As a B2B marketer, amongst all of your opportunities, your biggest may be your most difficult: LinkedIn content marketing. According to Hootsuite, 96% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn for marketing. However, very few people know the secrets of consistent content creation on the site. More importantly, even fewer professionals know how to connect LinkedIn with other digital media to increase engagement and sales.
Thus, a clear and effective LinkedIn content marketing strategy gives you an edge. For example,
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ADP went from 300 company page impressions to 1.3 million per month. You, too, can start small and grow big.
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Adobe found that LinkedIn content marketing influenced 42% of their successfully closed B2B deals.
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What happens on LinkedIn does not need to stay there. You can expand your success across all of your marketing by integrating your LinkedIn company feed with your website or intranet.
Why Use LinkedIn for Content Marketing?
LinkedIn is as important for B2B companies as Facebook and Instagram for consumer-facing businesses. Here are some key benefits of utilizing LinkedIn for your brand's content marketing strategy:
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🎯 Reach the right audience at scale.
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💡 Build up your brand as a thought leader.
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🌟 Grow a following and share relevant content.
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🌐 Drive traffic back to your website.
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📈 Increase engagement and sales on your website.
Reach the right audience at scale
A study by Zippia reported that LinkedIn has over 66.8 million active users monthly in the U.S. alone and an impressive global reach of 849.6 million. These LinkedIn statistics suggest that however small, your audience is likely on LinkedIn in sufficient numbers to engage them through compelling content marketing.
Number of LinkedIn users worldwide in millions. Source: Statista.
This extensive network helps expand your horizons beyond primary organic traffic sources, like search engines and major social networks such as Facebook or Instagram. You open up a way to connect with a broader audience actively looking for the value you offer, effectively increasing your brand recognition and market presence.
Build up your brand as a thought leader
LinkedIn gives a way for businesses to position themselves as industry thought leaders. Companies can build credibility and trust with their audience by consistently sharing content full of practical insights and expertise. Brands gain influence and open up relationships with other companies, improving their position within the industry.
Deloitte utilizes LinkedIn to foster thought leadership, sparking meaningful dialogues on sustainability and social issues, notably through their engaging posts about the #TheGreenRoom podcast series. They produce captivating podcast episodes and willingly share this insightful information with a wider LinkedIn audience, demonstrating their dedication to thought leadership.
Grow a following and share relevant content
With 65 million decision-makers and 61 million senior-level influencers active on the platform, LinkedIn presents a unique opportunity to reach a high-value audience. To do that, you need great content.
Your LinkedIn Company Page does not have to be a static digital billboard. You can make it into a lively hub that creates engagement on and off of LinkedIn. Creating the initial buzz and a well-rounded narrative around your company can be surprisingly easy. Here are some simple forms of content that our customers add to their company page and then use Flockler to show on their website:
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🎥 Visual storytelling with short-form videos.
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📸 Curated photos of your people, events, and locations.
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🎉 Celebrating your customers and their achievements.
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🏭 Show your product in action. Show, don't tell.
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🗣️ Emotionally engaging stories from your leadership.
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🔄 Content series to keep people coming back.
Even big brands like Microsoft post bite-sized content:
Besides quick wins, remember to connect directly with decision-makers and key influencers in your field. You pave the way for valuable partnerships and networking opportunities only available on LinkedIn. Creating strategic industry events, such as annual award shows, hosting webinars, or actively participating in industry discussion groups on LinkedIn are excellent ways to expand your brand's reach and connect with new rings of influence within your industry.
Drive traffic back to your website
LinkedIn offers a perfect platform to share your web content, effectively channeling traffic to your website. Still, it takes skills to nurture an audience that trusts you and to craft a post leading to substantial traffic.
Case in point, Salesforce's post linking to a blog article on A.I. speaks directly to a professional audience, their sense of curiosity and desire to increase revenue. The Salesforce marketing team paid attention to every element, from the headline to the post length.
By sparking interest and addressing needs consistently, you can increase the number of people interacting with your content. As clicks grow, algorithms promote your content because they see it as adding value to the platform.
Increase engagement and sales on your website
Even if the content is highly relevant and presented in a proper context, on average, the visitor will stay on your website for just more than a minute.
How can a visit to your site that lasts that little translate into something meaningful? There is a proven way.
Many success stories indicate that LinkedIn content does influence B2B sales. However, most brands need to provide more impressions to be successful. Independent research has proven that in more complex B2B sales, brands need anywhere up to 17 touchpoints to seal the deal successfully. To do that cost-effectively, you need visually appealing new content on your site that generates repeat visits and longer stays.
Many brands can afford to pay for LinkedIn ads to cross that bar. Smarter ones use a tool like Flockler. With it, you can repurpose your LinkedIn content by displaying it in unlimited locations on your website.
