LinkedIn Content Marketing 101: Become a Master of This Under Utilized Platform

There is over 875 million professionals on LinkedIn.

While many businesses and brands overlook this social media network, LinkedIn is one of the best platforms for digital marketing. LinkedIn was designed for professionals and comes with a ton of features to connect people and businesses together.

LinkedIn content marketing can help build a brand and generate leads online. As the largest professional network, it’s important for your business to have a presence on LinkedIn.

Interested in expanding your marketing strategy to LinkedIn? Here is a little introductory course in how you can become a master of LinkedIn content marketing.

What is LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is a professional and employment-focused social media company. This innovative social media platform is available through its website and mobile apps. While many may overlook the social media platform due to its business nature, you cannot argue with the sheer number of professionals and businesses on LinkedIn today.

LinkedIn dates back to 2003 as a professional networking website. This was one of the first-ever social media networks as it managed to allow users to create profiles and connect with other users. LinkedIn has evolved over the years, with massive changes kicking in after Microsoft decided to buy the network for $26 billion in 2016.

This saw LinkedIn streamline the entire social media network and focus on professional connections, employer hiring features, and marketing tools for businesses. These improvements have resulted in LinkedIn being the most effective platform for generating leads.

Who’s On LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is a social media network dedicated to professionals and businesses. The social network operates with connections that you can make with other professionals. However, you can also choose to follow businesses, influential figures, and interesting topics.

This information then curates your feed on LinkedIn so that you can catch up with the latest from your connections and the topics you enjoy reading about. The feed that you see is populated with content from these sources.

Professionals

For professionals, it is a great place to share useful information, interesting articles, and update your network with recent career updates. These can be things such as completing a course, getting a promotion, or changing jobs.

Businesses

For businesses, LinkedIn is a great place to find and recruit talent. This is because the LinkedIn profile is designed to look like a complete CV. LinkedIn also has built-in features to help streamline the hiring process as they can quickly take your information and package it for the application process.

Businesses can have individual pages on LinkedIn. These pages can also generate content about your business that your employees can then share. In this way, the business page on LinkedIn can help you build a brand for your business in a more professional space.

Just as LinkedIn can help you build a brand; it can also help you attract new clients. This is because LinkedIn has become the best place to generate leads for B2B businesses. LinkedIn has invested heavily in this space and launched innovative new features to advertise and grow your business on the platform itself.

What’s LinkedIn Used For?

LinkedIn is a professional social media platform that differs greatly from the competition. While there are business profiles on platforms like Facebook and Instagram, LinkedIn is in a league of its own. This is because the platform offers a more professional, curated experience for professionals and businesses.

The social media platform is not trying to grow its user base exponentially or go viral. Instead, it’s dedicated to building meaningful connections and delivering tools that businesses can use to grow. By focusing on this niche, LinkedIn has managed to become the biggest platform for growing B2B businesses in the world.

For professionals, LinkedIn can be a great way to keep track of your colleagues and friends as they move up in their careers. The platform can help you stay in contact with these people but also keep an eye on what they’re doing professionally.

The platform is also great for learning new information, reading great articles, and evening finding a new job. This is because of the innovative hiring features that LinkedIn launched. With the click of a single button, you can apply for an open position on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn Marketing

When it comes to marketing your business on LinkedIn, there are a few options available. While LinkedIn does have modern tools to help you sponsor posts and adverts, you can also build awareness for your business passively. This is because LinkedIn has an algorithm that seeks out informative content to show to professionals when they visit the site.

In this way, you can expand your reach by investing in premium content for your LinkedIn page. LinkedIn’s algorithm takes everything you publish and tries to match it with professionals that are interested in those topics. This works in the same way as SEO, meaning that you can take steps to optimize your content to reach more people.

LinkedIn as a platform prioritizes high-quality, engaging content. This means that you should ensure that you create captivating content that is filled with essential keywords and hashtags. In this way, LinkedIn will know who to show this content to.

The best part about this is that LinkedIn will promote your content to relevant professionals for free. While it’s not easy to optimize your content perfectly, it’s an incredibly cost-efficient way of building a brand and network for your business online.

Kinds of Paid LinkedIn Marketing

LinkedIn also hosts a few paid options for those who want to boost their business profile on the platform. These services can help you build a network on the platform, build a brand, recruit new talent, and even generate leads. Here’s a quick look at the marketing services LinkedIn offers.

1. Sponsored Content

The primary way to generate content on LinkedIn is through content that you post directly to it. LinkedIn supports a wide range of content on its platform. This means that you can post written content, attach documents, upload images, and even videos to your page.

