LinkedIn: An Important Part of Your Digital Marketing Strategy

Since its first launch in 2003, LinkedIn has become a networking hub for businesses globally and has skyrocketed in popularity with currently over 610 million members. It is now an integral part of the business world and not having an established account on the platform can be detrimental to your company’s success. It creates trust that you are who you say you are and gives a consumer a chance to learn more about you and your business with ease and without having to commit to anything at an early stage. If your account is impressive and you’ve implemented a LinkedIn marketing strategy, you could convert someone from ‘just looking’ into a fully-fledged customer. So, how would you do this?

Create a LinkedIn marketing strategy

To implement a LinkedIn marketing strategy, you first must know what it is. Put simply, it is a plan put in place to reach specific digital marketing objectives and goals through LinkedIn. This can include building brand awareness in order for your business to be more visible and established within the industry or recruiting desirable candidates. Tactics such as these may often be overlooked due to them seeming initially small in impact. However, in the long term, these tactics can prove incredibly valuable and can even make or break a business.

The LinkedIn ranking algorithm exposed

Algorithm can be an intimidating sounding word, but it is essentially a set of instructions for solving a problem or accomplishing a task. Unlike other platforms, LinkedIn has been fairly open about how theirs works:

1. An AI bot will ensure that your content isn’t spam by checking through your content. It’s unlikely to be served to many peoples’ feeds if your content fails this test. Therefore, on LinkedIn you should only share high-quality, original material.
2. Following the checks, your post will be seeded to a trial audience. Then the algorithm examines the engagement of those initial people. If there is little to no interest in the post, then it is unlikely that LinkedIn will show your post to many more people.
3. If your initial audience found the post favourable and engaging, and gave it a fair number of likes and shares, then further checks will be undertaken by the algorithm to ensure it isn’t spam, and whether or not the results are credible for your audience network. This is when the algorithm broadens the number of accounts it feeds the post to, increasing your visibility and opportunities for engagement.
4. Human editors will eventually become involved, assuming your post is still performing well. They’ll read through the post and then come to a decision as to whether it merits boosting to a wider audience.

Why is LinkedIn essential for your digital marketing strategy?

Why use LinkedIn for digital marketing? Firstly, you’ll be implementing a digital marketing strategy where there might not have been one before, potentially saving your business. It’ll bring in new customers and give your business a voice and digital footprint that can prove invaluable. This will give you an edge over competitors who aren’t prioritising their social media, their SEO or even just keeping their website up to date and user friendly. A good website or social media account such as LinkedIn can be all it takes for a consumer to decide to bring their business your way. If your account appears active and engaging, the account demonstrates that your company is also active, engaging, and feels more trustworthy than an account with minimal posts, low rates of engagement and has little information available. This is why LinkedIn should definitely be a part of your digital marketing strategy.

The top LinkedIn marketing tools for your business

LinkedIn has put in a huge amount of effort to allow users to gain the majority of their information straight from their platform. LinkedIn supplies you with all the own analytics and statistics required to analyse important areas of your page including engagement in the page and posts, CTR, demographics of the people interacting, your organic following, and so much more. It’s your one-stop-shop to all the analytic data required to make informed decisions about the activity of your LinkedIn page.

You will also have, on the left side of your business page, statistics on hashtag following. This is a great way to see what’s popular and current, what people are talking about and what you should be posting about in order to be seen and heard by the widest audience.

One tool we recommend that isn’t internally produced by LinkedIn itself, is a scheduling tool. There are various options to go for with this kind of tool, however at Cariad Marketing we use Sprout Social (with some adhoc posting where necessary). This tool can be fundamental to your LinkedIn content strategy as well as helping you create a flourishing business account as it not only schedules the posts you create for a particular time, it also explicitly tells you when the optimum timing for posting would be. It will give a star rating based on when the most engagement is acquired, and therefore when is best for you to post.

A step-by-step guide to developing an effective digital marketing strategy with Cariad Marketing

This is all there is to know regarding a LinkedIn marketing strategy, bar one key element. How can you create a comprehensive digital marketing strategy for LinkedIn? Let’s start from the top and ensure we first know how to create a business page on LinkedIn:

1. The very first step is to create the page itself. To do this: Click the “Work icon” from the top right corner of your homepage. Scroll down and select “Create a Company Page”. You have the option to select the page type you’d like to create, i.e. for Small business (under 200 employees), Medium to large business (over 200 employees), Showcase page, Educational institution (school or university/college).
2. Now the page is created, it’s time to set up your identity. This step is essential in terms of branding so take your time to consider all your decisions to ensure you’re properly representing your company. You’ll be required to fill in fields such as the industry, company size, company type (public, non-profit, educational, and others).
3. Visual identity. Upload your logo and a standard image for your company LinkedIn page – these are the elements that will make your page stand out. Make sure you follow the photo standards: LinkedIn logo size: 300 x 300 pixels, LinkedIn business cover photo: 1536 x 768 pixels
4. Your company description. This is the first thing someone sees when checking out your company’s LinkedIn page, meaning it should be informative and to the point. If possible, include a synopsis of your products or services and include any added value your company has to offer. This should be kept short whilst still presenting as much relevant information as possible.
5. LinkedIn allows you to preview how your page will look, so double check to ensure everything is set up how you want it then click the “Create page” button. Once you’ve done this, your page will be live.

Once your page is set up and looking good, you can then turn your attention to the digital marketing strategy. Set yourself some goals and objectives you want to meet by a certain time frame. This will ensure that your strategy stays focused.

Then turn your attention to your target audience. Who would you like to see your posts? Ideally, who would your customers be? What demographics do your current customers fall into? The answer to these questions is who you should be writing your posts and content for. This will assist in getting the best engagement on your page, so make sure your posts are relevant and engaging for your target audience.

Now you have established who you’re aiming your digital marketing efforts at, you can begin to expand the strategy with some straightforward methods. Some of the best methods to include are:

• Use LinkedIn newsletter. If you already have a newsletter then this method is perfect for you as you can just bring the content that has already been written onto the platform.
• Add LinkedIn groups to your page. This has the advantage of making your content more visible to more people.
  Make your employees part of your business’ Linkedin strategy. Your employees are your best ambassadors. Ask them to share their own content and tag the company page.
• Tag people in your posts. This gets people interacting directly with your page and makes people feel included in your business.
• Use LinkedIn hashtags. This will also make your brand more visible across the platform.
• Measure your LinkedIn performance. Keeping an eye on your statistics in digital marketing is key to the entire process. You can put all these actions in place but if you don’t measure the success of these actions, you won’t understand where you should be making more or less effort. This can also help ensure you’re meeting your targets and digital marketing objectives, and keep you on track to delivering tangible goals.
• Set up events like webinars, hosted on LinkedIn, on a topic your company is passionate about and invite your connections and followers to come along.

With your new-found knowledge in LinkedIn digital marketing, go out into the digital world and put it into action. You will be surprised how much optimising this wonderful platform can do for your business. If it all feels too much but you believe it would be helpful for you, get in contact with Cariad Marketing today and we will promise to get your LinkedIn profile looking professional and full of your brand’s signature character!