Are you looking for actionable LinkedIn strategies to grow your business, boost brand awareness, and maximize your LinkedIn marketing results? You’re in the right place! This article will give you 17 nuggets of gold and help you create more impactful content.
LinkedIn Basics, Algorithm, and Profile Optimization
When someone is interested enough in your company or brand and decides to check out your personal profile or company page, you want them to be impressed. This is where a little optimization goes a long way.
Likewise, knowing a thing or two about the LinkedIn algorithm will stop you from making rookie mistakes and avoid some of the growing pains of posting content on the platform.
1. Master the Basics
We all think we must learn all the “secrets” and “ninja tactics” to succeed in something. More intricate and complex ideas certainly have their place in your LinkedIn marketing strategy, but you will only be able to leverage them effectively if you have the basics down to a tee.
The basics of the platform, like optimizing your profile, learning how the platform functions, knowing your audience and what they respond to, etc., will provide you with fundamentals and inform your every move going forward. You know what all the best coaches and athletes say – always go back to the fundamentals!
The fundamentals of the platform include:
- Learning the algorithm and how it works
- Having a complete personal profile or company page
- Learning about the different types of content you can publish and what content does best on the platform
- Finding your audience, learning their habits, and engaging with them
- Building a network of like-minded industry peers
- Finding your “voice” on the platform because every platform is different
2. Mastering the LinkedIn Algorithm
LinkedIn’s algorithm is easy to comprehend. The main job of the algorithm is to distribute quality content to relevant users to boost engagement and keep people on LinkedIn for longer. When you break it down like that, there’s not a lot to it.
What can we learn from this? Basically, to make the algorithm like your content, you should:
- Know who your audience is as accurate as you can
- Create quality content that’s interesting and relevant to them
- Craft the content so that your audience is inclined to engage with it
3. Maximizing Your Personal Profile or Company Page Potential
Your every action on LinkedIn should have a goal behind it. Filling out your personal profile or company page is the same. Here are several tips on how to craft a profile or page to impress:
- Use quality profile and background image and convey a message with it
- Use relevant keywords to inform both the algorithms and the humans visiting your profile
- Create an attention-grabbing Headline and About section
- Get applicable endorsements that showcase your expertise
- Build a strong network of connections with industry peers and colleagues
Crafting Powerful Content on LinkedIn
On the platform with over 800 million users, crafting relevant, interesting, informative, and engaging content can do many good things for your business. Through such content, you will gain leads and sales, build trust and become an authority figure in your industry. In this section, I’ll explore proven strategies and techniques to help you resonate with your audience.
4. Harnessing the Power of Visual Content
Visual content is more than just using high-quality images. Although quality is undoubtedly important, it’s not the most important factor when succeeding with visuals on LinkedIn. It’s more important to capture your audience’s attention, convey a relevant message, and do that at scale than to occasionally post super high-quality visuals a few times per year. Some of the key points to keep in mind when it comes to visual content on LinkedIn include:
- Use different types of visual content; images, videos, graphs, charts, slideshows, and infographics
- Post multiple times per week
- Keep the visuals aligned with your brand and voice
- Use original images and videos whenever possible
- Respect the optimal size and format guidelines for the platform
5. Creating Engaging LinkedIn Content
Engagement will be one of the main drivers of your success on LinkedIn. If the audience doesn’t find your content engaging, the algorithm will not share it. This is why fundamentals like knowing your audience and what they want are very important.
It’s not just enough to post high-quality content. It’s also essential to reach the right audience with it. Because only the right audience will find a piece of content interesting enough to consume, like, and share it.
6. Strategic Use of Hashtags for Visibility
When you’re starting out on LinkedIn, your reach is minimal. One of the features that can help with this issue is hashtags. Hashtags don’t just extend the reach of your posts, however. By choosing relevant hashtags, you can reach relevant audiences, which is a double whammy when it comes to usefulness.
You can also use branded hashtags to foster a sense of community around your content. Your audience will always know how and where to find your latest content if you’re consistent about it.
7. Taking Advantage of LinkedIn’s Native Video Feature
Instead of embedding or linking to videos from other platforms, use the native video feature and upload your video content directly to LinkedIn. The algorithm loves this because it keeps the audience on the platform and rewards it by enhancing the reach of native video content. In general, video carries many benefits, such as enhanced storytelling, improved retention, brand building, and more.
8. Showcasing Your Expertise and Personality Through Content
To borrow a writing term, don’t tell your audience you’re an expert, show them. This means serving your audience with relevant, helpful content that solves their problems.
And when it comes to showcasing your personality, it doesn’t mean tooting your own horn. Talking about yourself or your company is perfectly fine, but make something else the focal point.
For example, posting about the lessons learned on a vital topic surrounding your business is an excellent chance to talk about your company while providing valuable information to your audience.
The same goes for sharing industry insights and advice. There are plenty of such opportunities where you can talk about what matters to you, which is your business, and help your audience simultaneously.
