LinkedIn is the perfect place to show off your businesses’ history, achievements and accolades all in one place. It acts as a one-pager for outlining your successes and highlighting what you do for other professionals in your industry.
However, this isn’t where the power of LinkedIn stops.
In fact, it goes much further than being merely a digital resume for your brand.
More than 90 million LinkedIn users are senior-level decision-makers within their own companies. This, combined with how easy it is to connect and reach out to people on the platform, makes it the perfect place to meet high-profile prospects.
There’s one major problem though:
The majority of LinkedIn users are sceptical of any direct messages they get from businesses they don’t already know. This is because there are tons of people aggressively selling themselves through the platform.
But there’s a way to bust through that scepticism, and it’s by standing out with quality content that your prospects need and want in their lives.
With just a couple of tweaks to your profile and a content strategy that’s based on research, it’s easy to turn LinkedIn into a conversion-powered portal for your business.
Why Use LinkedIn For Content Marketing?
As well as digitally housing a huge number of active decision-makers, research has shown that LinkedIn is the most effective social platform for generating conversions.
In fact, a whopping 80% of marketing leads that are found on social media come through LinkedIn.
As a result, it’s an incredibly effective way to attract and convert new customers in an authentic way.
Ready and raring to get started? Here’s our step-by-step guide to creating a conversion-powered content strategy on LinkedIn.
Step One: Optimise Your LinkedIn Profile
Before you start throwing out content left, right, and centre, it’s important that your profile is up to scratch.
The last thing you want is for prospects to see your content, navigate to your profile, and be greeted with tumbleweed.
This doesn’t have to be a lengthy or difficult exercise; you simply need to do three things:
- Flesh out your profile with your brand’s history, successes, and any relevant information your prospects might need
- Use relevant keywords throughout your profile (in particular, throughout your headline and summary) to make sure you’re easily searchable
- Create a custom profile URL to stand out and make your brand look more professional
Your profile is essentially your digital business card, so treat it like one.
Step Two: Define Your Strategy Goals
Once your profile is looking good, it’s time to get started on your content strategy, and that means one thing: it’s time to set your goals.
Every strategy needs an end goal to work towards, and this will help you determine what kind of content to create and who you share it with, but it will also help you measure the results to see what’s working.
Your goal will depend on what your aim is for your business over the next week, month, or year.
For example, you might want to use LinkedIn to:
- Drive traffic to your blog or a landing page
- Increase the authority of your brand in your industry
- Increase your monthly revenue
Step Three: Identify Your Targets
Now you’ve got your goals outlined, it’s time to work out who exactly you want to reach with your content.
This will be determined by your goals, what you’re selling, and where your brand sits in your market. Think about who your product or service helps and what problem it specifically solves for these people.
Once you know exactly who it is you want to reach, you can use that knowledge to search for LinkedIn groups that these people might hang out in and use relevant keywords to find them on LinkedIn.
Plus, you’ll need this information in order to create and publish the right content that really resonates with them.
Step Four: Get Content Inspiration
You can find content inspiration everywhere, and LinkedIn is no different.
Throughout the platform, there are tons of professionals within your industry having intelligent conversations about all parts of business.
And, now you know who it is you want to reach, you can dig out the topics that your people are talking about and create content around those.
On top of that, LinkedIn has a plethora of features you can tap into to get even more content ideas. You can:
- Search through relevant groups to see what discussions are taking place and what questions are being asked
- Check out what your target buyers are sharing on their profile pages
- Use a tool like BuzzSumo to see what pieces and topics are getting the most shares on LinkedIn (simply type “LinkedIn.com” into the search bar)
Step Five: Publish Content On LinkedIn Pulse
Like most social media platforms, LinkedIn favours content that has been published natively on the site – and that means content that has been published on LinkedIn Pulse, the in-house blogging platform LinkedIn uses.
With this tool, you basically have a place to share your content amongst a swathe of other relevant pieces. As a result, decision-makers who are browsing the platform might stumble across your stuff.
Remember to include a call-to-action (CTA) in all your LinkedIn Pulse posts that pushes prospects towards your goal. It might be a link to a landing page where they can sign up for a freebie, or it might be a link to get in touch with you to discuss a product demo.
Step Six: Other Kinds of Content
You don’t want to limit yourself to just posting on LinkedIn Pulse, though.
There are plenty of other ways you can create and share content on LinkedIn that will help get more eyeballs on your brand.
Like most social channels, LinkedIn supports the posting of a range of different content types, including:
LinkedIn Text and Photo Posts
Text and photo posts give you the chance to show up in your prospects’ feeds. For best results, avoid linking out from these posts and instead drop a CTA link into a comment to avoid being punished by LinkedIn’s algorithm.
Here, MailChimp has created an eye-catching image to grab the attention of prospects scrolling through its LinkedIn feed.
LinkedIn Videos
LinkedIn is favouring videos at the moment because it’s actively trying to compete with the likes of YouTube and Facebook. Essentially, it understands that users respond well to video, and it wants us to share more of them.
You can use short videos to portray the value of your product and brand, as well as use them to promote other pieces of content, whether that’s an in-depth article you’ve published on LinkedIn Pulse or another piece of content you’ve shared on your own website.
Step Seven: Promoting Your Content Through LinkedIn
As well as natively creating content on LinkedIn Pulse and sharing text, photo, and video updates in prospects’ feeds, you can also promote your external content in several different places around LinkedIn, including:
- On your personal profile
- On your brand’s page
- In relevant LinkedIn groups
- Via direct messages (or InMails, as they’re called on the platform)
Creating a Consistent Conversion-Powered Content Strategy
Now you’ve got all the elements you need to create your LinkedIn content strategy, it’s just a case of keeping things consistent and measuring your results.
Set up a calendar to schedule what kind of content you’ll be posting, where you’ll be posting it, and when you’ll be posting it.
Once you’ve got this covered, you’ll quickly be able to see just how powerful LinkedIn can be for generating conversions with highly-targeted prospects.
