The Ultimate Guide to Using LinkedIn for Digital Marketing

LinkedIn is arguably the most important network for B2B marketers to network and make new connections with prospects, clients, and business partners. Any well-crafted digital marketing strategy includes great content distribution channels.

Your content can be top-notch but, it is only effective if you distribute it on relevant channels to your target audience. Social media allows you to quickly share content from your business with your followers, their followers, and millions of other users across the platform. What sets LinkedIn apart from other networks the most is that it is designed for professionals. The content you share on your company page and your personal profile should reflect you and your organization in a professional light.

In the global business world, having a relevant LinkedIn profile is a must — in fact, there are 55 million companies currently on LinkedIn. If you are a B2B organization looking to improve your content distribution, LinkedIn should be considered a top network for your 2021 marketing strategy.

Marketers who managed to achieve success on LinkedIn keep sharing the most effective strategies for this social network. With their help, you can also expand your audience, promote your events, attract potential customers, and do much more.

About LinkedIn

This social network for business communication and business focuses on promoting B2B products and searching for useful contacts. It is easy to highlight the advantages of this platform for digital marketing.

• The quality of the audience. A considerable part of LinkedIn is their users — specialists, companies, top managers, managers, and small business owners. Each of them sets a goal to make useful contacts, promote a personal brand, and profit from cooperation. Any offers, product advertising, or personal services are never accepted as “spam” but as an opportunity to make a profit.
• LinkedIn is the perfect place to advertise B2B products. The platform’s advertising capabilities and the available information about users allow you to get to the target audience. On LinkedIn, you can contact any person, offering him your services. People are ready to study any offer that has a specific benefit for them.
• Readiness for dialogue. On the LinkedIn social network, users actively make contacts, get valuable information, share experiences, or hunt a skilled specialist to implement a particular project.
• Increase the credibility of your brand. By posting good content, you can attract potential customers, inform employees, find partners, and share your ideas.
• It is an effective SEO and a Google-friendly platform. If the profile or business page is filled correctly, the search engine will display them on the first page. Google likes LinkedIn and makes its content a priority. 
• You will have a variability of settings for targeted advertising. An adequately organized advertising campaign on LinkedIn will allow you to grab a good piece of the pie in the form of satisfied customers. An audience here that is ready not only to buy but also to invest.

Optimize your profile

How to prove to be a good business on LinkedIn? Perhaps your LinkedIn profile is where you should start. Your company’s LinkedIn page can drive traffic to your landing page with a few clicks. That is why you should focus on making the most of every element in your profile.

When filling out your profile, do not forget to answer how you can help your potential audience. Yes, you need to fill out the profile based on the interests of the target audience. It is essential to understand who exactly your customers are. Highlight the value proposition and describe in detail the services you provide. This helps filter out unqualified leads and ensure that you deliver the optimal message to the most likely potential customers.

Here are a few tips on how to optimize your LinkedIn profile:

1. Start creating your company page and add information about your business: company name, link to landing page or website, industry, size, and type of company.
2. Add a cover to make your profile look more attractive and professional. The cover is a large image located at the very top of a business page. The cover may show your product, team, or a larger version of the logo. Whatever image you choose for your cover, make sure it matches your brand and has the right size (1584 x 396 pixels).
3. Make a convincing description of your company: briefly tell us about your business mission and what you do. Use this section to promote your product/service or to draw attention to yourself as an employer. To make it easier for users to find you in search engines, be sure to use relevant keywords in the description and throughout the business page.
4. It will be much easier to find your company on LinkedIn if you add its location. If necessary, you can add multiple locations.
5. If you have hashtags, search for them on LinkedIn and confirm that they are existing hashtags that contain your intended meaning. An acronym in your business or industry may also be used by a different organization and have a completely different meaning. Pay attention to the type of content that uses this hashtag. If it does not match your content type, choose something more appropriate for your profile and publications. 
6. Customize your profile URL. A nice and clean URL will look more professional and easier to share.

Your employees who publish content as part of your marketing strategy should also optimize their LinkedIn profiles: specify the company and position, add posts to their achievements, and so on.

Best Practices to Market Your Business on LinkedIn

When your business page is fully set up, it is time to start following digital marketing LinkedIn tips to grow your business.

Share your profile to grow the network

Growing your network of contacts in LinkedIn is an essential marketing step. It is believed that first, you add contacts, and after you are connected with 300 people, they work for you themselves. Queries can be interesting and useful for you, but you need to search for your target audience and not wait until it finds you (if you are focused on productivity, of course).

If you have had a productive meeting with interesting people, immediately add them to LinkedIn. If you met at a forum, or if the person was just one of the conference call participants — ask him to make contact with you.

LinkedIn primarily shows your posts to the audience from those locations where you have the most first-circle people. Therefore, it is better to expand the network of contacts in those locations where you are looking for customers, users, and investors.

When there is a sufficient number of investors, potential business partners, and buyers among your contacts, just being among their contacts is not enough. Show your interests – like their updates, comment on their statuses. Important! Just do not spam your network of contacts with messages like: “We have a solution especially for you at a favorable price!”. Be smarter — stand out, personalize your comments without using cliches.

Involve employees in a marketing strategy

Employee profiles should correspond to the company’s image, look professional, and contain links to the company’s website. Do not forget to pay attention to the photo. The photo should be high-quality, made in a business style, and contain only an image of the profile owner (preferably portrait).

