With this expansive reach, you can make your content visible to users anywhere. But managing to fully leverage the resources of LinkedIn marketing for B2B requires a strategy. You need to approach LinkedIn business as a piece of multi-channel strategy with objectives and allocate appropriate resources, while putting an emphasis on quality to be able to secure significant advantage on this platform.

What numbers say?

In few words, they say that LinkedIn marketing is very effective. In many words, this is what they say:

• LinkedIn is the top channel with 94%, through which B2B marketers share out content.

• Over 90% of marketing executives say LinkedIn is the home for highest quality content.

• Half of the social traffic for B2B websites and blogs is driven by LinkedIn.

• B2B generate over 80% leads from LinkedIn compared to Twitter 13% & Facebook 13%.

• LinkedIn successfully generates revenue as reported by 38% of B2B marketers.

• Compared to Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn generates 3 times more conversions.
   

Some key benefits of using LinkedIn for marketing include:

• Reducing or totally eliminating the need for cold calling

• Optimizing your presence in search engines

• Making connections with like-minded professionals

• Gaining exposure for your business or brand

• Establishing yourself as a leader in your niche by sharing top notch content and participating in groups

• Recruiting candidates for job openings

So, to be able to leverage on all these benefits, here are the strategies that you must use.

LinkedIn Marketing Strategies That Work

1. Work on Your Profile

You must create a great first impression that’s going to drive traffic and reinforce your credibility. If you don’t have an account already, create one. If you have one, complete it fully. If you only have a personal account, then get to the next level and create a company profile. Here are a few main guidelines.

a. Use a great photo.

Profiles with great photos generate more views and matches and eventually better results. Use neutral backgrounds and soft lighting. Don’t use selfies or pictures where you’re in a group of people. While choosing outfits, consider background colors and pick the ones that match both your personality and your target roles. Keep it professional yet appealing enough for viewers to want to meet you.

b. Sound Approachable but Not Desperate

You may desperately be looking for a client or employment, but showing that you’re actively seeking these opportunities may not be a good thing. Human psychology always seeks to find what is in demand, so present yourself as someone or a brand that people want. It sounds like a cheat but it’s really about winning, show your value not your needs.

Thus, use first-person description of yourself and sound like someone clients or hiring managers would like to meet.

c. Use Keywords Skillfully and Make the Profile Readable

Your profile description must include the necessary keywords that match your target roles, use them artfully and don’t overstuff them. Make your paragraphs short and easily digestible considering the fact that your viewers will use different screens or devices.

d. Highlight Your Accomplishments

You want the target audience to know the highlights of your business. Include anything that constitutes such information without seeming like you’re bragging. Just put it out in a way to show that you deliver great results.

e. Proofread and Proofread

Have you ever seen a renowned company with a typo in the title description and you cringed on their behalf? Yes, it’s easy even for the mighty to fail even by a punctuation error. But it’s more than just punctuation, the descriptions must be relevant for your activity.

Finally, avoid multiple entries and delete any irrelevant information from your company’s profile, such as social media accounts that are no longer in use.

Source: linkedin.com

Here is a step by step guide on how to create your LinkedIn business profile and page.

2. Define Your Audience and Goals

The second LinkedIn marketing strategy is identifying your goals and your audience. Peter Drucker said if you can’t measure it then you can’t improve it. What exactly do you want to achieve on LinkedIn and how do these goals tie in with your career, personal brand or business?

So, the impetus is upon you to have a clear understanding of this in order to know the tactics, type of content and manner in which you will pursue your LinkedIn marketing goals. Write down your objectives, specify how you can achieve them then track your progress.

With goals in place, the next thing is to identify who you want to appeal to be able to make relevant connections. Know their challenges and how you can help solve them. This is the only way you can create content that will resonate with them.

3. Create Helpful and Original Content

As you may know, LinkedIn is the social media for pros and experts, so you need to bring your A game to play. One major purpose of being on LinkedIn is to establish your credibility and build your authority to boost your brand.

Creating valuable and relevant content is one sure way of accomplishing this while having in mind the goal and target audience identified above. So, in other words your subject matter should resonate with your brand as well as your target network. It must address their pain points and other common challenges with a viable solution for them.

With this said, it’s always recommended that you also share relevant quality content created by other people, not just your own unique work all the time. Research has in fact found that you should try and strike a 40% balance in sharing other similar content in your LinkedIn page.