9. Demonstrating Industry Expertise for Credibility
It’s self-evident why being considered an industry expert on a social media platform like LinkedIn would be beneficial. So let’s focus on how you can do that with your content. Here are three actionable content ideas to accomplish this:
- Case studies – highly technical and demanding to put together, but giving your audience practical insights and letting them learn from your success or even mistakes through a case study will immediately raise your profile among industry peers.
- Hosting Q&A sessions – demonstrate your fearlessness and tackle difficult questions on the go, and by doing so, demonstrate your expertise.
- Educational content – create how-to guides, tutorials, best practices posts, etc. Teach your audience what you wish someone else taught in the beginning.
10. Diversifying Your Content Formats for Engagement
The idea behind diversifying your content formats is to cast as wide a net as possible to give as many people as possible what they want. Some of your audience might prefer articles, others prefer infographics, and some prefer videos. You can publish various content types on LinkedIn, so use different types sparingly.
Even if your audience is particular in what they want and the vast majority of them prefer a single type of content, like videos, for example, you will know that once you actually test this out and see the results.
We all tend to revert back to what we’re familiar with, so the best way to force yourself or your team to do this is to set a month-long challenge where you will post different types of content no matter what.
11. Strategically Placing Outbound Links in Comments
This one’s short and straightforward. It goes back to the algorithm preferring people to stay on the platform instead of leaving somewhere else. That’s why you should always post outbound links in the first comment under your posts.
You can mention the links in the first comment in your content so that people know where they can find them. This carries an extra benefit of more of your audience checking out the comments section so they might see other comments that will nudge them to post one themselves, further boosting engagement.
Effective Networking and Audience Engagement on LinkedIn
Networking and audience engagements are the bread and butter of any LinkedIn content strategy. LinkedIn is currently one of the best content channels that helps you effectively accomplish both. Build a strong network of advocates and humanize your business while demonstrating expertise and thought leadership at the same time.
12. Encouraging Employee Involvement and Advocacy
Your employees can be powerful advocates for your business. More often than not, your employees’ entire networks will be larger than your business network, which can help spread the word. On top of that, employees saying good things about their workplace is a very positive signal. It will raise the profile of your company and humanize it.
However, I would not force this upon your employees under any circumstances, nor would I reward it when they do it. Forcing people to talk positively about their workplace if they don’t feel that way can only backfire in the long run.
13. Active Participation in Relevant LinkedIn Groups
This one is huge. Especially if you’re starting fresh and don’t have an audience of your own. And even if you do, participating in relevant LinkedIn Groups is an excellent way of expanding your reach and networking with industry peers. Let’s briefly discuss what to do and what not to do when posting in LinkedIn Groups. What to do is easy, be helpful and positive. Some of the things not to do are:
- Talking about yourself or your company when not prompted to
- Being pushy or salesy
- Hogging the conversations
- Giving advice on things out of your expertise – giving opinions is fine, just don’t posture yourself as an expert on the topic if you’re not
14. Resisting the Pitfalls of Automation in Outreach
Sure, automation can save time. Spamming connection requests to anyone and everyone will make your network grow much faster, but that’s not as beneficial as you might think. The idea is to attract the ideal customer to your network. Only they will be interested enough in what you have to say for it to positively affect your business.
Performance Monitoring and LinkedIn Strategy Refinement
You always want to do more of what works and less of what doesn’t. However, don’t leave it up to a hunch and just decide something works and the other thing doesn’t. Analyze all the data you can get your hands on, and be open to all of your ideas. Let the analytics guide you because they’ll only show you what your audience wants and resonates with.
15. Evaluating Your LinkedIn Performance Metrics
Getting into a habit of regularly monitoring and analyzing the performance of your content is very important. It will help you understand the success of your content and your content strategy as a whole. Some of the metrics to keep in mind include:
- Engagement rates
- Post impressions
- Click-through rates (CTR)
Having your finger on the pulse of your analytics will help you effectively evaluate your content, recognize trends, and, most importantly, pivot away from strategies or angles that simply don’t work for you.
16. Maintaining Consistency with a Content Calendar
Setting up a content calendar can help you keep on track and get into a habit of producing and publishing content consistently. Consistency over a long period of time is what differentiates successful content strategies from failed ones.
A content calendar will also help you visualize your strategy from a bird’s eye view and pinpoint potential weaknesses. For example, a content calendar can help you:
- Post and share a balanced mix of content types, formats, and topics
- Dial in your urge to promote yourself versus helping others
- Streamline your content creation processes
- Allocate resources more effectively
- Stay on track
17. Implementing Targeted Paid Marketing Efforts
Targeted paid marketing efforts certainly have their place, but I would not recommend them to complete beginners. If you’re going to pay for the reach of your content, it better be for a good reason, and you better be sure it’s ROI positive.
LinkedIn does offer you the capability of reaching targeted audiences based on many useful factors like job titles, industries, and company sizes, but thread carefully and spend time to analyze your campaigns to further optimize them or pivot away before needlessly spending more money.