Share insightful content

Do not worry; at first, you won’t need to come up with different LinkedIn content — you can share articles from your blog. By regularly posting on LinkedIn, you can keep your page active, present your business as an industry leader, engage with subscribers, and drive traffic to your website.

By sharing high-quality content useful to your professional network, you demonstrate your value and credibility in the industry. Increased visibility in social networks helps generate leads, improves sales, and even allows you to get job offers or contracts. You can also share news, updates, or upcoming company events on your LinkedIn business page.

Focus on content that is valuable to users. Of course, it is also allowed to publish information about important news or its success. Still, the recommended ratio remains 20:80 (20 — information about the company, 80 — information useful to readers). Publish posts during the peak user activity. As a rule, this is the morning before starting the working day, or the time closer to 5-6 PM.

Publish posts regularly. The frequency of updates on the company’s page depends on its size and geographical affiliation.

Use sponsored LinkedIn updates

When talking about digital marketing LinkedIn strategies, it is worth mentioning sponsored LinkedIn updates. Downloading the update provides the best way to put your content in front of key and influential LinkedIn personalities, which will ultimately help you build your credibility as an expert in your niche.

You will determine how effective these paid updates are by using the detailed analytics provided by LinkedIn. Metrics found in the LinkedIn campaign manager include:

1. Impressions
2. Clicks
3. CTR (click-through-rate)
4. CPC (cost per click)
5. Total spent
6. Social actions by campaign
7. Audience demographics by campaign

Ensure that you only sponsor the most valuable messages to your target market and provide a positive return on your invested capital. Keep in mind that the market will not forgive the waste of time on low-quality content.

Add high-quality visuals

Did you know that you can visually enhance your LinkedIn profile by adding photos, videos, related articles with images, screenshots, or even infographics and presentations? 69% of marketers said that visual content marketing is an absolute necessity in their marketing campaigns.

But you do not have to set up and forget your new “visual” profile. Here are the content pieces you should update regularly on LinkedIn:

1. Video recordings of speeches
2. Slides and presentation materials
3. Special projects, such as books and programs
4. Recent articles from the press
5. Screenshots of social proof

The social network’s algorithm puts a post with a video to the top of the feed, but only a tiny percentage of users use this technique. Publish an article, create a video that will promote it, add a link to the landing page, and use the campaign tracking code to measure the traffic that came to it through the publication.

Network influence

Identify your network MVPs (most valuable people) and review their profiles to gather information about what is important to them and what their needs and goals are. You can then find ways to help, encourage, and even connect your customers at the individual level.

Working with personal LinkedIn messages that have @ mentions, instructions, and intentional promotion ideas from MVPs is an example of network influence in action.

Here are 3 advantages you will achieve through using LinkedIn’s network influence:

1. You will stand out from the competition because you are doing something different.
2. You will become more memorable and valuable to your network members because you show that you listen to them and care about them.
3. You will more readily engage your network members in creating and sharing content.

Join LinkedIn groups and discussions

LinkedIn groups are a useful tool of the digital marketing LinkedIn process. The goal of this type of marketing is to establish intellectual leadership. Therefore, when the time comes to buy something, the reader remembers that your company knows how to help him and returns to it. These rules apply to social media, as well as, in particular, to LinkedIn discussion groups.

Share your opinions, make provocative statements, publish original content, ask interesting and relevant questions, and comment on publications. Do not be a banal spammer, begging to go to the company’s page and purchase a product or service. However, if an expert participates in the discussion, it gives you every chance to expand the audience. When you enrich content and share valuable social content with LinkedIn discussion groups, it can become the most significant traffic source.

Tag your customers in your messages

Did you know that you can tag your customers in messages? This ensures that they will see your post, even if they have not visited LinkedIn for a long time. They will receive a short email informing them that they have been tagged and containing a link to this message.

To tag a client in your messages, type “@” followed by the name of the person you want to tag. However, do not be tempted to tag and annoy them always. Use this opportunity strategically to tell them something important or something that they should not miss. 

Use LinkedIn targeting

One of the more significant LinkedIn marketing features is its organic targeting for your content. Page admin’s can target posts based on follower profile data, including organization size, industry, job, seniority, geography, and language preference.

Build relationships instead of adding new clients

Developing relationships on LinkedIn is useful for marketers because it is essentially their “pre-qualification.” You become a trusted advisor to customers, so if there is an opportunity to help each other, answer a question, buy a product, etc., you are the first person they will turn to. If everything is done correctly, then this relationship can develop into a long-term and business relationship.

LinkedIn allows you to develop relationships that turn into something more: friendship, partnership, collaboration, and even a new business.

Evaluate your marketing performance.

With the help of reporting and analytics tools, analyze your marketing campaigns:

1. Measure conversions
2. Analyze performance
3. Understand your audience
4. Keep a pulse on your most immense opportunities

Conclusion 

Are you excited to try all those digital marketing LinkedIn tips we discussed above? All of the above actions will bring you an impressive result if you find only 30 minutes a day for this work.

LinkedIn helps millions of entrepreneurs around the world find employees, customers, and business partners. This is one of the most effective ways to expand the network of professional contacts. And remember that marketing is a business philosophy that puts the client at the center of the universe. If you follow the same principle in your LinkedIn promotion campaigns, success is guaranteed.