“People spend time on other social networks, but they invest time on LinkedIn.” This quote by Jason Miller, LinkedIn’s Global Content Marketing Leader is an indication of the sophisticated level that LinkedIn has reached in terms of professional networking.
Today, LinkedIn is extensively used by knowledge intensive industries and for B2B products and services. The most effective content marketers reach their audience in multiple ways across LinkedIn:
- Updates via Company Pages & Showcase Pages
- Interactions in Groups & with Influencers
- Conversations via Messaging and sponsored In-mail
- Sponsored Updates, Direct Sponsored Content
Short-form content such as articles, images and stats helps you gain followers, while long-form content helps spread your ideas.
The humble Status Update may actually be one of LinkedIn\’s most underutilized features – and provides invaluable ways to connect with and stay in front of your target audience consistently. You can engage with, like, comment and share other people’s content as well and the more you engage with others, the more they’ll return the engagement.
Another powerful way to distribute content on LinkedIn is through the LinkedIn article publishing platform. Content published here is attached to and becomes a part of your LinkedIn profile and positions you as a thought leader. It gives you immense exposure – showcasing your thought leadership and increasing your following.
Company pages are your brand identity on LinkedIn. A well-optimised company page can show up on page 1 of search engine results and ensures your company can easily be found in searches and that people interested in your brand can follow you. Showcase Pages allow you to serve content to distinct audiences based on their interest in a specific brand, business unit, or initiative.
LinkedIn Groups offer opportunities to share your expertise, build trust. If you join the right groups, contribute to discussions, and offer insightful content and opinion, you will find traction and generate valuable leads and also get ideas for relevant content. Similarly, following an exclusive group of Influencers on LinkedIn is one of the newer ways to increase engagement with industry thought leaders. Engage with Influencers either by liking a post or commenting on their post and eventually getting these influencers to react to you or your content.
Promoting your content
“If you’re not paying to promote your good content, then I think you’re missing the boat in content marketing.” — Jason Miller
You must drive traffic to your content – for free – using social techniques – and also strategically by investing budget into paid promotions that push your content to those who the LinkedIn algorithm knows follow your topics
Sponsored Updates allows intricate targeting, using criteria such as location, company size, industry, job function, and seniority. Additionally, they appear alongside high-quality content, leading to a positive association with your brand. An added bonus is that you get access to impression and engagement metrics.
Direct Sponsored Content allows you to send content in the news feed without creating posts on a company page – allowing you to try content specific for their audiences, send them personalized messages or conduct A/B tests to optimize content.
Sponsored In-mail is a unique marketing solution allowing you to send direct messages to a person’s LinkedIn account without being connected to that individual. An invaluable tool to reach out to people not connected to you but with better results than cold emailing.
One of the other advantages of being a paying LinkedIn member is that two fabulous tools, The Content Marketing Score and Trending Content are available to you.
The Content Marketing Score is a metric that quantifies the influence of your company and brand on LinkedIn. It tells you which members within your target audience are engaging with your content. And it can show you how you stack up against your competitors.
What topics and keywords are most important to your readers? How do you know just which topics will catch – and keep – their attention? And how do you know which members will be most interested in your content? Trending Content will answer that. You’ll see which topics matter, and which members are sharing the most content on any given subject.
What’s coming up?
LinkedIn will soon be implementing Lead Generation Ads. Users will be able to submit their contact info directly on LinkedIn, providing an effective way for businesses to generate leads.
In addition, LinkedIn will add an email remarketing option, similar to Facebook’s offering, which means when you upload a list of contacts, those associated with a LinkedIn account will be available for targeting with ads.
It takes time and effort to begin building your content credibility on LinkedIn. High quality of content is irreplaceable and without it, the time you spend on content marketing will be entirely wasted.
Creating great content that demonstrates your expertise, and helps others solve a pressing problem or reach a specific goal, is the real key to success in marketing through LinkedIn.
If you need to partner with someone who’s got the talent to create content and help drive a successful LinkedIn engagement strategy, give us a shout at Xenia Consulting.
Hope you liked the post, Comments and feedback welcome
Regards,
Atul Dhakappa