Are you leveraging the opportunity that LinkedIn presents to build brand awareness and boost lead generation? LinkedIn is an oasis for creating valuable B2B content that gets you noticed. After all, 45% of all social media traffic to a company’s homepage comes from LinkedIn.
But to get into the game, you have to know what strategy to play. Here are some tips to help you take advantage of what LinkedIn has to offer B2B content marketing.
Create an appealing company page
This is the first step to implementing a LinkedIn strategy for your business. Create a company page that showcases your organization and gives people a snapshot of what your brand is all about. Make your company’s page visually appealing with a quality banner image and build brand unity by applying your brand elements to any original posted graphics.
In addition to creating visual interest, you want to write a compelling summary of your company in the About Us section. Creatively choose the right words to highlight your company and set it apart from your competitors in less than 2,000 characters. Use relevant keywords in your page’s content to further increase your reach.
Automate the process
Half the battle of running successful social media campaigns is posting regularly. There are several platforms on the market (such as Hootsuite) that automate this process, saving you time and optimizing the best time to post updates to your social accounts, including LinkedIn. Set aside time every month to write social media posts and create or add visuals, and then schedule them to post automatically via your publishing platform. This keeps you on a schedule of creating valuable content or sharing relevant information with your followers. Research by Hootsuite has found that the best day to post for B2B brands is Wednesday, and LinkedIn research reveals that companies that post once per week see a 2x boost in content engagement.
Establish your leadership as industry experts
In addition to regularly sharing content on your company page, you have to remember that LinkedIn is a platform for professionals to connect with one another. This means that it’s crucial for your leadership team to actively engage on the platform as well. Have at least one member of leadership who is not on the sales or marketing teams establish themselves as an authority in your industry. This person should post regular content and not just shares of the company’s posts. Give them their own voice on the platform to boost credibility of the brand and extend its reach.
Along with sharing industry-related content, your leader should be active on the platform and engage with others. They should be commenting on posts with thoughtful responses and making authentic relevant connections.
Diversify the content you share
One of the most popular forms of content shared on LinkedIn is blog posts. When sharing blogs on your company’s page, make sure to include brief preview text to give people a reason to click the link to read the article – don’t just paste the URL. Make the first sentence enticing and include a call to action.
Another great way to share company blog posts is to republish it on LinkedIn’s publishing platform. Blog articles from your website can be republished as a LinkedIn article without damaging your SEO as long as the original is published first on your website and you link to that article when publishing on LinkedIn.
Long-form, text-only posts are popular and perform well on LinkedIn. The messaging of this content is often industry tips or a compelling human-interest story. There’s something very classic about reading a post without visuals that people seem to connect to. If you create text posts that are genuine and discuss topics your audience cares about, people will engage with you. Make sure to utilize relevant hashtags at the bottom of your text posts to further expand your reach and make your post searchable. Follow and associate your company page with up to three hashtags to expose your brand to a wider audience (use too many hashtags and it starts to look spammy). Polling your audience and asking them questions is another great way to encourage engagement.
Photos, graphics and videos are visual forms of content that you should add into your post rotation. Infographics especially are a great way to share interesting information and perform well on LinkedIn. Photos and videos are excellent ways to share engaging information about your company, employees and culture.
Share third-party content on your LinkedIn page as well. If there is industry news that would resonate with your audience, share it. You want to post content that your readers will find valuable and want to engage with. Finally, utilize the analytics available on LinkedIn to identify which posts perform well and recreate those posts with fresh content.
Get your employees active on LinkedIn
LinkedIn has come a long way from being considered just a job-posting site. It is a hub of business professionals and decision makers who prefer to be self-educated on topics that interest them. If you want to boost your company’s credibility and extend its reach, rally employees to be active on the platform. The first thing they should do is list your company as their employer in their job history. This connects them to the company LinkedIn page. Then, encourage them to share company posts, which expands its reach to those in their network. Additionally, according to LinkedIn, content shared by employees receives twice as much engagement than when shared solely by the company. This shows that engaging employees on LinkedIn is not just beneficial for marketing but for the overall business growth as well.
Utilizing LinkedIn as part of your social media marketing strategy can be an exceptional tool in spreading brand awareness and generating leads. If you’d like direction on your LinkedIn strategy, let’s get in touch.