LinkedIn continues to be the strongest social media platform for B2B marketing. In addition to being the easiest social channel for finding targeted B2B audiences, LinkedIn has made an aggressive push over the last 12 months to turn itself into a more powerful content marketing platform. This gives you a lot of new options to use LinkedIn for effective marketing in just about any industry.
1. Write Native Blog Posts
The first strategy is to create native blog posts on the LinkedIn platform. When we say native, we’re referring to taking the content that you would normally post to a blog on your website and posting it directly inside of LinkedIn’s content editor so that the content actually lives within LinkedIn, rather than linking out to your blog post.
This is, of course, a preference for LinkedIn because it keeps their users inside of LinkedIn to consume your content rather than leaving the LinkedIn platform. That means that your content will get better distribution inside of LinkedIn
2. Post Native Videos
The second strategy is to use native video. Again, in this case, you’ll want to upload your video file directly into LinkedIn’s content editor rather than linking to a YouTube video outside of LinkedIn. Video has been given a much higher priority in LinkedIn in 2019 and gives you an opportunity to communicate with your audience in a way that’s more entertaining and engaging.
3. Use Hashtags with Your Content
Using hashtags is a great way to get your content found. Similar to other social media platforms, hashtags on LinkedIn create a way for users to search for content by keywords and topics. Use hashtags on all of your content to ensure that you’re showing up in searches.
4. Promote Your Content with Ads
Promote your content with ads. The LinkedIn ad platform doesn’t get much attention but is actually quite powerful and very easy to use. When you create content inside of LinkedIn, use the ad platform to promote that content to your target audiences and make sure it gets the visibility that you desire.
5. Target Your Ads with Matched Audiences
Matched audiences are a way for you to find similar audiences to those that you’ve already had success with so you can expand the reach of your marketing beyond the audience that you’ve already built (very similar to Lookalike Audiences on the Facebook advertising platform). Matched Audiences are also a way to retarget visitors to your website and your list of prospects and customers, making it easy to retarget interested audiences with additional content and offers.
6. Start Your Own Group
Starting your own group within LinkedIn gives you a great opportunity to demonstrate leadership in your particular market and to create relationships with a large number of people in your market very quickly. It’s very easy to start a group in LinkedIn, and it can be a very powerful asset to your business and your personal brand.
7. Add Value to Other Groups
You don’t have to start your own group, and in some cases, it may not be worth your time and effort if you feel like there are already really good well-established groups in your market in LinkedIn. In that case, be an active participant and demonstrate value to the group through your content and your comments, and you will extract a lot of attention from that group to your business and personal profile on LinkedIn.
Don’t just selfishly post your content to the group (a big, common mistake). Instead, look for opportunities to consume and share other people’s content and add some value with thoughtful comments.
8. Leverage Your Team
Finally, leverage your team. Every business should create a business profile on LinkedIn and post to it. But it’s also a very effective strategy to have everyone on your team share the content from your company on their personal LinkedIn profiles.
When they share on their personal profiles it will greatly increase the visibility of your content and also demonstrate that the members of your team are all on the same page.
Take Action on LinkedIn
LinkedIn is the most powerful B2B marketing platform in social media and doesn’t seem to be at risk of losing that title anytime soon. Make sure you’re investing effort and energy into these content marketing strategies for LinkedIn in 2019. Pick three and take action right away, then let us know how it goes for you!