Brugg Group, with over 1,800 employees and 35 subsidiaries, showcases a highlighted gallery of their people, events, and places to add an emotional side to a highly specialized infrastructure business:
Flockler raises the time spent on site and the number of repeat visits to be on par with other successful B2B sites. It increases the chances of saying yes to a complex solution offer. Finally, you can save money on ad spend and corporate events because your website generates many of the B2B touchpoints you need.
7 Steps To Effectively Build A Content Marketing Strategy for LinkedIn
Now that you know the fundamentals, this guide will walk you through seven essential steps to build an effective LinkedIn content plan (click on a step to scroll to it).
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Step 1: Define clear objectives for your LinkedIn content strategy
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Step 2: Research and understand your LinkedIn audience
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Step 3: Set topic areas and content types
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Step 4: Create engaging content for LinkedIn
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Step 5: Supplement owned content with curated content
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Step 6: Share and promote your content strategically
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Step 7: Measure your results and tweak your strategy as needed
Step 1: Define clear objectives for your LinkedIn content strategy
Start by considering what your team aims to achieve on LinkedIn. LinkedIn content marketing goals can be straightforward and align with your objectives. Common LinkedIn objectives include
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🌎 Introducing your business to a broader customer base.
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📚 Sharing content to enhance brand recognition.
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🤝 Building trust to attract new customers.
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🎣 Cultivating leads for your sales efforts.
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🚀 Invite more sign-ups to trials or demos.
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👥 Building a community of loyal subscribers.
Once you've identified one or two goals, outline how to monitor and measure your progress; for example, to boost brand awareness, you might track your website traffic from your social channels. Set specific traffic increase targets, like a 10% increase, to quantify your success.
With your primary goals and metrics, you can determine the content your team should create. For example, sharing your company's blog posts could enhance brand awareness while directing attention to gated content to better serve goals like lead generation in the later stages of the buyer's journey.
Step 2: Research and understand your LinkedIn audience
Before you share anything on the platform, think about your target audience or buyer persona. The more precisely you identify your audience, the more effective your content strategy will be in delivering meaningful outcomes. For instance, if financial professionals are your focus, opt for topics that appeal to them and center your content around their challenges and needs.
Another aspect worth considering regarding your audience is their level of employment. Is your audience mostly made up of independent solopreneurs? Or are you speaking to managers and heads of companies? Or are you targeting mid-level employees who report to one or multiple higher-ups?
Also, remember that LinkedIn Analytics offers user behavior and demographics insights. This data proves invaluable as you get to know your audience.
Step 3: Set topic areas and content types.
Moving ahead in your LinkedIn content strategy, let's explore the content you'll create and the areas you'll focus on. To identify your best topics, keep two things in mind:
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💕 Audience Connection: Craft content that genuinely interests and meets the needs of your LinkedIn audience.
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🎖️ Leverage Your Expertise: Ensure your content aligns with your brand's expertise and knowledge.
Avoid guesswork and rely on solid audience research methods to uncover what they want to read and the preferred format. Include checking tools like the Flockler Analytics Add-on and reviewing profiles and groups within your network in your work routines.
Analyzing your content and your competitors on LinkedIn can also help identify trending topics for your niche. This audience research ensures your content aligns with your audience's preferences and you choose the correct content types.
LinkedIn offers a variety of content types and formats. You'll likely rotate through several to maintain audience engagement. Here's a breakdown of the main LinkedIn content types (click to scroll):
Oh, and don't forget — you can breathe fresh life into your old content by presenting it in a different format.
Text Posts (Status Updates)
Like Facebook, you can share concise status updates or "mini-blogs" containing a few paragraphs of text - with a limit of 3000 characters. These posts can include hashtags and links.
What to share:
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🌈 Life's Little Lessons. Share a life lesson or an inspiring moment.
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💎 A treasure trove of tips. Provide practical tips or innovative ideas.
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🌟 Experiences that matter. Narrate an impactful experience.
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💬 Quips and quotes. Share an amusing or thought-provoking quote.
What to avoid:
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🚷 Me, Myself, And I. Don't excessively promote your products.
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🙅♀️ Wandering updates. Keep the random rambles at bay.
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🌊 Torrent of texts. Give each post its moment.
This LinkedIn post from Under Armour highlights their dedication to innovation and creating performance solutions for athletes. The 'Innovation Idea House' mention sparks curiosity about their innovation process. Plus, featuring Lorin Hamlin adds a personal touch, making the post more relatable. Lastly, the promise of insights into how this initiative started creates anticipation and encourages the audience to engage with their content.
