How to Create a LinkedIn Content Marketing Strategy

Although LinkedIn started as a professional networking site in 2002, in the last decade, it has morphed into a social media powerhouse, with over 875 million registered users. It’s, therefore, no wonder that more companies are pitching their tent on LinkedIn for expansion amidst other business objectives.

It also helps that 80% of B2B leads come from LinkedIn, compared to Twitter and Facebook, which drive 13% and 7%, respectively. The stats reveal that LinkedIn is a goldmine for B2B companies, but it’s nearly impossible to succeed on any social platform without the right strategy.

If your startup struggles to gain traction on social media, our guide can help you beef up your LinkedIn content marketing strategy.

In this article, we’ll explore the following:

• what LinkedIn content marketing is
• how to develop a winning LinkedIn content strategy
• LinkedIn engagement tips

What is LinkedIn Content Marketing?

LinkedIn content marketing involves using valuable or entertaining content to attract, engage with and build lasting relationships with your target audience on LinkedIn.

In a previous article covering social media content, I explained that each social media channel functions differently. Therefore, it’s purely rational that a segment of your customer base prefers LinkedIn to other social media platforms.

But navigating a professional platform like LinkedIn can get tricky when you don’t have a concrete strategy to get your ideal customers’ attention.

In the next section, you’ll discover the procedure for drafting an effective LinkedIn content marketing strategy.

Creating a LinkedIn Content Strategy

The following steps will help you get off to the strongest possible start and ensure you have a well-thought-out and effective LinkedIn content strategy. Let’s take a look.

(1) Outline your content marketing goals:

Your approach to content marketing on any social platform—LinkedIn inclusive— generally depends on your final objective.

In essence, the type of content you produce for LinkedIn and your publishing and engagement pattern should always mirror the end goal.

When startups join LinkedIn, their objectives typically include:

• building brand awareness
• boosting company credibility
• generating qualified leads
• strengthening customer relationships through community-building

If you’re just starting out on LinkedIn, I suggest you focus on creating brand awareness. Over time, you can comfortably pursue more objectives simultaneously.

(2) Define your metrics:

Having outlined your goals, the next step is knowing how to measure your content marketing performance. It is one thing to set attainable goals, but tracking your progress is a whole other issue.

LinkedIn provides abundant data for marketers to measure their content marketing performance. But having to sift through so much information to figure out what you should prioritize can be overwhelming.

That’s exactly where LinkedIn metrics come in.

Before publishing your first post, decide what metrics align with your content marketing goals. For the sake of this article, I’ll distribute LinkedIn metrics into two categories:

• Traffic metrics: this category reflects how much buzz your company is gathering on the platform. You should track these metrics if your end goal is creating brand awareness, including—visitors, page views, followers, and reach.

• Engagement metrics: if, on the other hand, you’re more focused on generating leads, strengthening credibility, and community-building, engagement metrics are the ones to look out for. Consistently monitor clicks, reactions, comments, shares, and post views.

(3) Choose the best content formats:

LinkedIn is one of the most versatile platforms because it accommodates long-form texts, short posts, and audiovisual content. For starters, choose two to three content formats your business can work with and alternate them.

Whichever content formats you eventually decide on, be sure to include native videos. Why? Social Insider recently partnered with Cloud Campaign to analyze 1,126 LinkedIn pages. They found that video content generated the highest engagement per impression rate for small to middle-sized accounts—in this context, accounts with < 50K followers.

However, the best way to know what works is to test as much as possible and choose the formats that garner the most engagement.

(4) Draw up the editorial strategy:

An editorial strategy is a roadmap or plan that guides your content production and publishing pattern on LinkedIn. It helps your team to create, publish and promote content in a timely and organized manner.

An editorial strategy involves two key factors—an editorial calendar and an editorial plan.

• Editorial plan: this plan determines which content format you publish for maximum engagement and how often you do so in a given time frame (in a week or month). Draw up an editorial plan that covers an entire week and stick with it for at least two months to see how it performs.

