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Beginners Guide To LinkedIn Marketing

So, you’ve crafted the perfect LinkedIn profile after reading our handy how to blog, but what next? Whether you’re looking to market your personal brand, product, or service on LinkedIn, we’ve got the ultimate guide to help you get started!

According to LinkedIn, the platform has the largest global professional community, with over a billion members across more than 200 countries and regions worldwide. A LOT of people, right? If that isn’t a reason to get cracking with developing your LinkedIn marketing strategy, we don’t know what is…

When used to its full potential, the platform can help build brand awareness and authority, grow your network, generate leads and increase revenue. In this blog, we’ll delve into why LinkedIn can be invaluable as a marketing channel and how best to utilise it to achieve your broader goals.

Why is LinkedIn Marketing important for a business?

With its extensive worldwide reach, LinkedIn is now widely considered to be an integral channel for any B2B marketing strategy. Ultimately, you should always be visible where your audience is … and for a B2B organisation or professional, your business-focused audience will almost certainly be on LinkedIn. Its evolution in recent years also makes it highly effective for improving personal branding too.

The platform has also introduced a range of features designed to help businesses build stronger professional brands, improve audience engagement and leverage AI powered tools for content creation. A great example of this is LinkedIn Newsletters, through which you can create and share on-site, long-read content. This allows you to showcase your opinions and expert knowledge on a range of topics, stand out from competitors and attract more people to your website. Other social media platforms aren’t currently offering content distribution of this nature.

So, what are our best practices for LinkedIn marketing? Here are some of our top tips:

1: Know when to use a business page or profile

Pages on LinkedIn work similarly to Facebook pages. Anyone can view published content and opt to follow a page to stay up to date. There’s no waiting around or having to accept connections first. As LinkedIn pages are public – unlike profiles that may have privacy settings restricting access to content – they enable amplified reach and engagement, which is why they’re primarily used for businesses.

Profiles are a little different. They’re designed to be used by individuals; however, they can still have followers, which differ slightly from connections on LinkedIn. When connections are made, you both get access to each other’s networks, you can reciprocally direct message and view each other’s content. But when you opt to follow, you’ll see the other person’s content but yours won’t be visible unless they also follow you.

For someone to connect to another profile, the owner must accept the invitation. Profiles also differ from pages, because you can have one-to-one private conversations through messaging on the platform. You may be using a profile over a page if you’re looking to build your personal brand, or you’re an individual seeking jobs and opportunities.

Using a page for a business will also be a better approach for sponsored content if you were to dive into LinkedIn advertising for your business, product, or service.

LinkedIn page vs. personal page (profile):

LinkedIn pages represent businesses, while personal profiles represent individuals.
Your personal profile has connections. Your LinkedIn page has followers.
You can only run ads on LinkedIn through a page.
You must have a personal profile to be able to create a page.
Your personal profile includes sections about you including activity, experience, skills & endorsements, recommendations, and interests. A LinkedIn page’s sections include an overview, about, jobs, and people.
Both are free!

2: Test different formats

No format is right or wrong, but your audience may respond differently to variations of content.

Don’t be afraid to test multiple formats such as imagery, text-only posts, videos, or using interactive LinkedIn features such as polls.

If you plan on storytelling within your content on LinkedIn, longer text posts may be more appropriate, but if you want to share easy-to-digest and relatable content, shorter text posts could make more of an impact. Don’t forget to test different approaches and analyse your audience’s reactions.

If you’re creating image-led posts, make sure images are clear, high-quality and relevant to the accompanying written content. Image carousels are an engaging way of showcasing multiple images in one place, as opposed to just uploading them as feed images. They also sit nicely in terms of sizing and style.

In the above example, the image on the right isn’t in focus, the subject isn’t properly in the frame and the background isn’t the best – wires and cables do not shout aesthetic!

The left image is high quality, the subject is in focus and there are no distractions in the frame – Making it clear and concise.

Video on LinkedIn

The demand for video content has hugely increased in recent few years, heightened by the ever-growing popularity of platforms like TikTok.

Some Patch tips for sharing videos on LinkedIn:

Design for mobile!

Always film and edit for mobile when it comes to videos as most users are active on the LinkedIn app, rather than desktop. According to Findstack, “57% of LinkedIn users come to the platform from their smartphones.”