LinkedIn Articles
You can also publish longer articles on LinkedIn, similar to what you'd share on your blog. LinkedIn typically recommends articles ranging from 1,500 to 2,000 words. These should be comprehensive, relevant, and valuable, providing significant insights to your readers. Plus, these articles are indexed by Google search engines and appear in search results, so employing keywords and optimizing your content can improve its discoverability.
LinkedIn Newsletter
Here’s another excellent content idea: you can post your content monthly or every week by crafting a LinkedIn newsletter. Creating it right on the platform is a breeze, and then you invite your connections and followers to subscribe. Once they hop on board, a heads-up pings their way every time you drop a fresh newsletter. And once they’re in, they can dive in with comments and reactions.
You can do even more effective cross-channel marketing by turning things around. With Flockler, you can add your LinkedIn company feed to your traditional email newsletter.
Photo Posts
Photo posts can diversify your content and increase engagement—especially if the photos show people in a way that aligns with your brand and message. Or they showcase your products in action. Both styles have historically high engagement rates.
These two examples from Meta and Ford illustrate some of the best practices in action. One image with a brief description of fewer than 200 characters is enough to highlight people.
However, you can consider adding a gallery of images and longer text to introduce products.
An ever-popular style includes testimonials in images, as Freshworks showcases.
Link Posts
Link posts are a practical way to share content published elsewhere, such as on your website blog. These posts are engaging because they include a preview that automatically pulls images from the linked site.
Poll Posts
Polls are a wonderfully engaging tool for businesses to connect with their audience refreshingly. Instead of just saying things, your brand asks intriguing questions. Polls let people choose from different options, helping you tap into the collective insights of your network, sparking valuable conversations, and gathering on-the-spot feedback.
By crafting intriguing questions and presenting a range of options for responses, brands can tap into the collective insights of their network, sparking valuable conversations and gathering on-the-spot feedback. These short and to-the-point polls offer a breath of fresh air from the usual content and boost genuine interactions, positioning your business as an attentive industry leader who cares about the viewpoints of its connections.
Businesses like Salesforce use polls to diversify their content strategy, encourage active participation, and create a lively community built on shared passions and expertise.
Video Posts
Video gets strong engagement, with audiences 20 times more likely to share videos than other content. On LinkedIn, you can directly upload videos, distinct from video ads or embedding videos from YouTube or Vimeo. Or you can use LinkedIn Live if you'd prefer to do something more interactive, like a Q&A or a live stream. When you launch a stream on LinkedIn Live, the platform may notify your followers or show it on their feeds. Alternatively, short clips like the one from GE Aerospace can engage customers and employees alike. Leading to organic
When crafting and sharing videos, maintain the same standards you would for your written content:
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Stay attuned to what your audience wants to watch.
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Ensure your content remains relevant; avoid sharing videos that diverge from your brand’s identity or purpose.
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Use videos to narrate compelling stories about your brand, company culture, and customers.
Document Posts
A distinctive LinkedIn feature, document posts enable you to upload PDFs, PowerPoint presentations, and Word files. This feature lets you share more in-depth content like ebooks, whitepapers, case studies, and research studies directly within a LinkedIn post. Your audiences can then download the documents you post as PDF files.
To make an impact with document posts, ensure they boast visually appealing designs that capture your audience's attention.
Step 4: Create engaging content for LinkedIn
Let's roll up our sleeves and step into the world of crafting captivating LinkedIn content for B2B companies. Here are some top-notch tips to make your LinkedIn content shine:
- Start with an introduction that demands attention and draws readers in.
- Keep your sentences concise and engaging — think casual conversation, not complex jargon.
- Authenticity is vital — ditch the sales pitch and let your unique voice shine.
- Sprinkle in images and videos that complement your message, keeping things lively and engaging.
When your creative well runs dry, turn to templates for your LinkedIn post. They're ready-made content blueprints that ensure you're never left staring at a blank screen. And hey, if you're aiming for a broader impact, remember to tag relevant LinkedIn users and pages that can help amplify your message. Hashtags are your allies — use them cleverly to increase the visibility of your content.
Step 5: Supplement owned content with curated content
Your business might have some news and content to share, but creating fresh content for LinkedIn is only sometimes doable or necessary. After all, producing content takes resources your team might have yet to use elsewhere.
So, how can you keep your audience engaged without wasting too many resources? Many companies set up a news aggregator hub. Tools like Flockler can be beneficial for that. With Flockler, you can gather news sources and social media feeds in one place and categorize them with keywords and tags. Imagine mixing a collection of RSS feeds, top-notch LinkedIn posts, and Instagram hashtag feeds.
Once it's live, new content gets updated automatically, and you can use Flockler to moderate the feed.
From there, you can easily share these curated gems on LinkedIn and embed aggregated feeds on websites, apps, and digital screens.