• Editorial calendar: the calendar is where you outline the exact date and time that each post goes live. When creating a calendar, you should consider how often you want to share content on LinkedIn. A content calendar helps you craft and schedule posts in advance to stay on track.

The experts suggest posting once a day, five days a week.

(5) Identify opportunities for collaboration:

This step is one that many startups gloss over, probably because they’re looking to stand out from the competition in the early stages. Also, influencer marketing isn’t exactly common on LinkedIn. However, there are different ways to approach content collaboration on LinkedIn for maximum ROI.

Let’s look at two of my preferred methods:

• Collaboration with individuals: LinkedIn has thousands of influencers who grew their communities by sharing helpful content around their occupations or interests. For every industry or niche, some credible individuals have done the work to garner a massive following on the platform.

You can leverage their influence by proposing an irresistible value exchange offer. For example, you could offer money as an incentive, premium subscription plans, or bylines on your website. In exchange, they could mention your company/app in specific posts, offer a tutorial on how to use your product, or even co-host a LinkedIn live event.

To discover potential collaborators by continent or industry, I suggest you look at LinkedIn’s Top Voices list.

• Collaboration with credible brands: B2B content collaboration is even rarer than the former, but it’s not new. All you have to do is find companies on LinkedIn that serve a similar customer segment you want to target and propose a brief partnership.

Content teams from both companies can create LinkedIn campaigns to show how both products can be used simultaneously to achieve better results.

Example:

A communication technology company (e.g., Zoom or Google Meet) can team up with a project management software brand (e.g., Trello or Monday).

The end goal? Show remote workers how to clock in and out of meetings faster and skyrocket their productivity.

The key here is to ensure that both brands have a similar target audience, i.e., people who will benefit from the advertised products.

(6) Measure results consistently:

I outlined earlier what metrics to track concerning your content marketing goals. However, I didn’t mention why tracking is vital to your success on LinkedIn. Measuring the effectiveness of your LinkedIn content marketing strategy helps you better understand what your audience resonates with and what you can improve.

The result? Satisfied customers and engaged prospects.

However, one-off evaluations of those KPIs will not give you the accurate insights you need to scale. The best way to measure results is to incorporate them into your business strategy.

Define how often you intend to measure your content marketing efforts to the team. Then schedule those dates in your editorial calendar.

Conducting a content marketing performance analysis every month or two. This leaves ample time for the content to reach your potential customers and for them to make a decision.

Additional LinkedIn Engagement Tips

Here are some little tweaks you can make to your LinkedIn content to hit your goals faster.

1. Create conversation-starter posts: your LinkedIn content won’t always go viral. But try to insert your brand in relevant conversations. You could approach this by stating your company’s opinion on a trending topic in the industry.

Better still, end your regular posts with a question that encourages people to leave comments. Or, reveal just enough in an update to spark curiosity and make your ideal customers wonder what you’re about.

2. Have fun with the hashtags, but not too much: as with every other social media platform, LinkedIn hashtags help people to find your posts when they type the keywords in the search bar. This is an engagement hack that, when used excessively, can make your brand appear spammy.

LinkedIn allows users to use up to 10 hashtags per post, but Hootsuite recommends using four.

3. Be consistent: if you’re after brand awareness or any other content marketing goal, ensure that your publishing schedule corresponds with the editorial calendar. Random one-off posts certainly don’t help people remember your brand.

4. Engage: LinkedIn is about building a community. The brand and customers’ interaction must reciprocate for mutual trust. Advise the social media manager to comment on posts that mention your brand and offer insights relevant to the post. It’s another way to present yourself as a customer-centric brand.

The takeaway

Whether new to LinkedIn or just trying to generate more leads on the platform, having a documented content marketing strategy can save your company time, effort, and dollars.

But just like any worthwhile venture, results take time. Monitor your content marketing performance within the first three months of creating your new strategy and adjust accordingly.