With 310 million active monthly users and a diverse range of content types, LinkedIn has huge potential for any B2B brand looking to assert themselves as a thought leader and drive engagement for their business.
While there’s a lot of success to be had on LinkedIn, like any platform, there’s a right way and a wrong way to approach LinkedIn's page optimization, content, and networking.
In this post, we’ll go over 5 ways to improve your LinkedIn marketing strategy and drive engagement for your B2B brand.
1. Build a Compelling Profile
Your LinkedIn profile is going to be the essential foundation for all the marketing drives that follow. With this in mind, it’s essential that you give your profile its due diligence and carry out key optimizations that maximize its visibility both on LinkedIn and on other channels like Google.
Some crucial optimizations for personal LinkedIn profiles include:
- Adding a high-quality profile picture and a banner that shows your company affiliation and specialisms.
- Writing a concise, yet engaging headline and summary that showcases your value to your audience.
- Maintaining a detailed and accurate experience section, listing all of your positions to date with bullet points that showcase your biggest achievements.
- Skills, recommendations, and endorsements that align with the benefits you can offer your target audience.
- A comprehensive list of your certifications, licenses, and other qualifications.
When it comes to your company page, you can optimize your content further by:
- Adding in-demand keywords to the company overview and specialties fields.
- Linking from your company page to your website landing page to encourage the flow of engaged traffic.
- Sharing quality, insightful content on a consistent schedule.
2. Learn When to Post
Like with other platforms, there are going to be certain days and times when there’s more general activity on LinkedIn, as well as periods where your particular audience is more likely to engage with your posts.
There’s already a wealth of data online showing when the broader LinkedIn user base is most switched-on, which will give you a good starting point for scheduling your posts to maximize engagement. However, to really get the most from your LinkedIn marketing drives, you’ll need to fine-tune your approach to scheduling based on the nuances of your specific audience.
Using social media scheduling and analytics tools, like our own Highperformr suite, you can harvest engagement data across all your posts and look for patterns showing the days and times when your audience tends to ramp up engagement with your content.
Once you’ve highlighted these “sweet spots”, you can develop a content calendar that ensures the right kind of content is posted at the right times, and maximize the chances that your content will enjoy more views, likes, comments, and shares.
3. Learn From the Competition
The most successful brands on any social media platform are able to distinguish themselves from the competition and stand out from the noise.
While it’s definitely important to set yourself apart on social media, you can still learn a lot by checking out your successful competitors and taking cues from their marketing strategies.
Some key areas you should focus on when studying your competitors’ LinkedIn marketing strategy include:
- Branding and positioning techniques.
- The content strategy in terms of the types of posts, hashtags, publishing frequency, and average levels of engagement.
- Visible patterns in terms of how other users engage with content through comments and re-posts, and how competitors engage their audience through two-way communication.
- The demographics of your competitors’ audience and how they appeal to them with their content.
- The level of community engagement evident in competitors’ webinars and other events.
By taking inspiration from your most successful competitors, and applying these lessons through the lens of your brand identity, you’ll be able to tap into proven marketing techniques while still maintaining your own distinct voice.
4. Plan Time for Talking to Your Audience
When you’re able to nurture a relationship with your audience, this will lead to building a strong online community and help you turn passive followers into powerful brand advocates.
Aside from this, the LinkedIn algorithm boosts the visibility of posts which have a lot of likes and engagement, helping to put your brand in front of people outside your usual audience and grow your equity.
Developing a community on social media is rarely easy, but there are a few best practices which you can make time for in order to help your chances. These include:
Replying to comments: Making time to acknowledge people’s comments with thoughtful replies will show your audience that you value their input and make them feel seen. This will encourage them to come back for future engagement, and show the broader LinkedIn audience that your brand is personable and accessible. Aside from this, the discussions you have with your audience can reveal some powerful feedback which you’ll be able to apply to future posts for better engagement.
Posting interactive content: Content like LinkedIn polls and quizzes can encourage LinkedIn users to make their opinions known, and will attract people who are interested in gauging the sentiment of others in their industry. Present your audience with clear, thought-provoking questions, and you’ll increase the chances of sparking conversations in the comments.
Being a source of insight: Though many brands converse with their audience on social media, the ones with the most loyal communities set themselves apart as sources of actionable insights. Though it may take a little more time and effort, trying to be insightful while you interact with your audience will help frame yourself as a thought leader. This helps with encouraging follower loyalty, shares, and an all-around stronger presence.
Highlight customer successes: Testimonials, success stories, and case studies from your clients or customers will provide social proof, while also encouraging engagement from your wider audience who can put themselves in your customers’ shoes.
5. Empower Your Employees
When the CEO of a company is the only one posting, it can cause your LinkedIn presence to come off as brash or egotistical. To counteract this sense that you’re always “tooting your own horn”, it’s a good idea to empower employees to get active on LinkedIn, and fill your pages with content that feels more genuine and relatable.
Some of the effective ways to stimulate employee advocacy on LinkedIn include:
- Celebrating employee achievements and milestones internally and encouraging them to share these on LinkedIn.
- Creating “behind-the-scenes” content showing life at your company, and sharing these through your employee advocates rather than the company profile.
- Getting employees more involved in content creation, for example through interviews, hosting webinars, and free-form discussions about engaging industry topics.
- Asking all team members to make sure they’re listing your company as their workplace and following your profile for content updates.
When your employees are an active part of your LinkedIn marketing strategy, you’ll naturally begin to form a more organic and lively presence on the platform. This will help your audience to see you less as just a faceless logo, and more as a real, personable entity they’re eager to engage with.
Smarter LinkedIn Marketing
Building a powerful LinkedIn presence may not be as easy as tackling marketing on some other platforms, but the rewards for B2B brands can be huge. By starting with strong fundamentals, developing a smart posting schedule, and actively engaging your audience and employees, you can quickly turn LinkedIn into a powerful engine for client and customer engagement.
For more support with your LinkedIn marketing, sign up to Highperformr for free today!
