Todd Kunsman — June 14, 2020 
Over the years, LinkedIn quickly grew to obtain massive amounts of users. While the early days were a way to show off your resumes and professional skills — it turned into a viable marketing and sales channel too.
People are coming to this platform to be educated, connect with colleagues and thought leaders in their same space, follow companies, and learn about tools and services. Because of that, there is no question that your company needs to have a LinkedIn marketing strategy in place.
But beyond some basic posting on your company handle, your organization needs to strategize as to how to best attract audiences, but also engage customers and employees. By not doing so, you are missing out on a huge opportunity that your competitors will gladly take advantage of.
Why LinkedIn Matters
If you are working in marketing, sales, or recruiting then you probably know why LinkedIn is so important to your organization. However, it’s worth reiterating why LinkedIn matters so much today for marketing.
Currently, LinkedIn is approaching 700 million users that are based in over 200 countries around the world. The amount of potential reach is staggering and that alone should convince your teams and executives of its value.
But we can dig a bit deeper with some LinkedIn statistics:
- 55% of decision-makers use this content to determine which organization to work with. 1 in 5 investors says it’s the best platform when you want to learn about a topic. (LinkedIn)
- 98% of the Fortune 500 companies use LinkedIn to tell their stories, recruit, and network. (UMass)
- 4 out of 5 members on the platform are in charge of making business decisions. Compared to the average web audience, LinkedIn users have 2X buying power. (LinkedIn)
- B2B marketers have seen revenue increases by using LinkedIn. 43% attributed their sales to LinkedIn. (DemandWave)
- 52% of those surveyed said that LinkedIn had the biggest impact during research. They use it to browse existing discussions on products and ask for recommendations. (Influencer Marketing Hub)
LinkedIn Marketing Strategy Tips
While the above are just a few statistics related to LinkedIn, those alone are pretty powerful numbers. If you have a LinkedIn marketing strategy in-place, maybe are starting from scratch, or need an upgrade — stick with me here.
Some of these tips you may be doing, but others you might be completely missing or unfamiliar with. I hope these help your strategy!
Optimize your company profile
You might be thinking, “Well, no duh!” but you’d be surprised at the gaps on your brand’s company profile on LinkedIn. Since there are many aspects to LinkedIn that you might be paying more attention to (like the advertising side), it’s quite easy to overlook creating an epic company profile page.
Not only will it help ensure you get company page followers, but it keeps audiences engaged and interested in your copy, content shares, and overall information. Here is a checklist of items:
- Company logo that is on brand
- Banner image that shows creativity and on brand
- Your company tagline that engages the reader
- Custom CTA button to point to a landing page
- Detailed description about your company
- Add your organization’s specialties
- Include any specific hashtags that matter to your org
- Career page (you may want to upgrade to build a career and work culture page too)
This is a chance to really show off your brand, mission, and tone of voice so audiences can start to see what your company is all about.
Mix up your content
You know what makes your LinkedIn marketing strategy stale? Posting generic copy with a link to the company blog post on some cadence and never mixing it up.
There is no strategy in place, other than trying to get clicks to your company content. Naturally, that is a part of the marketing strategy on LinkedIn, but it needs to be more engaging and interesting.
You want to post content that will connect with your audiences and accomplish some specific goal. That could help educate, guide, or to entertain audiences. And with this, it means going beyond just sharing a link to your latest blog post.
Utilize videos, images, presentations, polls, carousel images, text only, third-party content, and certainly your own blogs or guides are fine too. Each one of these mediums can cover areas about your products or services, your company, employees, customers, or industry thoughts.
Your content becomes interesting, more engaging, and it feels like your brand is genuinely trying to help than always pushing for a sale.
Get employees involved
While building a LinkedIn marketing strategy has a big focus on utilizing your branded page, this is also an area to get employees involved.
A popular strategy that is being used by many organizations is employee advocacy — where employees are creating and sharing content from their expertise and behalf of their company.
Many employees are already sharing and talking about the company they work for, plus have social connections not connected to your brand.
For example, Adobe has over 900 employee advocates posting and sharing to LinkedIn and other social channels. Those employees have a combined reach of over 3 million! That’s a big additional brand and marketing boost.
“Brand messages reached 561% further when shared by employees vs the same messages shared via official brand social channels.” (MSLGroup)
Zero in on storytelling
While posting content with a purpose and variation will make a bigger impact for your LinkedIn marketing strategy, there is one other area to weave in more. And that is digital storytelling.
The way your company tells its story will naturally be in all forms of marketing from print, content, ads, the website, etc. But in your LinkedIn strategy, you can and should be connecting your company’s narrative here too.
Audiences like your customers, prospects, and just general observers can let their guard down with your branding. They know what your mission and values are, but also creating something that is worth paying attention to.
There is no exact methodology for building your story, but treat your company LinkedIn page, advertising, and posts like additions and chapters to your overall brand story.
Up your copywriting game
No matter what you are doing for your LinkedIn marketing strategy, copywriting plays a massive role in how people engage and interact with your brand.
Naturally, any LinkedIn advertising you do having a topnotch copy will help your ad conversions, engagements, and even can improve your costs. But your copywriting skills need to be just as good (if not better) when it comes to social shares or any LinkedIn in-mails that may be part of your strategy.
For marketing and salespeople, it’s easy to get in the habit of using marketing jargon or go for the hard-sell. But, that needs to be altered as audiences can read right through that and don’t want to be constantly pitched.
Start writing copy like you speak, become more human, and show off some personality. It may take some practice for your LinkedIn marketing to find a rhythm, but it starts to become more natural as you go. Plus, you should find results improving and engagement growing.
A great way to start doing this is talk to text, if you are struggling to write as you speak.
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