Group shot

The Beginner’s Guide to LinkedIn Marketing

As the most powerful B2B marketing platform LinkedIn is something businesses should not be neglecting, yet LinkedIn marketing is something that is often not invested in by people and businesses.

Our paid social team are incredibly well-versed in creating LinkedIn content for individual profiles, people looking to grow their network, and businesses that want to expand their presence on the platform.

In recent years, LinkedIn has enjoyed record engagement thanks to the global switch to more remote, hybrid working making it the ideal time to invest in paid and organic ads on the platform.

Here, you’ll discover everything about LinkedIn, from the platform itself to why now is such a great time to invest time and money into it.

Grow your brand’s LinkedIn presence today

To learn more about how we specifically can help you feel free to get in touch with our team by calling us on 0161 327 2635 or emailing us at [email protected].

quote left

"We were really impressed by Embryo's industry knowledge and helpful advice. They provided an excellent service in all of the digital marketing projects."

Joshua Duggan, Burgess Pet Care
navy LinkedIn icon

What is LinkedIn Marketing?

At Embryo, we are constantly looking for digital marketing opportunities that will help to grow your business.

Today, LinkedIn marketing is the home of professional conversations and integral to many successful digital strategies. It utilises the largest professional social network to make connections, increase your brand awareness and conversion rates, generate leads, and drive traffic to your website. The platform’s purpose is for individuals to showcase their careers and professional personalities, whilst businesses can showcase their brands, products and services through company pages. Due to the professional nature of the social media platform, it is especially beneficial to B2B businesses looking to market their services.

The best way to get started with LinkedIn marketing is to create a company page, ask personal connections to start following your page and then start sharing content. However, if you’re looking for your LinkedIn activity to be a success, we recommend you create a strategy that is tailored to a particular target audience.

Why It Is Important to Have a LinkedIn Marketing Strategy

In order to achieve your marketing goals using LinkedIn, you should ensure you have a detailed plan, or strategy that sets out the steps you will take to achieve those goals. Without having a LinkedIn strategy you’re unlikely to fully utilise the platform and ensure you’re gaining benefits from it as a marketing channel.

In your LinkedIn strategy, you should think about the audience you want to target, the different messages you want to share, and how you’re going to measure the success of the platform as you use it. Once you have your strategy you should then regularly review it to ensure it is helping you to achieve your marketing objectives, and make any necessary changes should it not be.

Is LinkedIn Really Effective?

Like with many marketing tools, the more you invest in it the more benefits you will experience. Now, this doesn’t mean you just have to invest lots of money, but you should know that you will need to invest time into the platform. This is because you can’t just expect to set up a page or profile, start sharing posts and expect results. Instead by setting out what it is that you’d like to achieve from the platform, and perhaps some KPIs and targets that can help you measure the success, you’re likely to find LinkedIn marketing more effective.

How Businesses Use LinkedIn for Marketing

There are two main ways businesses can use LinkedIn for marketing, the first being organically and the second being through paid activities. This is similar to many other social platforms, and we recommend that as part of your social media strategy, you separate your actions into those organic and paid.

This is because your organic activities should happen naturally and you have less control over who engages with that content. Whereas with your paid activities you can be a lot more targeted about who you want to engage with and the specific actions you want them to take.

  • Embryo-LinkenIn-Post-Friday-Five

    Content Distribution

    There are many different types of content you can share on LinkedIn, with some examples being text posts that may or may not include images and videos, polls and even articles for long-form content like blog posts. When it comes to your LinkedIn content strategy we recommend utilising these different formats as well as sharing different topics and themes of content.

    On LinkedIn you can share content numerous times per day, however, we recommend only sharing a maximum of a couple of posts a day if you have content you need your audience to see. This is because sharing multiple posts throughout the day can mean you’re watering down your content and reducing the engagement from your audience.

  • Embryo LinkedIn Win

    Sharing Company News and Notable Wins

    Having a LinkedIn Page for your business enables you to share content with your audience. As LinkedIn’s audience is all about professional networking, sharing company updates and achievements is a great way to gain engagement, but also helps attract talent for recruitment and winning new business. Whilst it’s important to share company news and showcase your culture, we advise that this sort of content is only part of your content strategy, as constantly and only sharing positive news about your brand, could also disengage your audience.

  • Embryo-LinkedIn-Post-by-Megan-Ritchie

    Highlighting Company Culture

    Your LinkedIn business page should be an authentic representation of your brand. Therefore it’s a great platform to showcase your company culture and to shout about your successes. Sharing posts about these topics can then help you in recruiting new team members and even win new clients.

    Using features like the cover image and page description you can showcase the people behind your brand and any key messages or USPs that you think set you apart from your competitors.

    Your company culture doesn’t just have to be shared by your business page, the posts from individual users from your team that tag and mention your company will also help highlight this and can be even more authentic in generating engagement.

