Nobody would have thought back in May 2003 when LinkedIn was launched as a professional networking site. However, the current situation is that LinkedIn has become a global phenomenon that attracted 756 million users spread across 200 countries.
Currently, it is not just a platform that strives to connect job seekers with potential employers but instead has revolutionized into an extraordinarily useful marketing tool.
It stands true beyond the shadow of doubt that LinkedIn has truly become crucial for every business when it comes to developing a successful marketing strategy.
When executed in a smart way, it can easily help you build true brand awareness and forge long-term professional relationships. In addition, it can also be useful for effective lead generation.
Why is LinkedIn Marketing Strategy Such a Big Deal?
You would be amazed to know that among the platformโs 756 million members, four out of five members have the authority to influence business decisions. The important point is that these movers and shakers also have twice the buying power of typical online audiences. In addition, there are LinkedIn marketing tools specifically available for every kind of business on the basis of their size and type, from small to medium to large and B2B to B2C.
12 Steps to Create a Successful Marketing Strategy
It is clearly evident that a successful LinkedIn marketing strategy is so important for the success of your business. It can easily help you build brand awareness, enhance website traffic, produce quality leads, and much more.
However, the successful promotion of your brand on LinkedIn needs a set of clearly defined goals as well as tactics. Developing a useful LinkedIn strategy also needs a far better understanding of your target audience.
Letโs have a look at some of the important steps for creating a robust LinkedIn marketing strategy.
1. Create an attractive company page
- It goes without saying that a LinkedIn Company Page is one of the biggest assets of your LinkedIn marketing strategy.
- Keep in mind that a LinkedIn Company Page is one of the very first interactions that your target audiences are truly going to have with your brand.
- A LinkedIn Company page should easily help them learn each and everything they need to know about your business. This also includes your detailed information about the products/services, employees, and also headquarters etc.
- While creating a captivating page, ensure that you provide your company logo, website URL, the type of industry, company size, and also certain other specifics.
- Adding these details builds your companyโs credibility and can indirectly help make your LinkedIn marketing strategy stronger.
- In addition, you should also carefully craft an accurate and precise description that easily conveys crucial details about your company and also your offerings.
2. Clearly define your goals
It is worth mentioning here that the type of content you publish and also the thorough approach you use to easily distribute it on LinkedIn wholly and solely depends on your final objective.
That is why it is more important to outline your goals at the initial phase of your LinkedIn marketing strategy.
Make sure that you may want to target any of the goals i.e. building brand awareness, generating qualified leads, strengthening brand reputation, engaging with your target audience or selling your product or service.
3. Carefully understand your audience
Once you have a better understanding of your marketing goals, it is a clear time to define your target audience. Thatโs pretty essential for developing a robust LinkedIn marketing strategy.
You can clearly outline your audience based on different parameters such as job title, physical location, and industry to name a few.
In addition to clearly defining your target audience, it is also crucial to have a better understanding of your already existing audience. It is worth mentioning here that a successful LinkedIn marketing strategy wholly and solely focuses on carefully understanding who your audience is and what they favor.
In addition, you can also use the analytics section on your Company Page for learning more about your followers as well as page visitors.
4. Carefully analyze competitorsโ company pages
To strengthen your LinkedIn marketing strategy in a better way, you should know as to how you fare up against your competitors.
LinkedIn offers a feature called โCompanies to trackโ that helps you to know about the list of companies identical to yours. The best thing about this feature is that it gives you access to a few key metrics which include the total number of followers, growth of the followers, and social media engagement.
Assessing these pages will help you better understand how your own Company Page fares in comparison. Moreover, you can identify what is going good for them and also integrate those tactics into your own LinkedIn marketing strategy.
5. Better optimize your LinkedIn Company page
This is the basic part of your LinkedIn marketing strategy. Like your website, the same goes for your LinkedIn Company page just like your website and that is why, you should better optimize your LinkedIn Company Page for search.
As far as a well-optimized Company Page will easily help you gain enhanced visibility in search results, both on and off LinkedIn. This makes it more convenient for people to learn about your company using search engines and also LinkedIn.
You can also optimize your LinkedIn Company Page for search with some of the essential techniques such as using keywords, linking it to your website, and publishing relevant content to name a few.
6. Promoting your company page
Keep in mind that creating a captivating company page is of no use whatsoever unless you can easily attract followers and better grow your audience. Moreover, you should also need to optimize your Company Page for search while also encouraging users to follow it.
Enhancing your visibility is really crucial to ideally creating a successful LinkedIn marketing strategy.
This will also ensure that all of your detailed updates pop up in their LinkedIn Feed and will obviously enhance the reach of your content.
Also, a high follower count will also reinforce the better credibility of your company.
The simplest way to do this is to inquire all your employees and colleagues to turn into followers of your Company Page. You should also include a โFollowโ button in your email signature and also newsletters on your blog as well as website.
7. Include images and videos
Itโs essential to enhance your audience engagement on your LinkedIn updates for better LinkedIn marketing strategy in order to be successful.
The best way to grab the full attention of your audience is by including images and videos. This should be enhanced along with text-based articles.
Besides, you should also upload SlideShare presentations and PDFs to successfully make your content more captivating.
8. Post at the appropriate time
Itโs also crucial that you post on a frequent basis on your company page as this is extremely essential to build an audience on LinkedIn.
It has been estimated by LinkedIn that the majority of the brands that post once a month tend to gain followers six fold faster than those that are unable to follow the strategy.
It has also been revealed that companies that post weekly observe two times the engagement. In addition, brands that post once a day tend to achieve even more following.
9. Launch a showcase page
Create a LinkedIn Showcase Page as this will show off a pretty special initiative and in turn engage a target community. These pages will in turn give LinkedIn members yet another way to follow you more, even if they donโt opt to follow your page.
The importance of a showcase page can be comprehended from the fact that Adobe has as many as five showcase pages for its various products and communities.
10. LinkedIn Groups are very helpful
It is also pertinent to mention that not all tools rely on LinkedIn marketing software. That is why; LinkedIn Groups can be a useful marketing tool as well.
Just like Facebook Groups, LinkedIn Groups offer your community with a useful online forum. As a brand, you can easily be part of the conversation, and thus can easily make meaningful connections with clients.
There are some groups on LinkedIn that are pretty useful for page admins and also business owners.
11. Canva cannot be ignored
Canva is a useful tool that helps you to ideally create custom images for free.
While keeping in view the fact that LinkedIn posts tend to be more engaging with images, Canva ideally offers an extensive stock photo library with branding as well as customization options.
However, you should also keep in mind that you can easily use Canva to create graphic pull quotes as well as data visualizations. In addition, you can simply share a branded hashtag as an image.
The most important part is that Canva can also be used to create GIFs as well as videos with your own recordings, stock footage, and graphics.
12. Slideshare is really essential
SlideShare is a really useful built-in professional content sharing tool of LinkedIn.
You can easily upload your PDF, PowerPoint, Word, or OpenDocument file here to share with your followers.
The amazing thing about these presentations is that they add heft to your posts. LinkedInโs audience properly appreciates this type of material.
Even if you are not going to share your presentation in an update, SlideShare uploads can easily reach 70,000 plus monthly visitors.
SlideShare can also be a useful LinkedIn Page referrer. If people can land on your presentation and adore what they observe, they may ideally be inclined to follow.
Bottom Line
LinkedIn provides innumerable opportunities to connect your brand with the best kind of decision-makers as well as senior-level influencers. It has powerfully grown into a more marketing tool that can help you build brand awareness as well as sell your products or services.
That is why it is the best time that you recognize its significance and start devising a robust LinkedIn marketing strategy.
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