LinkedIn will then show this to everyone in your network. However, you can choose to sponsor your content to maximize its reach. This way, your content will show up for more people even if they don’t have a connection with you.

LinkedIn will use the data that it has to match your content with people that might be interested. This service can scale according to your marketing budget, making it perfect for both small and large businesses. The content that you sponsor can vary, allowing you to achieve whatever goals you have set for the business.

2. Sponsored Messaging

LinkedIn offers a unique feature to let you automatically send a personalized message to your network. LinkedIn message ads automatically spark a conversation with new connections as soon as they accept your request. However, they also offer conversational ads to reignite conversations with your existing network.

This is a great tool to help you engage leads without having to lift a finger. Once the person replies, you can take over the conversation to seal the deal.

3. Dynamic Ads

Dynamic ads are a great way to build your business on LinkedIn. These ads are personalized to your audience, allowing you to leverage their profile data to remain accurate. This way, you can customize your entire approach to meet your marketing objectives.

These ads are seamlessly presented to users on their feeds. In this way, the ad itself is not some annoying pop-up that distracts you while you’re on the platform. LinkedIn also makes these ads scalable so that they can meet your marketing budget wherever it might be.

4. Text Ads

LinkedIn also offers text ads on its platform. These ads are self-service pay-per-click ads that can help you drive traffic to your profile or website. LinkedIn has all the tools you need to create and publish the ad directly from their platform.

The Benefits of LinkedIn Content Marketing

LinkedIn marketing is a great tool that you can use to build your business online. From growing your network to generating leads, this platform is the best for B2B businesses. Here are a few key benefits of marketing on the platform.

1. Building Brands

LinkedIn is a professional social media platform. This means that the entire platform is a professional environment that you can use to build a brand for your business. The platform allows you to generate and share content that can help align your business in the market.

2. Creating Relationships

LinkedIn is designed to connect people and businesses. This goes a long way in building meaningful, long-term business relationships. Whether this is for a professional securing a new job or a business securing a new client, relationships are important to LinkedIn.

3. Generating Leads

When it comes to generating leads, LinkedIn surpasses every other social media platform. While other platforms may have more users, LinkedIn prides itself on having professionals use their site. This helps make the site an extension of the workplace environment where you can meet, greet, and secure clients.

LinkedIn Marketing Tools

As a platform, LinkedIn has evolved in the last few years. This innovation has not only made the platform easier to use, but also introduced a few new marketing tools for advertisers. LinkedIn is a hub for professionals and businesses, both of which can benefit from increased exposure.

This is why LinkedIn didn’t just create isolated marketing tools but also a dedicated campaign management dashboard. This dashboard lets you view all your adverts, sponsored posts, and promotional activity in one place. The dashboard also lets you view data and adjust your campaign in real time.

How to Master LinkedIn Marketing

Mastering LinkedIn marketing is not as difficult as you may think. Here are a few key elements to keep in mind:

• Target Your Audience
• Create Engaging Content
• Don’t Forget SEO
• Stay Consistent
• Adapt and Adjust

Building a LinkedIn Marketing Strategy

Having a digital marketing strategy is important for all businesses. However, if you have a B2B business, marketing on LinkedIn is the best option for you.

When crafting your strategy, it’s important to define your goals at the beginning. This can help you decide on a path that you want to take. LinkedIn offers four distinct ways to market your business on the platform, each with its own unique benefits.

If your goal is to build a brand on the platform, sponsored updates and posts are the way to go. However, sponsored messaging is a great way to generate leads for your business. In this way, using your goals can help direct you toward the right plan of action.

The most effective way to market your business on LinkedIn is to incorporate it into the rest of your marketing strategy. In this way, you can have a digital footprint for your business that extends past a single social media platform. This adds authority to your business and increases your overall reach.

LinkedIn still uses the same content formats as other platforms. This means that you can use the same content that you share on Facebook and Instagram on LinkedIn as well. However, LinkedIn is a more professional setting so you should keep that in mind before posting anything.

Expand Your Marketing Strategy to LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the largest social media network for professionals. With around 875 million professionals on the platform, it’s the perfect place to market your business. LinkedIn has a few innovative marketing tools that you can use to build a brand and generate leads on the platform.

If you’re looking to create an effective LinkedIn content marketing strategy, don’t hesitate to call us today. Our team can evaluate your business and marketing campaign to see how LinkedIn can boost your overall performance.