LinkedIn Marketing: Create A Winning Content Marketing Plan

Is your business fully taking advantage of LinkedIn marketing? With more than 756 million active users in 2020, LinkedIn’s expanded from a networking site for professionals to one of the top social media platforms. As you may know, each social media platform has its own set of unwritten rules as to what is and is not acceptable — and LinkedIn is no different. Before, you may have been able to create a static post on a company milestone and receive some engagement — but that’s not the case anymore. In order to effectively utilize LinkedIn marketing, you need to create a winning content marketing plan. 

Today, it’s becoming quite clear that LinkedIn isn’t just for people in executive corporate roles. With millions of company pages and individual members, there’s a discussion, post, or professional network for almost anyone on this channel — including marketing agencies.

Why do you need LinkedIn? Is it not possible to build an audience on more universal social networks? What content will perform best for your LinkedIn marketing? Agency Vista has covered these questions for you to create an effective content marketing plan.

Why LinkedIn marketing?

LinkedIn is the most powerful platform for B2B, with more than half a billion professionals gathering on LinkedIn to stay connected and informed, advance their careers, and work smarter. 

The key users are IT specialists, C-Level managers, startup owners, and employees of successful companies. LinkedIn goes beyond job hunting and listings. People here actively buy and sell business products to solve current problems and earn more. The main segment is complex B2B products, which take time to make a purchase decision and build a trusting relationship with the client.

What are LinkedIn’s business opportunities?

• You can promote your brand as an expert or business owner.
• You can develop a personal profile to attract customers to your business.
• You can create and strengthen the profiles of the company’s employees, top management.
• You can maintain the company’s business page to attract customers.

Are you still wondering if LinkedIn should be a part of your marketing strategy? Put your doubts aside and start using LinkedIn for digital marketing. LinkedIn representatives say that an effectively-created content plan will attract an audience and increase sales. There are many various types of content, and the LinkedIn Marketing Solutions team has run multiple tests to prove what content works the best.

It does not matter if your goals are brand awareness, thought leadership, or lead generation; these recommendations will help you get started with content marketing on LinkedIn successfully.

Key Steps To Build A Strong Content Marketing On LinkedIn

1. No goal – no result

Any goals are the road to profit, that is, what the business strives for. It is usually quite tricky to calculate the return on investment in content marketing, but setting clear and specific goals and ways to evaluate the results achieved makes it much easier to understand the value of content for business. The implementation of the defined goals increases the confidence of the entire marketing plan as a whole. And, most importantly, it inspires confidence in the prospects of financial investments in marketing.

LinkedIn marketing goals:

• Increase your brand awareness.
• Attract traffic to the website.
• Attract more promising leads.
• Boost newsletter sign-ups.
• Retain customers and drive sales growth.

2. LinkedIn content types to publish

LinkedIn Company and Showcase Pages

Company Pages and Showcase Pages are great resources for sharing relevant content and attracting your target audience’s attention. Compared with Company Pages, Showcase Pages are designed with much more differentiation, allowing you to build a page about your company based on different niches and business structures. This means that the right users see specific content. It has already established itself as one of the most effective means of B2B marketing.

Types of content to share on LinkedIn company pages:

• Links to your best white-papers 
• eBooks
• Case studies
• Industry articles
• Helpful how-to guides 
• Attractive visuals

LinkedIn marketing company pages guide:

• Post 3-4x per day
• Engage with your audience and respond to their comments
• Change cover image every six months

LinkedIn SlideShare

SlideShare has an undeniable advantage — presentations contribute to brand awareness. Eighty million professionals trust SlideShare to learn about any topic quickly from subject matter experts. It is a kind of combination between a social network and an online learning resource. The task of presentations is to promptly convey to the user the primary information on a particular topic. Users do not want to read novels; they want to get a solution or answer a question. Therefore, try to express the idea as clearly and concisely as possible.

Types of content to post on LinkedIn SlideShare:

• Company videos 
• Webcast and conference recordings
• Influencer videos
• Product how-to’s and tips
• Company presentations
• Webcast decks
• Infographics
• Nicely designed, short, and informative content

LinkedIn marketing SlideShare guide:

• Upload new content every week
• Highlight decks on the profile page
• Group content into playlists
• Add lead forms

Posting on LinkedIn

One of LinkedIn’s primary tools is publishing relevant content through its internal publishing platform. It is ideal for creating and strengthening a professional image by sharing your knowledge and work experience.

Types of content to share on LinkedIn:

• Professional expertise
• Industry trends
• Lessons learned

LinkedIn marketing guide:

• Share whenever you feel passionate
• Recommended: bi-weekly or once a month

LinkedIn Sponsored Updates and Direct Sponsored Content

Sponsored content is an update on an organization’s LinkedIn page that is sponsored and allows you to run native ads across desktop and mobile to build an audience ready to do business with you. Direct sponsored content is an ad in the sponsored content format that is not displayed on the organization’s LinkedIn page as a page refresh. It allows you to personalize and test content for your target audience and increase the content effectiveness without cluttering up the organization’s page.

