Your Guide to Creating the Best LinkedIn Marketing Strategy for 2022

LinkedIn has gained importance in the last few years, especially when it comes to the business world. In 2003, LinkedIn was launched for the sole purpose of professional networking. However, with time it has gained immense popularity amongst all types of users, thereby attracting 660 million users from 200 countries by now.

Today, this multi-purpose platform plays several roles. It is used for marketing products or services, connecting with customers and potential employees, tracking the competitors, prospects, increasing the conversion rate and brand awareness. This business network also allows professionals to increase their number of followers, join groups whereby they can discuss their industry with other industry experts and gain useful insights and knowledge. LinkedIn supports all of this along with giving people a chance to develop and progress in their careers.

It is true that LinkedIn caters to a large number of professionals and makes their professional lives very easy. However, this platform is most relevant for the marketer community. These people are exposed to multiple techniques to further enhance their knowledge which enables them to generate sales online. Moreover, there are a variety of amazing features available on LinkedIn which help marketers to locate and connect with their target audience. This article talks about creating the best LinkedIn marketing strategy to reach your target audience in the best possible way.

Here are 10 marketing and promotion tactics to help marketers reach their goals.

1.  Create and strengthen your company page

Whether you are a new, blooming business or an established multinational giant, your user will probably search for your company page on LinkedIn to stay updated about your product portfolio. The first look of your company page will create a lasting impression in the minds of your consumers. Hence, it is suggested to create an impressive company page that attracts the consumer every time they visit your page profile. The ‘About Us’ and other sections should contain all of your relevant details.

The basic details include:

• Company logo (as the profile picture)
• Your name (with correct spelling)
• Email address
• Location (also known as actual address)
• Other contact details
• Offering (what products/services you are currently offering)
• Your website URL (this is very important, don’t forget this!)
• Company description

The company description is a space used mainly to describe your company, its offerings, your brand story, and what makes you different from your competitors. One of the most important aspects that should be present on every company page is its visuals. Without visuals, the page tends to lose its attractiveness and seems very dull to look at. The cover image should ideally be something that complements your profile picture.

For instance, if you are a content writing service, your profile picture would be your company logo. The banner image could be an office, a cup of coffee or a pen and paper on a desk. Similarly, a fast food restaurant could again have its company logo as the profile picture. The cover image in this case could be the exterior of their outlet, the fast food that they offer or a picture of the menu. You can update your cover photo from time to time as the need arises or as your company evolves and grows.

The next, crucial step is to strengthen your company page. You can strengthen your company page by adding a few relevant keywords for your organization. This ensures that your company immediately comes up when your customer looks up those words. Therefore, always make a wise selection when you are adding the keywords.  

Keep in mind to never leave the profile incomplete as it leaves the wrong impression on the visitor and makes them wonder as to why the gap is left. There should be absolutely no grammatical mistakes or errors. Last but not the least, don’t forget to mention any honorary mentions or awards that your company has received in the past.

2.  Engage your audience with insightful content

  Once you set up your business page, make sure to keep the page updated with meaningful content and hashtags to engage your audience. A layman may think of LinkedIn as a platform where you only seek and advertise jobs. However, that’s not true. LinkedIn is a lot more than that. People also use this forum to broaden their horizons and read online content which may or may not be related to their industry or field. Mostly, this content is industry specific. This gives the marketers many chances to establish themselves as industry “thought leaders” hence allowing them to post thought-provoking and captivating articles with heavy usage of trendy hashtags.

This content makes the audience ponder over the article and think ‘out-of-the-box’. Expressing your ideas and coming up with original content means that you can easily build your followers and make them grow. It can be any contemporary topic related to the industry where you can give your viewpoint and throw questions at the audience asking them about their thoughts and opinions.

Below mentioned are some of the ideas with the help of which you can improvise your content:

• Posting about current topics/issues that are trending in the global world but hold relevance to your sector. You can recommend practical solutions to the audience for the pertinent issues.
• Do some industry research.Doing so, you can provide useful insights into an industry. These insights can be in the form of facts or figures related to your sector.
• You can also add spice to your content by letting the followers know as to what’s happening around the corner with your company. Posts such as ‘Stay Tuned’ and ‘Coming Soon!’ tend to fall in this category.  It could be an important company event coming up or the launch of a product. Your network may anticipate such events and keep their fingers crossed for what your firm is offering next.

 

3.  Generate leads using LinkedIn Search

This useful feature of LinkedIn enables you to generate leads. LinkedIn is undoubtedly one of the largest platforms when it comes to stimulating B2B businesses. This advanced search feature allows the employee of one company to search for an employee from another company and connect with them. Search results can also be narrowed down to the person or place you are looking for, just by filtering out the results.