To make sure your LinkedIn content marketing stays in perspective, here are a few questions you can think about before creating your content:

• Does it add value?

• Does it help me portray myself as a thought leader?

• Is it clear?

• Does it solve their pain points?

Finally, it’s very important to be consistent with your content uploads. Create a schedule that you can stick to, without being very “spammy” or “salsey”.

4. Leverage on LinkedIn Groups

You could boost your LinkedIn business page by joining or creating your own group. This is a great way to build a buzz around your brand. LinkedIn have made it quite simple to do this, under the “interests” button on your homepage, click on groups then create group and finally proceed to fill it out.

With this done, you can get the word out to your target audience especially the thought leaders and influencers if possible. They work as great catalysts for your growth and over time you can build a sizeable community that will give leverage to your business.

Groups are a great place to have relevant conversations and this is a good way to keep your page active and engaged. Alternatively you could discover new groups in your niche and request to follow them.

Groups help build new connections and create a nice environment to discuss relevant issues, share new ideas or just learn new stuff. Here are a few more benefits of creating groups:

• You become a thought leader especially if you back it up with stellar content.

• It boosts connectivity especially when you bring like-minded people together

• Drives traffic to your site.

• You develop personal networks that you can send weekly messages/updates to.

5. Use LinkedIn’s Native Advertising to Sponsor Your Best Content

LinkedIn has a number of advertising options for marketers and one of the most popular options is LinkedIn Sponsored Content. This one allows you to distribute your content to professionals outside your visitors and followers.

For example, if you have content that has gained high engagement rates you can amplify the reach even further using this native advertising option. It’s interactive so this means likes, comments and shares are there to help boost ad virality and engagement.

Another option is Direct Sponsored Content which is still a sponsored ad but does not appear on your company’s page because it’s created directly under the campaign manager. It’s specifically designed this way to be able to A/B test, personalize and improve your ads for optimal performance without cluttering your page.

It’s important to note that content here doesn’t only mean text format, rather it includes images, links and videos too, so this content may appear on multiple locations including the newsfeed, the notifications page as well as the InMail and connections page. LinkedIn, in fact, favors native videos over links to external videos, this means you should upload your video file directly to the platform as opposed to just sharing a link to a video hosted elsewhere like let’s say YouTube.

Thus, you see you are spoilt with choices on how you may want to sponsor your best content. For best results, here are a few best practices for LinkedIn Advertising:

• Know your target

• Promote your best performing content

• Optimize your sponsored content

• Have an effective bidding strategy

• Link your ads to a post-click landing page

• A/B test your campaigns

6. Promote Beyond LinkedIn

Yes, this is about LinkedIn marketing, but you still need to integrate your strategy beyond LinkedIn to gain substantial growth over time. LinkedIn allows several cross-promotion strategies to allow for this growth.

You can link your company’s page in your marketing communications, blogs and email signatures as well. Another very simple way to cross-promote is to allow your readers to share your content at any point while they’re browsing through your website.

By adding a LinkedIn follow button on your landing page or through use of social media sharing buttons, you can gain greater outreach to a wider audience beyond your page.

7. Optimize For Search Engine Ranking

The world today is hyper-connected and the business world highly competitive, so it’s crucial for any brand or business to reach its message to its target audience, and this is why SEO is very important. When done right and in combination with other marketing strategies, SEO can help your content get good rankings.

First page Google SERP’s receive up to 95% of all web traffic, the lucky thing is that your LinkedIn page is already designed to be SEO friendly and all that’s left for you is to tailor your content to suit your audience to enhance your business’ chances of building referrals, generate leads and build traffic.

Use of relevant keywords, linking your company page to your website or blog and sharing content, all lead to better SEO optimization.

8. Keep Up with LinkedIn Analytics and Changes

It’s easier to get through to people when you know what resonates with them. It’s even easier and better when you can segment them according to different needs and LinkedIn has made this easy through use of their LinkedIn Company Page analytics along with analytics for publishing on LinkedIn.

Both of these will help you with optimizing and monitoring your page. You can also leverage on the LinkedIn Campaign Manager to track your campaign performance as well as conversions.

You can also take advantage of the LinkedIn Marketing Blog to keep up to date with any new changes and developments as they offer a curated selection specifically made to help you tweak your LinkedIn marketing.