When asked to think of a professional-targeted, thought-leadership-driven social media channel, LinkedIn likely comes to mind.
That’s because LinkedIn is often used as a specialized space where professionals connect with one another and share lessons from their careers. With more than 450 million members worldwide (nearly 30 percent of whom are in the U.S.), LinkedIn serves as a rich space for targeted marketing.
If you’ve been overlooking the why or the how of using LinkedIn for your brand, you may want to consider tapping into this platform to raise brand awareness, drive conversations and generate warm leads.
How do you determine whether your company should be on LinkedIn? Consider your answers to the following questions before you get started:
- Is my target audience there?
- LinkedIn is driven by three forces: those seeking jobs, leads or expertise. Does your audience fit any of those bills?
- Do I have content to support a brand presence?
- Remember, LinkedIn users are looking for career opportunities or thought leadership. Can your brand offer that?
- What are my brand’s current business and marketing objectives?
- After recognizing that your target is on LinkedIn, and confirming that you have appropriate content to share, would doing so align with your current goals?
You may find that LinkedIn presents an opportunity for your brand. (And if not, at least you no longer need to let the uncertainty of it haunt you.)
If LinkedIn is a smart place for your brand to be, here are four ways to get the most out of the channel.
1) Content Marketing
With such a professionally minded audience, LinkedIn is an ideal channel for sharing thought leadership content, including:
- Links to your blog posts that drive additional and qualified traffic to your website.
- SlideShare presentations that showcase your organization’s expertise and ability to share it through a story.
- News articles that feature your organization.
- Infographics that highlight technical information or statistics that address a target audience’s pain points.
- Images that feature key experts at your organization, project profiles or product detail.
Like any other social media channel, you’ll want to focus on sharing compelling content with the occasional CTAs; respond to comments promptly; and publish regularly. Once you have this down, you can consider more advanced tactics such as incorporating sponsored updates into your strategy.
2) Recruiting
LinkedIn is the ideal place for attracting talent to your organization. If this is your primary objective for being on the platform, you still need a comprehensive company profile and to publish content regularly, but you’ll likely shift your content strategy to include:
- Company information that underscores award recognition, employee benefits and corporate initiatives like sustainability, wellness, etc.
- Job openings
- Employee testimonials and spotlights
It’s best to work closely with your HR team to learn what strategic information they feel would be most important to convey, what positions are available and who can help manage what is being published. Like any other social platform, proactive communication across teams is vital.
3) Employee Advocacy
Employee advocacy raises awareness about your company and creates reach for content. It can also generate warm leads for your sales team’s lead generation program and help foster relationship growth with current clients. A basic employee advocacy program might include:
- Advising sales associates on how to optimize their LinkedIn profiles
- Providing content–pre-written posts, images, graphics and links–to your team to distribute to their individual professional networks
- Training and support on how to use LinkedIn features for company and people searches, InMail messaging and ongoing content generation and publication
LinkedIn also offers custom tools specifically designed for use by sales teams or for lead generation, including Sales Navigator and Sponsored InMail, which are available for additional fees.
4) Amplification of Content
Tapping into the power of sponsored updates will allow you to garner additional reach on your content, driving higher engagement rates and clicks on your links in the process. Similar to many other types of ad units, Sponsored Updates allow you to select targeting parameters such as location, company, skills, industry or title.
The key to running this type of ad unit, just like any other type of paid ad, is to measure the results throughout the campaign period as the value of each impression/engagement fluctuates based on the marketplace. Equally important is to test new content or targeting in future campaigns, continually comparing results of each campaign. This process can reveal insights about your audience, which can in turn improve your content and the success of your advertising.
Want to get more mileage out of your content and messaging? Like other social channels, there are a range of paid options, depending on your objectives. On LinkedIn, in addition to Sponsored Updates, there are:
- Sponsored InMail, which is designed to be a lead generation tool, allowing email-like messages to be delivered to a recipient’s LinkedIn inbox
- Display and text ad units designed to support conversions to a website
- Dynamic ads that pull in a user’s profile image and encourage website conversions or LinkedIn page follows
Some ad units require working with a LinkedIn representative, but most have self-serve options as well. They can be a meaningful way to connect with the right people and drive results for your objective.
If you want to learn more about what your brand should do when it comes to using LinkedIn effectively, please reach out to Ted Jun at tjun@hiebing.com or connect with him on LinkedIn.