The Beginner’s Guide to LinkedIn Marketing

Like with all social media, to get the sought-after results of high engagement rates, impressions and even conversions you need to be creating and sharing compelling content that your target audience wants to see. Creating a detailed content strategy that lists the types of content you want to share can ensure you share a variety of content. As LinkedIn is a professional network a lot of users are looking for thought-leadership content that can help advance their skills and careers.

Whilst there are best practices for LinkedIn marketing that you can follow, it’s also important to remember that each account and LinkedIn page is unique and therefore what works for one, might not be best for another. However, LinkedIn’s analytics helps you to discover lots of data, which can enhance your marketing strategy.

For individuals, you can click on each post you share to find out how many engagements and impressions you’ve received. You can also analyse the demographics of the top people you’ve reached to see their job titles, locations and industries. For company pages, you can analyse the demographics of your followers, when your content is gaining engagement, how your following is changing and even how you compare to your competitors.

Being aware of all this information will help you refine and enhance your LinkedIn marketing strategy.

Whilst LinkedIn doesn’t impose restricting character limits like some other social platforms, it doesn’t mean you have to write large posts. LinkedIn posts with images gain two times more engagement than those without – you can even use carousel ads to showcase numerous images. This really demonstrates why you should be sharing images and videos in your content in order to grab the attention of your audience as they scroll through their feeds.

You can also upload PDF documents to your LinkedIn posts which your audience can then scroll through. Sharing this type of content can position your business as an industry leader and help you to gain engagements and achieve objectives.

In order to achieve the best results when using LinkedIn for marketing, you’ll need to consider both the type of content you share and the timing of that content. By doing so, you’ll be able to maximise the impact of your efforts and get the most out of your investment in the platform.

Depending on your target audience there will be better days and times to share your content in order to attract their attention and get them to engage. Using the platform’s analytics you can access data which will show you your follower demographics and the best times to share your content. As LinkedIn is a professional network, it’s worth keeping in mind that usually, the best times to post are when the majority of users are in a professional mindset, during the working week. We find some of the best weekdays to share content are between Tuesday and Thursday, and either before or after the working day.

Sharing regular and relevant content will increase the success of your marketing efforts. However, it can be difficult and time-consuming to create content each day. This is why we recommend scheduling your content in advance. Now you might argue that some content requires you to be more reactive, which is true, however, by also scheduling content in advance you can ensure you are always sharing content, even when there is nothing for you to react to.

If you’re investing in a LinkedIn page then you need to ensure it can be found by users searching for your business and products or services. To help with this you should do the following:

• Choose a profile picture that is clear and matches up with your other social channels and branding. This will help users identify your page and ensure you’re not being mistaken for another brand or user.
• Include your company name in your profile headline and ensure it is in your personalised URL.
• Link to your website on your profile. Not only will this help users find your page, but also on their journey to finding out more about your business and interacting with you.
• In your company description, you should include the services or some of the products you sell, that way users can find your page when searching for those. You should also include any USPs and make full use of the character limit, as once those users have found your page you need to make a great first impression and encourage them to engage with you and perhaps even use your business over your competitors.
• Ensure your team and colleagues have connected their profiles to your company page. This will also help you to be discovered, and provide credibility to your business page.

As a social platform, LinkedIn wants to share the best and most relevant content with its users. Therefore the platform’s algorithm works by identifying content which has high levels of engagement, deems this content helpful and relevant and then shares it with more users on their feeds. This is why if you want your LinkedIn content to be seen by a large audience and receive higher engagement rates it’s imperative that you encourage your team members and colleagues to quickly engage with your content.

When you share content on your company page there is a link that you can click which says ‘notify employees’. By doing so, LinkedIn will automatically notify any users who are connected with your page about your post and to engage.

Like with many other social platforms, whilst a large focus should be on the unique content you share, you should also ensure your page and account is engaging with other users. You can do this in a number of ways including tagging other users and company pages in your posts, responding to comments on your posts and even commenting on posts of other users. All of this engagement and activity will help your brand be seen by more users and will help increase the success of your LinkedIn marketing.