It's no easy feat to stand out on LinkedIn. The platform is packed full of B2B marketers, all vying for the attention of your target market. But there are a lot of ways to put yourself ahead of the pack and make sure that your content is seen.
Here are six tips for B2B marketers to be successful on LinkedIn.
Invest in a good content strategy.
If you’re looking to take your LinkedIn marketing strategy to the next level, you must come up with a good content strategy, and here’s why:
- A good content strategy will help you put the right content in front of the right people.
- It will also help you figure out how to measure your success and how long it will take for you to start seeing ROI.
- Most importantly, it is better to understand your goals before beginning any kind of a project than to have a rough idea about where you want to be at the end of a certain time period. Once you do that, everything else falls into place as well.
Best practice tip: Do not get carried away by your creative juices and set yourself unrealistic targets that are very difficult for your team members to achieve or worse – this makes them give up on their goals altogether. If you do have an idea about what your business goals are, then make sure they are something tangible that can be achieved within 3-6 months at most (depending on how much resources, bandwidth, and budget have been allocated).
Include your employees and customers in the mix.
LinkedIn’s recommended best practice for business is to ensure that at least 30% of your content comes from third-party sources, such as industry influencers, analysts, and consultants. For B2B marketers on LinkedIn, this statistic could be a game-changer.
Your employees and customers are your greatest brand ambassadors.
Establish a content strategy that includes both your employees and customers by asking them to share company updates with their networks. This will help you reach more people while also increasing awareness of your brand in the marketplace. Make it easy for them to participate by creating unique URLs for each employee or customer ambassador so that you can track their engagement with your company page or sponsored content. As you begin to see which messages resonate most with the two groups, use those insights to create targeted content that will help drive even more engagement.
Be selective with your content.
Your content should drive engagement and build trust. Pick your content based on the value it can bring to your target audience.
Take advantage of when your business is launching a new product or piece of content. You can use that as an opportunity to create resources for your audiences, such as how-to guides and step-by-step tutorials.
Don’t over post about the same topic just because you want to keep up with the competition or your friends. That could lead to annoying followers and not building trust with them or growing engagement with them."
Engage with users on the platform.
One of the best ways to nurture a community is to participate in it. You wouldn't be much of a community organizer if you didn't participate in the activities your group members are doing, right? The same rules apply to LinkedIn.
To best engage with your audience, it's important that you spend time getting involved and participating in the conversations taking place on their feed. Spend some time each day responding to comments others have made on your posts, share other people's posts and articles when appropriate, comment on other people's posts, start discussions in groups that will be relevant to them, and invite them to join your own groups. By acting as a member of the community yourself, you're more likely to get others involved!
Use LinkedIn insights to determine what appeals to your audience.
Once you’re publishing content on a regular basis, use LinkedIn Insights to determine what type of content appeals most to your audience. The best part about LinkedIn Insights is that it not only shows you the top posts from your company page but also the companies within the same industry as yours. That way, you can easily browse what types of content other brands are posting to see what resonates with their audiences and ideally get some inspiration for your own pages.
Not sure where to start? Here are some ideas for using LinkedIn Insights:
- Determine which types of content perform best: Which posts get the most engagement on your company page? Do blog post links or photos perform better? This is important information because you want to publish more of the types of posts that earn more comments and likes. You also want to be aware when something new performs differently than usual so that you can quickly pivot in another direction if necessary.
- Find out when people are engaging with your content: What time or day do your followers typically interact with updates on your page? Knowing this will help you optimize future posts and make sure they go out at times when they’re likely to receive more engagement from followers who have opted in for notifications from your company page.
- Identify topics that resonate with readers: Oftentimes, a particular topic will catch fire with an audience (like “content marketing” might for ours), so pay attention to whether certain keywords crop up frequently in titles or descriptions for high-performing posts. Then try experimenting by using those buzzwords in new ways in future updates.
Measure performance, and don’t be afraid to try new things.
It goes without saying that you should be measuring the results of your LinkedIn marketing efforts, but it's also important to look at what works and what doesn't. The insights you gain from your metrics will help guide you toward a more effective marketing strategy, so don’t be afraid to try new things.
Remember, your first idea isn't always going to work. But if you keep pushing yourself and implementing new ideas, it will only be a matter of time before something sticks with your audience. The more content you create, the easier it will become for you to find the winning formula for success on LinkedIn.
You can tailor your Linkedin marketing strategy to use the platform in a way that works best for you and your business.
You don’t need to invest any money to build your Linkedin presence. You always have the flexibility and control over every piece of content you share on Linkedin.
The best thing about this is that you can tailor your Linkedin marketing strategy to use the platform in a way that works best for you and your business. You don’t need to do what everyone else is doing—you can find a way of making Linkedin work for you. Components like audience segmentation or LinkedIn Insights are there for a reason: they give you the power to create content that will get noticed by decision-makers who want what your company has to offer.