Although people are still using LinkedIn on desktop, your strategy should prioritise mobile.

Capture the user’s attention from the start

The human attention span is becoming increasingly like that of a goldfish! We’re all too busy to invest so much time into watching videos on social media and want convenience, which is why shorter videos perform better – we think TikTok would agree! To prevent people clicking off when watching your video, make it short and to the point. LinkedIn recommends that videos on the platform should include a hook within the first 1-2 seconds.

Design for sound off

Even if you don’t have much speech in your video, designing them for sound off is super important to ensure they’re accessible. Always include closed captions when editing. Handy tools such as Headliner and Canva allow you to instantly add subtitles to your videos.

You can also upload a subtitle SRT file when uploading the video onto LinkedIn. Here’s how:

Click the video icon in the LinkedIn share box on desktop and choose the video file you want to upload.

When the preview shows up, click the edit icon on the top right to see the video settings and then click ‘select file’, and attach the associated SRT Subtitle file.

Choose the right video length

Depending on the objective for your video and its content, you’ll want to ensure it’s the right length. LinkedIn says that the most successful videos on the platform are 15 seconds or less. A viewer typically loses attention within the first 10 seconds of a video, which is why they need to be hooked in the first few.

They also recommend testing longer videos for demand generation. “The same study found that longer-form content drove as many clicks and views as shorter videos because they help tell a more complex product or brand story.”

3: Use Hashtags on your posts

As with other social media platforms (Instagram primarily) hashtags are an important part of your LinkedIn strategy.

Hashtags serve a purpose – such as increasing reach, which leads to more engagement, ultimately resulting in more brand awareness. Without hashtags, you’ll be relying solely on first and second connections to see your posts and engage. By adding hashtags, you’ll have the potential to show up where interested users are following.

First things first…hashtag research! You need to include relevant hashtags relating to the topics your post is focused on, but in that mix, you’ll also want to include some relatively popular or ‘larger’ hashtags too.

For example, if you’re speaking about company culture, you might mention things like productivity and staff retention in your post. So, your hashtags may include ‘#CompanyCulture, #Productivity, #workculture and #Culture’ By using this combination, you have a good mix of smaller and larger hashtags, they’re all relevant but some are broader.

So how many should you use?

Hashtags on LinkedIn are unlimited; however, we recommend between 3- 5 targeting the niche you want to reach, with some broader terms to maximise reach.

4: Stay consistent

Keep your posting schedule consistent on LinkedIn to maximise impact. Compared to other platforms, it’s not essential to be constantly publishing, all day every day, but reliability is crucial.

Regardless of whether you’re selling a product or service or building a personal brand – your aim should be to capture and hold onto people’s attention. The only way to build this recognition and remain memorable is to show up consistently, while prioritising the quality of your content over quantity.

You can post every day, 3 times a week or once a week, but by staying consistent, your audience will learn to trust and value your content. It’s important to set a realistic posting schedule you can stick to.

To determine the best times to post, publish content for a month, then review which times and days are gaining the best insights, in terms of engagement and reach. You can also take this time to see what content your audience enjoyed more than others, which will also help you to plan content in the future.

Linkedin’s engagement typically follows the working day and week patterns. Daily peaks are between 9-11am, and weekly peaks are often on Tuesday or Wednesday – but this should always be tested and consideration given to the nature of your content and attention span expectations. In some cases, posting a video on a Friday may be better than on a traditional high-engagement day like Tuesday. People are more likely to be scrolling at the end of the week, rather than getting stuck into reading, so light content for low attention span days is more effective.

Creating a content calendar will facilitate your consistency with the platform. To support this, we recommend using a scheduling tool such as Metricool, to get ahead of time and stick to your goals! That way you can draft an idea at any time inspiration strikes, without having to reactively upload it there and then.

Ultimately, it’s important to have fun with what you are doing, regardless of if you’re posting on a page or a profile. Creativity and authenticity are critical to success, so choose content that resonates with your target audience, relates to your brand, product or service, and builds an engaged online community.

We hope you’re now feeling ready to get started with your LinkedIn marketing. If you need a helping hand, contact us to talk through our social media services.