Naturally, humans love to consume content and with LinkedIn's career-centric approach to social networking it is has become the pinnacle of professional interaction and content consumption.
Users visit the site for purely work-related purposes, therefore, LinkedIn lends itself to making business connections. Anyone can publish articles so now companies can easily target brand advocates, potential customers and industry influencers all in one spot putting LinkedIn at the heart of any successful marketing strategy.
For B2B marketers especially, it's virtually where your prospects are and with over 450 million members lead generating without LinkedIn would be like going fishing without a rod!
But do you ever get the feeling that LinkedIn is now awash with content and on the way to becoming Facebook - it's not uncommon but it is usually connected to the fact that most people & companies don't know how to get the best out of the platform. But help is at hand, and this awesome business tool should feature in any B2B marketing plan in 2017.
So let's go through some fundamentals on how to utilize this inbound marketing gold mine.
The company page
Building out your company page is the first step in optimising LinkedIn for lead generation. This tells users who you are, what you do, it also provides a great analytics tool to delve into who likes your content and why they should follow you ... (which in our case is because we're the best demand generating IT marketing agency around!) And here's what it looks like:
By following these key best practices you'll be generating leads in no time -
- Optimise your company page for keywords - people frequently run searches on LinkedIn, so make sure you show up in the results.
- Add tabs to your company page - these are usually 'careers,' 'products' and 'insights' - your products tab should be optimised for search.
- Post at least once daily to establish a presence.
- Add videos and other media to your product pages to further engage users.
Ads
This is where it gets interesting as you delve into the power of LinkedIn and the stuff they make you pay for !
Here are a few easy tips for advertising on LinkedIn (If you want to learn to advertise on Facebook too, download our free eBook on the science behind successful Facebook ads)
- Testing! - Possibly the most important practice and rigorously implemented here at Sherpa - test each ad to see which gets the best results and repeat that process over and over!
- Think about your artwork! Image ads on LinkedIn often get up to 20% more clicks than their image-less counterparts.
- Do you think questions work? Well, they do! (just take our word for it)
Sponsored Updates
The paid promotion option on LinkedIn comes in the form of sponsored updates. These are seen by targeted users and followers. Much like Facebook and Twitter (both of which you can learn more about from our recent blog series) these paid for updates should include a visual aspect like an image or video, and a content offer to attract users.
Due to LinkedIn being a social networking site for professionals, the options for targeting are a little different to the other social networks, but are hugely powerful, you can target based on:
- Job Title
- Company Name
- Skills
- School Name
- Gender
- Age
- Location
Usually targeting using a combination of a couple of the above criteria is most successful, but remember not to limit your audience size too much, usually targeting around 100,000 people leads to the most successful campaigns!
We are running around 6-8 LinkedIn campaigsn at anytime and have a wealth of information on the optimisation and results available from spending money on LI.
I hope you have found this blog useful and if you want a more in-depth discussion of IT marketing strategy and demand generation then get in touch with us!
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