LinkedIn marketing is a must-have for most marketers today. If you are in a B2B business, LinkedIn may be the most powerful marketing channel for you to leverage.Â
Furthermore, LinkedIn keeps growing in popularity year over year. Today, even though this is a strictly professional network, LinkedIn has nearly 800 million members in over 200 countries across the world.
Consequently, most B2B marketing professionals have tried LinkedIn at some point in their careers. And most of them have seen great results.
In this blog, we will talk about why LinkedIn is so popular as a marketing channel and what are some best LinkedIn marketing strategies for you to try out.
đź’ˇ Before we move forward, check out what are the world’s leading social media channels!
Make LinkedIn marketing effortless by leveraging employee advocacy
The Power of LinkedIn Marketing
LinkedIn is, by far, the biggest professional network in the world. There is no other network that gathers so many professionals from various career fields, backgrounds, industries, geographic locations, and more.
But on top of its size, LinkedIn has other benefits that no other social network provides. This is why most marketers today use LinkedIn to boost their content and lead generation strategies.
đź’ˇ Before we dig deeper into the advantages of using LinkedIn for marketing, check out our guide for mastering content curation!
Diverse user base
One of the biggest benefits of LinkedIn is its diverse user base. Students are on LinkedIn, as well as senior executives. Men are on LinkedIn, as well as women.
According to research, 57% of LinkedIn users are men, and 43% are women. Furthermore, LinkedIn is used across the world, with 76% of LinkedIn’s users being outside the U.S.
While the U.S. is LinkedIn’s biggest market with 174M users, the network has gained traction around the world.
That being said, when using LinkedIn for marketing, you are not limited to a certain geo location or other parameters.
Credibility and trust
Compared to other social networks, LinkedIn is the most trusted social network in the world. Today, when we are bombarded with lots of information from various sources, people are struggling with information overload and information filtering.
LinkedIn, being a professional network, gains much more brand trust from its users.
To add, 73% of social media users at least somewhat agree that LinkedIn protects their privacy and data. Compare that with just 53% for Facebook.
Focused targeting
The biggest benefit of LinkedIn for marketers is the fact that LinkedIn ads offer more than 200 targeting characteristics. This is much more than any other social network can provide. If you know your buyer persona, you are likely to reach your audience on LinkedIn.
Furthermore, decision-makers in the B2B industry use LinkedIn. According to research, 4 out of 5 people on LinkedIn “drive business decisions”, and 33% of B2B decision makers use LinkedIn for research purchases.
đź’ˇ Related:Â 9 Social Media Marketing Trends to Watch in 2023
Increasing reach
LinkedIn marketing is growing in its popularity because LinkedIn’s ads reach is also growing every year. Research shows that LinkedIn’s ad reach grew by 25 million people in Q4 2020
That’s a 3.5% increase from Q3.
Personal branding and social selling
LinkedIn is the most widely used network for social selling. Most B2B salesmen use LinkedIn on a daily basis to prospect, generate high-quality leads, share content, build trust in their networks, and act as thought leaders in the field.
Building a personal brand on LinkedIn helps s close more deals, and it helps organizations reach a wider audience and boost trust with potential future buyers.
đź’ˇ Related:Â Social Selling on LinkedIn: Do’s and Don’ts
Talent acquisition and employer branding
Besides sales and marketing, LinkedIn is also widely used for employer branding and talent acquisition. Building your employer brand on LinkedIn is crucial for talent attraction and recruitment.
Why?
Well because 40 million people use LinkedIn to search for jobs each week, and 3 people are hired through LinkedIn every minute.
Let’s take a look into 10 ways to optimize your LinkedIn marketing strategy!
10 LinkedIn Marketing Hacks to Implement
It is inevitable that your LinkedIn marketing strategy can be the most powerful marketing tactic to leverage. There is no other platform, other than expensive content syndication providers, that enable you to precisely target specific job titles and departments, in specific organizations, located in certain countries… and you can be much more specific than that.
However, it is important to grow your LinkedIn audience both organically and with paid ads. So let’s take a look into some best LinkedIn marketing practices.
đź’ˇ Related:Â 8 Steps to Implement a Killer Social Media Marketing Strategy
1. Optimize your profile
Before everything else, it is important to optimize your company’s LinkedIn page with the right content. Use relevant images, links, highlights, and your organization’s value proposition in the main description.
According to research, companies with a complete, active LinkedIn Page see 5x more page views. They also get 7x more impressions per follower and 11x more clicks per follower.
Furthermore, many organizations take a strategic approach to optimizing their employees’ LinkedIn profiles. This is particularly true for sales and marketing professionals who are often the mirror of their company’s brand and reputation.
đź“ą Also, take a look at our online session: The Marketing ROI Battle.
2. Post regularly and at the right times
While some social networks, such as Twitter, prefer constant engagement, this is not the case for LinkedIn.
LinkedIn marketing requires consistency, creativity, and originality.
Even though you don’t have to post every single day, you can’t just let your LinkedIn Company Page sit there and wait for results. You need to regularly share updates if you want to maintain a high engagement rate on LinkedIn. However, the good news is that you only need to post once a week to achieve that higher engagement level.
Furthermore, research shows that the best day to post is Wednesday for B2B brands, or Monday and Wednesday for B2C brands.
3. Create a product page
If you are in a B2B software industry, you may have heard of LinkedIn Product Pages. Today, LinkedIn has more than 10,000 B2B software Product Pages. More and more decision-makers use it to find, compare, and evaluate relevant software solutions.
Product Pages are a relatively new LinkedIn feature that came out in 2020. You can use them to highlight specific products with ratings and reviews, generate leads, and incorporate custom call-to-action buttons.