  • Embryo LinkedIn Download

    Lead Generation

    LinkedIn is a platform for professional audiences and therefore it’s a great marketing tool for your business to generate leads. Just sharing original and engaging content can help promote your business to potential clients and customers. Whilst if you’re looking for more targeted and precise lead generation, there are a range of paid features that you can use. For example, you can run paid LinkedIn ads that target specific industries, company sizes and even job roles.

    LinkedIn as a social platform is often considered online networking, and just like traditional networking, users shouldn’t expect to be able to just take from those they’re engaging with. When using the platform the individuals and businesses that have the most success are those who think about how they’re adding value to the platform and other users. This is where businesses can benefit themselves by sharing lead magnet content, such as white papers and other downloadable documents, which other users can benefit from in exchange for their information, such as an email address or phone number.

LinkedIn Marketing: Best Practices

  • 1. Post Industry Trends, How-Tos, and Thought-Leadership Content

    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.

  • 2. Make Use of the Analytics

    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.

  • 3. Use Images and Videos

    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.

  • 4. Use Data to Find your Best Time to Post

    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.

  • 5. Schedule 1 Post Per Weekday

    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.

  • 6. Optimise Your Company Page for Search

    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.
  • 7. Help Your Colleagues Help You

    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.

  • 8. Engage With Other Users

    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.

long navy advertisement icon

Using Paid Campaigns on LinkedIn

As mentioned, your LinkedIn activity doesn’t have to be all organic and there are numerous types of ads available. The professional network has a wide range of tools and features that can enable you to run highly-targeted campaigns for a target audience. These are set to achieve a variety of advertising goals within three different categories:

  • Awareness
  • Consideration
  • Conversions

Once you have decided on the objectives you’d like your LinkedIn ads to aim to achieve, it’s time to decide on your daily budget. You can then choose from a variety of ad formats to create your campaigns and set various pricing methods to control your costs. Our talented PPC are well-versed in creating bidding strategies that lower costs and increase performance.

In order to run paid advertising campaigns on LinkedIn you need to create a campaign manager account. This is free to set up and is quickly done. It is here where you can create, launch, control and report on different campaigns. You even have the option to set up conversion tracking.

Want to know more about advertising on LinkedIn?

Our award-winning social team are more than happy to discuss how to include LinkedIn in your paid strategy. Get in touch by email using [email protected] or by calling 0161 327 2635.

quote left

The team at Embryo is a joy to work with. They understand what we want to achieve as a business, their level of service is excellent, and they are constantly analysing metrics and data to ensure that together we overachieve in the performance of campaigns.

They have become a natural extension of my marketing department and I look forward to what the future brings.

Dan Walmsley, The Insurance Octopus

LinkedIn Marketing Options

1
Sponsored Content Ads

When you share content on your LinkedIn page you can boost that individual post using a paid campaign in order for your content to go further and be seen by a specific audience to encourage their engagement. As well as boosting posts, you can also create sponsored content in LinkedIn’s campaign manager. Here you are able to create ad copy, upload images and videos and set your targeting options that include company size, job title and usual demographics like location.

2
Sponsored Messages

Another way to engage your audience is through sponsored messages that appear in LinkedIn messaging. By doing this you are able to engage with your audience in a more personal manner. It can also be a great way for your sales team to nurture and keep prospects engaged.

3
Lead Gen Forms

For B2B and some B2C businesses, lead generation is a large part of their marketing strategy. On LinkedIn’s campaign manager, you can create paid campaigns to generate qualified leads. These forms open when a user clicks on your ad and can be completed directly in the LinkedIn app of the platform, helping save the user time and effort.

4
Text Ads

LinkedIn Text Ads, work in a similar way to PPC, in that you only pay for your ads if and when they are clicked or you can pay by cost per impression (CPM). By utilising this type of ad you are able to drive users to your business in a more cost-effective way.

5
Dynamic Ads

LinkedIn Dynamic Ads are paid campaigns which automatically add a personalised touch to the users you are trying to target. By doing this you can grab your targeted audience’s attention and personalise the experience for them. Like with the other ad types you can set different objectives for your campaigns, from brand awareness to website visits and video views.

Grow Your Business with LinkedIn Marketing.

So whether you just want to use LinkedIn organically or as part of a paid strategy, we strongly recommend you incorporate the publishing platform into your social media strategy.

Want to learn more about how you could use LinkedIn marketing to achieve your business goals? Our award-winning paid social team would be more than happy to discuss the platform to see how it can be incorporated into your strategy. Let’s talk.

quote left

There aren't enough superlatives to describe the Embryo team and the digital marketing solutions they've provided for our business. We've been working with the team for over 18 months, and I can say that they are an extension of our in-house marketing team and consistently go above and beyond with service levels, creative solutions and input, as well as supporting our day-to-day efforts.

Sam Shrager, BCB Group