Types of content to share on LinkedIn Sponsored Updates:

• Company news
• Blog articles
• Industry news and research
• Case studies
• Webcasts and content produced by business leaders
• Attractive visuals and statistics

LinkedIn Sponsored Updates Guide:

• Choose an attractive visual (800×400 pixel image)
• Run 2-4 sponsored updates a week
• Run for a few weeks, then test and iterate
• Add URL tracking codes to measure post-click actions
• Set up campaigns by audience
• Shift budget to the audience with the highest engagement rate

LinkedIn Groups

LinkedIn groups allow professionals who work in the same industry or have similar interests to share their experiences and essential information, search for advice, and make valuable connections. A branded group on LinkedIn will increase the credibility of the B2B brand in professional circles and establish new contacts.

Types of content to share on LinkedIn Groups:

• Use as a forum for discussion
• Use as a catalyst for thought leadership and community
• Spark conversations about industry trends and challenges
• Ask questions to crowdsource sentiment

LinkedIn Groups guide:

• Create a group for your company and assign ownership and duties
• Ask for opinions and provide unique insights
• Keep your content precise and relevant
• Manage and monitor post submissions daily
• Highlight top contributors
• Promote your group across social media channels
• Join other relevant industry groups
• Initiate and participate in group discussions daily

3. Choose your topics and themes

Getting the best out of SMM on LinkedIn is not as difficult as you might have imagined. Add humanity to your posts, tell us about your mistakes, record a training video, add a pinch of creativity and bright emotions — and it will not be long before new leads start coming in. Feel free to mix different topics and themes to maximize engagement. Try a new topic on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.

LinkedIn topic ideas and themes:

• How-to guides and valuable tips
• Industry news
• Inspiring pieces 
• Opinion pieces
• Announcements
• Answers to common questions from your audience
• Your success story
• Achievements
• Events
• Strategies and tactics
• Leadership
• Knowledge and skills

4. Organize your editorial workflow properly

Without an optimized editorial process, your content marketing project will become messy, and it can take anywhere from six months to a year to approve just one post. The beauty of an editorial workflow is that it helps you avoid problems and create content more efficiently.

Your LinkedIn content marketing success depends on a reasonably important but often overlooked group of people: your content team. These people will be responsible for successfully creating and fulfilling your content needs. Every team member should have specific goals, tasks, and deadlines.

We can define the following roles that can be assigned either to various specialists or one (if you are a team of one):

• Project management
• Content marketing plan creation
• Researching
• Content writing
• Content editing
• Content reviewing
• Content approving
• Publishing

5. Use your LinkedIn content to close the sale

Now you have a better idea of how to build the LinkedIn content marketing process. Remember, social networks are not yet sales, but first of all – communication. Do not forget about the primary goal to move people from LinkedIn to your business website.

An easy solution might be creating a content upgrade and placing it on your website. Each LinkedIn content post should have a link to a website to read more/get specific information, and so on. Also, every time a new relevant material appears on the site, announce it on LinkedIn and be sure to attach a link. Give a reason to go to the website. Make an intriguing intro, share only part of the content — all this will encourage the user to click on the link to find out the continuation.

Essential LinkedIn Content Marketing Tips

Content marketing is a great way to promote your product or service at the lowest cost. But it is pretty easy to mess things up here if you do not know the rules and learn from the mistakes of others.

Keep the following tips in mind to succeed in LinkedIn content marketing:

• Define your target audience. When a product solves a specific problem, people are willing to use it and pay even at a high price. Conversely, it is pointless to offer people something that they do not need. That is why it is so essential to understand whom your content is intended for initially.
• Understand your competitors. Try to know and understand your competitors to conduct a comparative analysis of them and their weaknesses and strengths, eliminate shortcomings, adopt the experience, identify “white space” and use it, and so on. You can create a competitive advantage only by analyzing the work of your opponents.
• Optimize your profile. Create a compelling company page on LinkedIn to get maximum results in this business network:
• Upload a quality profile photo.
• Add a header to make your page more professional.
• Think over a compelling headline.
• Personalize your profile’s URL.
• Add a clear description.
• Include multimedia content for each entry.
• Engage with other users’ content. Account activity attracts the attention of other users. Write comments in the accounts and groups that have your target audience.
• Maximize engagement in your publications. Ask questions in posts, participate in discussions, and encourage people to communicate. Use provocation, controversial judgments, or open-ended questions. Also, use appropriate hashtags to expand your reach.
• Get the most of user-generated content (UGC). UGC rules the marketing world. The reason is that it takes advantage of the client’s unspoken desire for recognition. External recognition or words of appreciation for your brand increase the value of users’ trust and sympathy for your brand.

Conclusion 

LinkedIn is a powerful platform to grow an audience, find jobs, sponsors, and grateful customers. And master the art of brand promotion! LinkedIn has an entirely different segment of users, including a premium audience willing to pay for high-quality services that bring them results. Understand your target audience and their pains, keep the algorithm in mind, and play with different content media and content types to get the most value from LinkedIn.