4. Use to promote your events
One of the best things about using LinkedIn for marketing is that LinkedIn offers many different features to engage your existing audience. For example, if you regularly organize in-person events, webinars or other online sessions, you can leverage LinkedIn to invite your followers.
It is very easy to set up, and every marketer should try it out.
LinkedIn went even a step further to offer a complete event experience when it launched LinkedIn Live for streaming.
đź’ˇ Related:Â 5 Social Media Marketing Tactics to Increase Brand Awareness
5. Try the live stream
LinkedIn Live is also a relatively new LinkedIn feature. It was launched in February 2019, and it has been growing in its popularity since then. LinkedIn Live streams’ popularity increased by 437% in 2020. Furthermore, the number of LinkedIn Live streams increased 89% from March to June alone.
Some organizations have even replaced their existing streaming, video conferencing, and webinar solutions with LinkedIn Live. If you are leveraging LinkedIn to promote your events, you can use LinkedIn Live to stream directly to your LinkedIn Event attendees.
One of the downsides of LinkedIn Live is that it’s not open to everyone. Before you get access to it, you need to submit an application.
6. Engage further with the newsletter
You can engage your existing audience and grow a new follower base with LinkedIn Newsletters.
Even though not everyone is eligible, the criteria is pretty basic.
To make this experience even better, LinkedIn also offers a very intuitive newsletter builder so that you can create beautiful, engaging, and inviting newsletters for your audience.
7. Invite people to follow your page
Your LinkedIn page admins can invite their networks to follow your LinkedIn page to increase visibility and brand awareness. The best practice is to have your social media managers, salesmen, or other marketing professionals handpick people who are likely to follow you.
The bigger the acceptance rate, the more invitations LinkedIn lets you send.
8. Use images and videos in your posts
LinkedIn posts with images get 2x higher engagement than posts without images. Furthermore, larger images do even better, with 38% higher click-through rates than other images.
Another research shows that video is the most re-shared form of content on LinkedIn – LinkedIn users are 20x more likely to re-share a video post.
This is not shocking as most marketers today know that video is the best performing content type on most social media and other communications channels today.
💡 Related: What People Like to Share on Social Media [INFOGRAPHIC]
9. Test different ad types and targeting options
LinkedIn offers many different ad types and targeting options. It is important to test them and understand which combinations work best based on desired results and your target audience.
For example, while image ads may be the best solution to boost brand awareness, lead gen ad types may work better if you want to promote a downloadable piece of content.
On the targeting side, you can go as specific as targeting personas from a list of companies you already have, or you can build wider audiences using interests and job titles as your targeting criteria.
10. Engage your employees
One of the most untapped LinkedIn marketing tactics is employee advocacy. Yet, employees are 14x more likely to share content from their employers than other types of content on LinkedIn.
This is not surprising as employees are the people who care most about seeing your brand succeed.
Employers need to understand that their employees are an important part of their LinkedIn marketing strategy. But building a brand reputation via employee advocacy is a winning strategy only for those companies that develop a comprehensive ambassadorship program in their organizations.
So how can you boost your LinkedIn marketing strategy with employee advocacy? Check in the next section! 👇
💡 Also learn How to Create a Brand Ambassador Program
Top 12 Reasons To Improve Your LinkedIn Marketing Strategy
- LinkedIn is a home to over 58 million companies
- Brands have seen a 33% increase in purchase intent resulting from ad exposure on LinkedIn
- An ad on LinkedIn can reach 14.6% of the world’s population
- More than half (55%) of decision makers use thought leadership to determine which organization to work with
- Of all B2B leads coming from social media, LinkedIn is responsible for 80%.
- 40% of B2B marketers surveyed indicated LinkedIn as the most effective channel for driving high-quality leads
- 30% of a company’s engagement on LinkedIn comes from employees
- Employees are 14x more likely to share content from their employers than other types of content on LinkedIn
- Marketers see up to 2x higher conversion rates on LinkedIn
- LinkedIn, Facebook & Twitter drive 90% of social traffic to B2B sites & blogs, with more than half of that traffic comes straight from LinkedIn
- 4 out of 5 people on LinkedIn “drive business decisions”
- 77% of content marketers say LinkedIn produces the best organic results
Boost Your LinkedIn Marketing Strategy Today
In the previous section, we briefly explained the power of employee advocacy in LinkedIn marketing. There is plenty of existing research that proves that your own employees have an unbelievable potential to reach a much wider audience than your corporate brand could.
Employees are trusted more than brands and CEOs, so it makes sense to involve them more in your LinkedIn marketing strategy.
Besides allowing social media in the workplace and creating a formal employee advocacy program, it is crucial that you enable employees to easily act as your advocates using the right technology. It is also important to have a clear social media policy.
Your employees should be able to distribute your company’s content on LinkedIn in a few seconds, and organizations should be able to gamify advocacy experience and measure the impact of your LinkedIn marketing startegy on a company’s success.
Haiilo’s Publishing Studio is a hub for creating and publishing content to your workforce at scale. It provides a central place from which employees can access their company’s existing content and social posts at any time.
Our Content Booster enables organizations to further enhance their existing technology ecosystem. It allows employees to get company updates on the platform they prefer: Yammer, Slack, Teams, Chatter, and many more. With just one click, people can easily share the content with their networks and go about their day.
Workforce Insights provide valuable employee advocacy insights and actionable recommendations for improvement. It’s a pass to all the analytics on the performance of your content. With Workforce Insights, you can not only form an understanding of what, how, and why is happening, but also tie this to revenue and employee retention.