These results can be filtered based on company, previous company, industry, location, profile language, schools etc.This makes the daunting task of digging through thousands of connections only to locate one person considerably easy as you only have selective options to skim through. This feature will aid marketers in finding the right person (the person that they want to target).

4.  Analyze competitors’ pages

Your competitor may have a better business page than you or their company page may have a description that your company may be lacking. You can learn a lot from their company page and implement those strategies in your own page. Their page can act as a ‘Learning Hub’for you.

In addition to this, LinkedIn provides a feature known as “companies to track” which shows the list of companies that are likely to be similar to your company. Along with that this feature also displays a few Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that reflect how that company is faring. These KPIs may refer to, but are not limited to, the total number of followers, updates, and social engagement. By successfully analyzing your competitors’ pages, you can do an inter-firm comparison and find out how your company is performing and where it is lacking.

Not to mention, you can incorporate those marketing and promotion tactics in your marketing strategy to create a successful business page and increase brand awareness.

5.  Be a part of relevant business groups

By being a part of relevant business groups, you tend to learn more about your business and tips and techniques to successfully promote it. You can start a discussion related to any particular topic with other industry experts in the field. With a limited audience, you can learn more about that topic which may be useful for your company or any project that you are about to launch. Also, by finding people with mutual interests, you can debate on different topics, ask questions from experts or get your problems solved.

Moreover, just by being a part of the discussion, asking the right questions and making contributions to the group, you can make the most out of it. You can get to learn maximum things that were previously not available to you or were unknown. For engaging in discussions, you must be an activemember of the group and keep a regular check on it to look for any new posts or updates. Another likely benefit of the business group is that when you either post or comment somewhere, you will possibly get noticed. This may grow your page followers as people may then be interested in your page.

6.  Get company influencers

    One cannot stress enough the importance of having company influencers.These are well-known, public figures who promote your company, product or service. Some famous, real-life influencers include Cristiano Ronaldo (Nike) and Ariana Grande. Hence, it is important to have a good company description but what will complement your company descriptions are the influencers that you have. There are very high chances of people following and connecting with your brand more if it is endorsed by a celebrity.

7.  Capitalize on your winning posts

Some of the content posted on LinkedIn may work while other content may not be so ‘successful’. It is a smart move to capitalize on the content that fares well to receive the maximum benefit from that one post. Only one post may help you gain maximum followers on your company page as it will appear as ‘sponsored content’ with the target audience. 

Sponsored content refers to sponsoring your winning posts so that they appear in the newsfeed of your target audience, whether they are a part of your professional network or not. This ensures that your posts reach the relevant audience and get their views and likes. It could also help you in getting your next potential client or customer!

8.  Persuade your colleagues to like and share your posts

Your posts don’t receive traction on their own. You have to ask your colleagues to help your posts gain traction by liking, commenting and sharing them. Send the link of the post to the whole team and ask them to like and share it. This will help you in receiving more engagement and reach on the post. When your colleagues do their job, their connections (your 2^nd degree connections) get to view it; if they were unaware of the business before, they receive more information about it. If the business and the product portfolio were known to them then they might be interested in purchasing it.                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

9.  Send personalized notes

Personalization is one of the keys to be successful in the marketing world. Sometimes, you may be trying to reach a specific person on LinkedIn, and you may wish for them to view your content. This may not be a clever tactic to begin with. You have to approach them on a one-to-one basis to ensure that they view your content.

This may work well if you send a connection request and attach a personalized note to it. Even if they do not accept your request, they will most probably see the note that you have attached and your content becomes more recognizable this way.

One of the perks of sending a personalized noteis that it gets your message or content to the right person.

10.  Invest in LinkedIn Ads

LinkedIn advertisements may be costly but they are worth it as they enable us to reach a mass audience. There are two options for advertising: Self-service advertisements and managed campaigns.The names make it evident as to the type of advertisements both are. For one, self-service advertisements cater to the marketers or advertisers who find ease and can manage their advertisements without any sort of support. The second one, managed campaigns are for marketers who need assistance to advertise their companies.

With these two options available, there are three main types of ads which can be placed on LinkedIn:

• Sponsored InMail: If you are a regular LinkedIn user, you would know what sponsored InMails are; these ads appear in the InMail of a user. As they appear as a message, they do not seem like ads in the first place.
• Text ads: Text ads appear on the side of the user’s newsfeed and they may seem like an article to be read next.
• Sponsored Content: We have already discussed this above; it is sponsoring for the good content to appear more on the audience’s feed.