LinkedIn marketing basics

Contents · 5 sections

1. What are the advantages of LinkedIn?
2. Start by optimizing your company’s LinkedIn page
3. Grow your followers organically
4. Types of LinkedIn ads
5. A LinkedIn marketing strategy

LinkedIn is one of the largest social networks, yet when it comes to online marketing, it often gets overlooked. It deserves better. The platform is far more than a place to present yourself as a professional or showcase your company. It can help you hit real marketing goals. So in this article, I’ll take a closer look at LinkedIn: what makes it different and how you can make it part of your business’s overall marketing strategy.

What are the advantages of LinkedIn?

In many ways, LinkedIn is different from other social networks such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Those differences are exactly where its main advantages lie.

For starters, most social platforms revolve around entertainment. They’re where people spend their free time, scrolling for hours through a news feed full of all kinds of content: funny videos, news articles, games and more.

LinkedIn, by contrast, brings together professionals and businesses. At the time of writing, it has more than 760 million users. That makes it the largest professional network in the world. It’s the channel of choice for senior managers at large companies and for specialists across many industries.

In other words, LinkedIn’s audience looks very different from that of the biggest social network, Facebook. On Facebook you’ll find people of every profession, education level and interest, while on LinkedIn more than a third of all users hold senior management positions. Sixty-three million users are in roles that let them make decisions about a business’s growth, and more than 17 million are opinion leaders.

People come to LinkedIn to learn, not to be entertained. LinkedIn lets them keep up with trends in different industries, get expert advice, sharpen their skills, form partnerships and follow some of the most popular and successful entrepreneurs in the world.

According to the latest data, more than 30 million companies have a company page on the platform. That includes many of the best-known companies in the world, among them 98% of Fortune 500 companies.

All of this makes LinkedIn an excellent platform for online marketing. It’s especially well suited to B2B businesses, because it lets you reach the right people in the right positions. Examples include businesses in IT, telecommunications, recruitment and more.

If you haven’t tapped into the platform yet, you probably have plenty of questions. Where do you start? How do you reach the right audiences? How do you make LinkedIn marketing work? I’ll answer them in the rest of this article.

Start by optimizing your company’s LinkedIn page

By now you’re probably convinced that LinkedIn has huge potential to generate quality leads. It can also boost your brand awareness and even help you find the right specialists for a new project. To get those results, though, you first need to take one small but very important step: optimize your company page.

Pages are the platform’s basic building blocks. A personal page presents you as a professional. A company page presents your business and what it does. If your company doesn’t have one yet, I recommend creating it, because it can pay off in a big way. Here are the main steps.

When you create a company page, start with the basics. Add a description, your logo and a cover image, and fill in every important detail about your business. Describe what you do and tell people a bit more about the company’s history, mission and vision. This is also the place to share key achievements and awards, so highlight the details that matter. They add value and strengthen your business’s authority.

Keep in mind that once you start building connections and looking for clients, your company page will serve as your business card. You want it to make a strong impression and engage visitors.

Don’t neglect your personal profile either. After all, you’re the face of your business. Your own professionalism and achievements will make people trust your company even more. A strong personal profile also makes it easier to connect with other professionals, whether you want to offer them your services or bring them on board as employees, partners and so on.

Grow your followers organically

Attracting followers to your company page is the next important step. It lets you put your business and products in front of more people: potential employees, partners and clients. One way to do it is organically (that is, without paying for ads).

That includes adding a “follow” button to the page. Your colleagues and the other people you’re connected with on LinkedIn are the first ones you should invite to follow it. Little by little, you’ll start building your network of followers.

Once the first results come in, you’ll be tempted to promote your products and services more. My advice: don’t overdo it.

As I mentioned, people on LinkedIn want to learn something new. So invest time and effort in creating quality articles, case studies, analyses, research and guides.

Publish useful, interesting content that speaks to what your target audience cares about. It’s a great way to position yourself as an expert in your field and engage more visitors. Of course, if you rely only on organic reach to build your following, keep in mind that it’s a slower approach with its own limits.

At some point it makes sense to use LinkedIn ads, which will help you reach much larger audiences more easily. So next, let’s take a quick look at the different types of ads the platform offers.

Types of LinkedIn ads

Like Google and Facebook, LinkedIn gives you plenty of ways to advertise your products, services, job openings and more. One important note: the cost per click (CPC) for LinkedIn ads is several times higher than on Google and Facebook.

Here are the different ad formats you can use and what sets each one apart:

• Sponsored content

Sponsored content lets you reach new LinkedIn users who don’t follow your page. Unlike other ad formats, it shows up in the user’s news feed, right next to the content they chose to see. That greatly increases the chance they’ll notice it and engage with it. Keep in mind that sponsored content also appears on your organization’s page. The closest Facebook equivalent is a boosted post.

Sponsored content works well for growing your followers, building brand awareness and announcing upcoming promotions and events.

• Direct sponsored content

LinkedIn also offers direct sponsored content. The main difference is that it doesn’t appear on your organization’s page. That gives you more freedom to create personalized ads aimed at your target audience. This is the place to test different messages, visuals and offers to see which combination gets you the best results.

• Text ads

As the name suggests, these ads are mostly text with a very small image (usually the company logo). They appear in the right-hand sidebar, and keep in mind that they’re only available to desktop users. They’re LinkedIn’s version of pay-per-click ads, which means you pay only when someone clicks on the ad.

They may look a bit retro, but they’re a great option for generating leads and promoting deals and offers. The key is to write a catchy headline with a short description. And don’t forget a call to action. Here, too, test different versions of your copy to find the most engaging one.

• Sponsored InMail

These campaigns deliver your ad as a message straight to the inbox of the users you target. That greatly increases the chance they’ll read it. The key here is to make the copy and the offer as personalized as possible. Otherwise, you risk people seeing what you sent them as annoying spam.

Sponsored InMail campaigns are an excellent choice when you offer B2B services. You can use them to tell people about an upcoming event you’re organizing or to offer them a free introductory service, such as an audit or a consultation.

• Dynamic ads

Dynamic ads are personalized, because they use the user’s photo, name and other details from their profile. That makes them very good at grabbing attention. There are four types, depending on the action you want the user to take: following your page (follower ads), visiting a website or landing page (spotlight ads), job offers (job ads) and promoting content (content ads).

Those are the main ad formats. Once you know them, it’s time to build a complete LinkedIn marketing strategy.

A LinkedIn marketing strategy

If you work in marketing, you know that running ads without a clear goal won’t get you far. Even when it works, the results won’t come close to what you get by focusing your efforts on building a complete LinkedIn marketing strategy. As I mentioned, advertising on LinkedIn costs significantly more. So be clear about what you want to achieve when you choose this network for your ads.

The platform also lets you reach out directly from your profile to people who interest you and whom you’d like to work with. Messaging each of them one by one and keeping track of every conversation can be extremely time-consuming. The good news is that this process can be automated, which saves you a lot of time and effort. Of course, you’ll need to research your audience carefully. It’s also a good idea to prepare a sequence of messages to send, and to optimize both your personal profile and your company page beforehand. Still, LinkedIn automation is well worth considering. Done the right way, it can bring significant benefits to your business.

To sum up, a complete LinkedIn strategy will help you pursue your goals and know exactly what to do at every stage. If you’re just starting out with your company page, give it time. You’ll need enough data before there’s anything meaningful to analyze.

If you don’t have the time or the technical know-how, the smartest move is to bring in a trusted partner to handle your LinkedIn marketing and automation.