If you look for the most pre-eminent social network for professional and career networking, LinkedIn is the best one out there. With over 700 million members (out of which 171+ million are from the US alone), LinkedIn has become a popular and essential B2B social media platform.
If youâre looking to attract more eyes to your business, LinkedIn can be more than helpful. An effective LinkedIn marketing strategy can help grow your business with increased brand awareness and more lead generation. Did you know that LinkedIn is 277% more effective for lead generation as compared to Facebook and Twitter? The visitor-to-lead conversion rate of LinkedIn is 2.74%, which is way better than that of Facebook (0.77%). Moreover, 89% of B2B marketers prefer using LinkedIn for lead generation.
You should know that cost per lead on LinkedIn marketing is actually 28% lower than on Google AdWords. Given that 94% of B2B marketers always include LinkedIn in their digital marketing strategies, there is no question about the effectiveness of this âprofessional social networking siteâ that helps marketers with customer acquisition. So, if you want to know how one can create an effective 2021 LinkedIn marketing strategy, keep on reading (and donât worry, we will explain it all to you).
Before we discuss how to create a successful LinkedIn marketing strategy in 2021, letâs take a look at what LinkedIn marketing is and why it is so important.
Understanding LinkedIn Marketing
It is important to comprehend one key aspect of LinkedIn that those days are gone when it was just for professionals and job seekers. You can now use it to grow your networks and business and boost your brand by using the connections and networking opportunities.
LinkedIn marketing is all about making connections, generating leads, fostering business relationships, enhancing brand awareness, and driving traffic to your business website. It is no surprise why LinkedIn has become an integral part of the marketing strategies of millions of businesses around the world.
Why is An Effective LinkedIn Marketing Strategy Important?
As compared to other social platforms, LinkedIn is not all about blatantly marketing or selling your services and products because the practices of aggressive sales pitches or spamming are highly frowned upon. The key to an effective LinkedIn marketing strategy is to be flexible and creative. Take an example of content marketing on LinkedIn that should be a part of your marketing strategy as it enables you to market your products or services without having to pay for it.
Given that the LinkedIn audience is different from other social networks, having an effective marketing strategy becomes ever so important. It is primarily because a different LinkedIn audience means crafting a different marketing strategy to get the desired results.
If used appropriately, LinkedIn has a huge potential of becoming an effective marketing tool to grow your business and take it to new heights. No wonder why 62% of B2B marketers confidently say that LinkedIn is effective in successfully generating leads.
LinkedIn can become a goldmine when it comes to business to business interactions. Moreover, it enables your brand to reach a wider audience and generate more leads. Moreover, it has the highest conversion rate than other social media platforms.
Steps To Creating a 2021 LinkedIn Marketing Strategy
If you’re not marketing on LinkedIn, you’re missing out on so many potential connections and customers. If your companyâs LinkedIn marketing strategy didnât deliver the results as expected in this year, you could easily modify it for good in the upcoming year.
So, if you want to increase your client base, then here is how you can develop a successful LinkedIn marketing strategy in 2021.
Step 1: Start By Defining Your Goals
Your LinkedIn marketing strategy needs to be based on your final objective. You should know that LinkedIn marketing is no different from marketing on other social platforms.
Instead of jumping right into marketing on LinkedIn (which mostly results in a waste of time and money), you may want to define one or more goals. For instance, you may have to determine whether you aim to:
- Sell your service or product
- Work on building brand awareness
- Build qualified leads that can help generate sales
- Work on strengthening your brand reputation
- Attract the target audience by engaging with them
Step 2: Define Your Target Audience
The prerequisite for crafting an effective LinkedIn marketing strategy is defining your target audience. Developing a marketing strategy without defining your target audience is just like planning on going on a long trip and ignoring the empty gas tank (you wonât be able to go too far).
One of the key factors to a successful LinkedIn marketing strategy is to understand the interests of your target audience. For example, you wouldn’t want to target vegans if you’re planning on selling chicken and beef burgers, right? That would be a disaster. Therefore, it is imperative to understand who your target audience is and what their interests are.
There is an exercise that focuses on your customers. You need to find answers to the following three questions:
- What does your customer want?
- What do your customers want to avoid?
- Are any barriers preventing your customers from getting the services or products from you or your competitors and how can you address them?
The reason why you need to find answers to these questions is that you should consider the interests of your target audience instead of just focusing on your business goals.
Step 3: Focus On Perfecting & Optimizing Your Company Page
You may or may not agree with the common saying that ‘the first impression is the last impression,’ but there’s no denying the fact it could prove pivotal when it comes to LinkedIn marketing strategy. After all, your company page could be one of your first interactions with your target audience.