Using categorization, you can create keyword-filtered views and display topic-specific feeds in context.
K&K Social Resources and Development gathers content from LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok and showcases it on their website, creating an impressive social news hub on the homepage.
Step 6: Share and promote your content strategically
A successful content strategy requires a consistent publishing schedule, managed through a LinkedIn content calendar, to prevent missing opportunities and repetitive content. Start with one high-quality post weekly, gradually increasing frequency as your network grows. Concerning the best times to post on LinkedIn, experimenting pays off – typically, before or after work and around lunchtime tend to be effective. For international audiences, diversify posting times to accommodate different time zones.
Also, engaging with your peers, industry experts, and followers by liking, commenting, and sharing their content builds valuable connections and increases your visibility within your network. Meaningful interactions can lead to your content being shared with a broader audience, creating a ripple effect that promotes your brand and its message.
In addition, you can extend your content reach with LinkedIn Ads, which offer precise targeting beyond your network. Invest in these ads to fine-tune your audience based on factors like industry, job role, and location. This paid approach helps increase your organic reach by putting your content in front of the right people, boosting engagement and interactions.
Adding LinkedIn to intranets and sharing with workers
Finally, embedding a LinkedIn feed onto your company's intranet fosters a culture of content sharing within your company. That's precisely what Da Vinci Engineering has built with Flockler's self-service platform. With automated feeds, the company has created a social media wall for internal and external audiences to discover the latest industry news, people behind the scenes, and career opportunities.
Employees can easily share this valuable content on their LinkedIn profiles by providing access to the latest company and industry information. This approach taps into their networks and potentially reaches a whole new audience.
Step 7: Measure your results and tweak your strategy as needed
Are you progressing toward your goals for your organization's LinkedIn content marketing strategy? Please take a moment to revisit the metrics you defined in the initial step of this process and closely monitor how they're evolving, along with the actions that influenced these changes. Tracking these metrics is conveniently done by keeping an eye on your LinkedIn page's analytics.
Exploring your website analytics is beneficial for a broader perspective on your organization's LinkedIn performance. You can use tools like Google Analytics to set up goals for tracking conversions, such as form submissions, free trial sign-ups, email list subscriptions, and even e-commerce sales. Social media analytics can be even more vital
If you're already hitting your goals, consider optimizing your outcomes by identifying the most effective content types, messages, and topics and boosting them. For instance, you can take a popular LinkedIn Live event and turn it into a regular series or increase your advertising reach to deliver your top-performing ads to a broader audience.
If you need to meet your goals, keep experimenting and refining your strategies to achieve better results. Whether adjusting content formats, targeting specific audiences, or fine-tuning advertising objectives, there are numerous paths to tailor your content marketing approach and drive improved outcomes.
LinkedIn Content Marketing Strategy Checklist
By following these dos and steering clear of these don'ts, you'll be on the path to a LinkedIn content strategy that resonates with your audience, aligns with your brand, and creates a positive impact in the professional community.
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✅ DO Stay True to Your Brand: While staying updated with trends is essential, ensure your LinkedIn content reflects your brand's identity. Finding a balance between being trendy and genuine is critical.
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✅ DO Mix Up Your Content: Don't stick to just one type of content. Experiment with different formats to keep things exciting and engaging for your audience.
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✅ DO Understand Your Audience: Know your audience's preferences and needs. This insight will help you create content that resonates with them.
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✅ DO Optimize for Search: Use relevant keywords and hashtags to help your content reach a wider audience. Making your content easily discoverable can boost its impact.
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✅ DO Embrace Helpful Tools: Use tools that make managing your LinkedIn content more straightforward and efficient. These tools can simplify tasks and give you valuable insights to refine your strategy.
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✅ DO Share Beyond LinkedIn: Spread your content's reach by sharing it on other suitable platforms, for instance, your website. You connect with new audiences and maximize your content's potential.
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🚫 DON'T Write Articles Directly on LinkedIn: Consider creating articles externally instead of using the built-in Publisher. You give yourself more control over formatting and ensure a smoother publishing process.
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🚫 DON'T Publish Irregularly: Keep a consistent posting schedule to maintain your audience's interest. Regular content updates keep them engaged and eager for more.
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🚫 DON'T Overwhelm Your Connections: Avoid bombarding your connections with excessive content. Focus on quality over quantity to provide value without overwhelming them.
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🚫 DON'T Use User-Generated Content without Permission: Always ask for permission before using content others create. Respecting their rights shows your professionalism and consideration. Getting approval is straightforward with Flockler's Rights Management. Post a comment to a LinkedIn or Instagram post using ready-made message templates or craft your message. Flockler keeps a record of pending requests, and after the customer approves by a hashtag, the content is available for your team to download and use in all marketing activities.
