicable (and without spamming), you can raise brand awareness among your ideal target audience.
LInkedIn’s publishing platform enables users to publish blog posts that are hosted and shared directly within LinkedIn. These articles can be used for all of the typical blog post topics, like educational content and industry commentary. LinkedIn Pulse articles have built in sharing tools that make it easy to notify your network, and for people within your network to engage with them.
LinkedIn offers the standard social media marketing metrics found on other platforms like page follower count, engagement rate on posts, post impressions, and page visitors. Use LinkedIn’s built-in analytics to measure the impact of your LinkedIn marketing efforts over time, or use one of the social media automation tools mentioned above to track these metrics.
Adding a link to your LinkedIn page across other marketing channels will increase page followers, and give your community more ways to connect with your brand. Include your LinkedIn page in your email signature, website header or footer, email newsletter footers, and blog posts to maximize exposure and potential followers.
Take advantage of LinkedIn Stories to share a flexible, engaging style of content with your audience. Posting videos and photos that inspire others with a story or lesson, educating people with new information, or sharing a behind the scenes look at your business and professional life are all examples of content that can be shared via LinkedIn Stories to drive engagement.
LinkedIn company pages feature the option to list multiple products under the products tab for page visitors to explore. You can add descriptions, features, and images of your products and services to gain extra exposure for them. This also has the added benefit of making your LinkedIn page and company look more established and showcasing what it is your business does.
LinkedIn’s page analytics allow you to track page follower growth, historic post engagement, top performing posts, post volume over time, and competitor page performance. While you can view these metrics in the social media automation platforms mentioned above, these built-in analytics can be used for brief check ins on performance in between more detailed reporting.
Sharing customer testimonials and case studies is a common pillar of most content marketing strategies because of the way in which they allow potential customers to envision the success they can experience with your brand. Share written case studies from your website, quotes from customers about your brand, and positive ROI metrics on LinkedIn to demonstrate the value your brand provides.
As you use these tips to expand your toolkit for growing your brand on LinkedIn, LinkedIn learning is a great place to go back to the well so to speak, and seek out your next set of business and marketing skills. LinkedIn Learning’s online marketing courses range from social media marketing to content marketing and email marketing, offering a plethora of opportunities to add new skill sets and subsequent strategies to your brand’s marketing strategy.
LinkedIn’s growth as one of the most popular social media platforms combined with its robust marketing feature set make it an excellent channel to add to your marketing strategy. Follow these LinkedIn marketing tips to start driving brand awareness and generating customer leads for your own business.
Hi, I'm Justin and I write Brand Credential.
I started Brand Credential as a resource to help share expertise from my 10-year brand building journey.
I currently serve as the VP of Marketing for a tech company where I oversee all go-to-market functions. Throughout my career I've helped companies scale revenue to millions of dollars, helped executives build personal brands, and created hundreds of pieces of content since starting to write online in 2012.
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