It is surprising how so many businesses focus on creating a strong marketing strategy and neglect the importance of creating a captivating company page. Your company page must have all the information about your services, products, headquarter, company size, website URL, number of employees, and even company logo.
You may ask why it is so important and the simple and short answer is: credibility. From a cover image that perfectly resonates with your brand to contact information, everything you provide helps build the company’s credibility and conveys necessary details that your target audience wants to know. For better understanding, take a look at a list of top 10 company pages picked by LinkedIn.
Once you are done perfecting your company page, another key factor to keep in mind is to optimize it for search. It is because a well-optimized page helps a lot in increasing visibility in search results (on and off LinkedIn). You can optimize your company’s page by using keywords (make sure to use only targeted keywords), providing links to your company page (website, newsletter, blog, etc.), and uploading relevant content.
Step 4: Promote To Grow Your Audience
Having an attractive company page is of no use if there are no followers and engagement. That’s why it is important you encourage people to follow your company page. It not only helps increase your brand’s visibility but also improves the reach of your content.
Another reason why promoting a company’s page is crucial is that it reinforces the credibility of your brand. Start by asking your managers and employees to follow your company page and then move to invite existing customers to follow it as well.
Step 5: Make Waves With Your Content
You know that the competition is tough and survival is difficult, what to do? Well, LinkedIn marketing can help you stand out from your competition. However, your marketing strategy’s success depends on many crucial factors. One of them is âContent.â As we all know that content is king, LinkedIn is a perfect place for those who focus on creating useful and engaging content.
You should keep in mind that LinkedIn is more of a professional social network that is not ideal for sharing your doggo memes. Instead, it is a place where you can create and share content according to your target market through sharing posts and articles (made by you or others).
Even if you share others’ content by posting a link, write some content about what it is and why others should read it. You can tell a story for better engagement or add more value to the content that is already present in the post.
Step 6: Maximize Audience Engagement
Although people can read long and even boring articles for the sake of useful information, times are changing and people want quick information (there is nothing wrong with it). And thereâs no denying the fact that text-based articles play an important role in the success of your LinkedIn marketing strategy, but not paying attention to using images and videos would be a BIG mistake!
The reason why we are saying that using images and videos is extremely important is that the comment images have a 2x higher comment rate and it is a 5x higher conversion rate on videos.
Step 7: Start Using LinkedIn Stories
Okay, LinkedIn Stories is similar to Facebook and Instagram Stories, but it is mostly about business. In fact, you can use it to a great effect by sharing information about the projects you are working on or even by hosting corporate questions and answers sessions. Make the best use of LinkedIn Stories for better results.Â
Step 8: Start Using Hashtags
Have you noticed that now LinkedIn suggests hashtags whenever you post an update? Well, hashtags offer way more than you may have thought.
If you ever thought hashtags were silly, you should reconsider it because hashtag marketing tactics can increase your reach and raise brand awareness. Users can find relevant content with the help of hashtags. That’s why you need to start adding hashtags to your posts to increase your chances of reaching more people on LinkedIn.
Step 9: Start a LinkedIn Group
For your 2021 LinkedIn marketing strategy, you must focus on starting a group that can help give your brand an authoritative status in your niche. In other words, you want to outrank your competition and become an industry leader.
Start by creating a group and choosing a name that is related to your brand. Once you are done with creating group rules and a welcome post, you need to invite your connections to join the group. Provide value to group members by posting engaging, useful content, and refrain from posting memes or content that provides very little or no value. Most importantly, stay devoted and motivated.
Step 10: Build and Email Marketing List and Keep an Eye on LinkedIn Analytics
Marketers know the importance of email lists and that’s why they focus a lot on building them. You can do it as well with the help of your connection. Whenever you connect with a potential customer, invite them to be a part of your email marketing list and how it can benefit them.
You need to know how your LinkedIn marketing efforts are faring and you can do it with in-depth page analytics that is quite helpful. You can also use LinkedIn’s reporting tools that help evaluate overall performance.
Craft Your 2021 LinkedIn Marketing Strategy
Understand that LinkedIn prides itself in offering a plethora of opportunities to your brand to connect with the right audience. Since the inception of LinkedIn in 2003, it has slowly and gradually become a powerful marketing tool that has a huge potential of playing a key role in building your brand awareness and generating more leads.
Before working on your LinkedIn marketing strategy in 2021, it is imperative to have an in-depth understanding of your business goals and target audience. Your company page needs to be compelling and make sure to optimize it for the online search. Moreover, focus on the content and create a group. All in all, your LinkedIn marketing strategy needs to align with your goals and target audience.
Are there any other tactics to create an effective LinkedIn marketing strategy? Please share your views with us and feel free to contact us if you have any queries related to LinkedIn marketing.
