Social Media Strategy for Linkedin. It is easy to become overwhelmed online, even on sites like Linkedin–a business-focused social platform that is famous for productivity and results. Through this free, downloadable guide, you can create your social media marketing plan with step-by-step instructions and examples for all the platforms you’ll need.
Based on years of experience and research, this ebook gives you an in-depth description of how to build your own Linkedin marketing strategy. Step by step we’ll explore the best possible campaign plan that will help you effectively express your marketing strategy on the social network linkedin.pdf
Define Your LinkedIn Marketing Goals
Marketing on LinkedIn is no different from any other social marketing. You need to begin each campaign by defining and setting your goals. You need to ask yourself why, precisely, are you undertaking this LinkedIn marketing campaign? What are you hoping to achieve from it?
You want your goals to be SMART – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely. In particular, you need to ensure that you can use some suitable metrics to measure the success of your campaign.
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Some common goals (expressed generally here, not fully SMART) include:
- Increasing your brand awareness (probably best measured using data on your LinkedIn Page analytics)
- Building leads (LinkedIn is after all the network where you are most likely to find potential business decisionmakers/customers)
- Engaging with your target audience (again you will find data on this in your LinkedIn Page analytics and less tangibly in your participation in LinkedIn Groups)
- Selling your product (perhaps less common on LinkedIn, but still possible indirectly)
Know Your Target Audience
One of the critical secrets to social marketing success is fully understanding the tastes and interests of your target audience. There is little point spending valuable funds and time marketing to people who will never have an interest in your product. You wouldn’t, for example, do much, if any, marketing on LinkedIn if you sell a product targeting teenagers who still attend school, for instance.
If your potential customers do spend time on LinkedIn, you will want to go into further detail describing their demographics.
You need to know the essential characteristics of the people likely to buy your product, ahead of the company for whom they work. You might sell B2B products, but it isn’t a business that makes up its mind whether to purchase your product – it will be some specific manager within each company. So, it is worthwhile asking yourself, which manager would make the decision, or even who is likely within a business to give recommendations on purchasing.
If you already have a reasonable LinkedIn company page, you can go to your analytics to give you a reasonable idea of the types of people taking an interest in your page. Are there any patterns in those who share and like your posts?
Perfect Your Company Page
Like many social networks, LinkedIn has two types of pages – personal pages where people list their past jobs and successes, and company pages. Once any manager or employee adds your business as a place of work, LinkedIn will create a company page for you. However, unless you add content and fill in the gaps, your company page will look uncared for and unclaimed.
An attractive, informative company page is essential for any business on LinkedIn. It will be one of the most likely places for your target audience to visit on LinkedIn. You should imagine it as being a virtual store, whether you sell items or just use LinkedIn to build brand recognition.
Your LinkedIn company page is a perfect place to narrate all the positive stories about your business. You can use it to highlight your team and any awards you have won. Ultimately, LinkedIn is a network about people, so you should use your LinkedIn company page to emphasize the public faces of your organization.
Anybody who wants to learn about your business on LinkedIn will make a point of searching for your company page. It is one of the most common ways that people research about your company – what you do, what you make, where your offices are, who your senior management and executive are.
You will want your LinkedIn company page to reflect all the branding you use elsewhere. It should include your official logo, your colors, your fonts, and links to your website URL. Think about the types of questions your potential customers would ask and preempt them by including the answers on your company page. As with all your online assets, you need to carefully consider the copy you use on your LinkedIn page, including relevant keywords in your text.
Make sure you continually update your company page, however. If you want to be considered a serious force on LinkedIn, you need to publish relevant, informative, interesting content regularly.
Analyze Competitors’ Company Pages
To amplify your LinkedIn marketing strategy, you need to know how you fare up against your competitors.
LinkedIn provides a feature called “Companies to track” that reveals a list of companies similar to yours. It also gives you access to a few key metrics. These include the total number of followers, follower growth, and social media engagement.
Evaluating these pages can help you understand how your own Company Page fares in comparison. You can identify what is working well for them and integrate those tactics into your own LinkedIn marketing strategy.
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Publish content that adds value
Marketing on LinkedIn is less about creating sales-y promotional messages and more about adding value to the lives of your audience. In fact, B2B marketers who put their audience’s informational needs first make up 88% of the top performers in content marketing.
So you should use LinkedIn to create, share and publish content that serves some purpose–whether it’s to educate, inform, guide, inspire or entertain your audience. This improves the chances of getting your audience to engage with your content and building a connection with you or your company.
And when someone engages with your post, there’s a chance it’ll also show up in the feeds of their connections, further increasing your reach. Here’s an example:
Note that you don’t necessarily have to share only your original content. But don’t hesitate to share insightful and informative content relevant to your industry even if it’s from a third-party. This will establish that you’re the go-to source for valuable industry-related information. But try using the native LinkedIn publishing platform every once in a while.
Conclusion
What do you get when you combine one of the hottest social media networks, a professional network for business people, and the most serious social media marketing book on the planet? You get an awesome guide to actionable strategies that have been successfully tested and proven from an authority in the field. Thousands have already adopted the methods that have been so carefully laid out here, and this book will show you how to do it without all the worry.