How Linkedin Marketing Works in 2021

What Is LinkedIn Marketing?

LinkedIn is a social media platform specifically centered around businesses. With more than 722 million members and 675 million monthly users in 2021, it’s actively helped people network, recruit and sell for over 15 years.

LinkedIn is also used as a place to carry out different company marketing objectives. How? It offers a variety of features specially created to generate visibility, interactions and, of course, leads.

There are several tactics that you can use other than simply uploading the typical text post, such as posting in multiple formats. This can make all the difference when it comes to who sees and interacts with your brand.

How Is LinkedIn Used For Marketing?

The fact that LinkedIn is specifically designed for business purposes means it already draws in a crowd with certain interests. People in this platform tend to use it to learn about people in and outside their network and about different companies, to connect with professionals and to do business. 

Feed posts:
All your posts are visible to your contacts and may be visible (depending on your configuration) to other people outside of your direct network, which is great to get new people to see your profile. LinkedIn offers a series of formats in which you can share news, ideas or updates:

• Text posts: share up to 1300 characters to express your thoughts or ideas (only around 200 characters are visible at first. You need to click “read more” to view its full length). They can be accompanied by different assets to improve readability like:

• Images: You can upload one or more images, and you can also choose to post them as regular images or carousel images (up to 9 images).
• Videos: A great way of getting complex messages across, since this format is more flexible and dynamic. You can only upload one per post, but it can be up to 10 minutes long.
• Presentations or document posts: Since April 2019, LinkedIn allows users to upload full presentations in .pdf, .ppt, .pptx, .doc, and .docx file extensions. 
• External links to news articles or webpages: You can share interesting websites and articles simply by pasting them in your LinkedIn post. 
• Polls: They come in handy when you need to collect anonymous feedback from your LinkedIn connections and followers and learn more about your audience. LinkedIn lets you place up to four options in your poll.
• Linkedin articles: They're designed to create in-depth texts about professional experience or content. Typically longer than posts - they can have up to 125,000 characters - they can be indexed by search engines, which provides even broader reach.
• Stories: A vertical format released in 2020. A story is short, spontaneous and dynamic - you can view it for a few seconds and it only lasts 24 hours. Share images or videos and add links to websites or posts for users to learn more about the topic you’re posting about.
  
  

Direct actions:

• Messaging: you can use LinkedIn to send direct messages to people in your network. If they aren’t already part of your network, you can send them a connection request with a personalized message to let them know you're interested in reaching out to them. This is a great way to start a conversation with people you’re not familiar with yet.
• Groups: groups are useful as a means to share information or set up discussions with people that share general interests or characteristics. 

Paid Ads

Different format ads can be created to reach specific audiences. One of its most important benefits is that you are able to run hyper-segmented ads based on key characteristics that are not available in almost any other social media platform. For example, segmentation can be based on role, company type, amount of years in a company, etc.

Creating paid ads consists of 5 easy steps:

• Choosing the objective of your campaign: whether it is to create brand awareness, gain traction in the consideration stage or to generate leads, it will determine how success is measured and the best ways to do so.
• Selecting the target audience: as we mentioned before, they can be created based on different criteria to perfectly match your target audience.
• Choosing the format of your ad: select which one of the followings will help get your message across the best:

• Sponsored Content: it is very similar to an organic post but that is boosted to guarantee people in your target audience will see it. It may include a button to redirect people to your call to action like: learn more, download content, etc. They come in three different formats: three different formats: single image ads, video ads, and carousel ads. 
• Inbox or Message ads: these are messages that let you reach your target audience’s inbox through personalized emails. They’re mostly used to drive brand consideration/engagement and generate demand and leads. They can have a button to trigger your desired action like filling out a form, clicking on a URL, or easily replying to your comment.
• Dynamic ads: they are personalized ads tailored to each person based on their profile data: such as profile photo, company name, or job title. There are three formats to it:

1. Follower ads: to promote a company page and encourage members to follow your LinkedIn Page. 
2. Spotlight ads: made to promote your service, product, event or content. The CTA will redirect them off of Linkedin and to your URL.
3. Jobs ads: this is made to promote companies who are looking for specific types of talent or to promote specific opportunities.
   

• Text ads: these texts are generally found at the right-hand side of
  the fastest way to get your business in front of the world’s largest professional network
  Used to promote your company, your product, a downloadable asset, or any site you wish to promote.
  One of the benefits is that it contains a small image, which means there’s usually less need for design work.

• Set budget and time frame: define how much you want to spend on your next campaign. These can be Cost por Click (CPC), based on campaigns which objectives are going to be pointed towards actions that can be measured by clicks; Cost per Impression (CPM) which are measured by the number of times an ad has been seen or Cost per Send (CPS), which is determined by the number of message ads you a message has been delivered successfully. At this point, you also need to define how long you want these campaigns to run. It’s important to let them run for enough time for you to gather enough data that can help you establish trends and understand customer intention.
• Analyze results: Linkedin provides really insightful data about how your campaign is performing. This lets you drill down on the important data and improve campaigns to reach better performing or more interesting audiences.
  

There are other innovative paid media formats that can be used for different types of marketing strategies:

• Lead gen forms: These can be added to your CTA in your Message Ads and Sponsored Content and when clicked, a form appears that sends pre-filled forms with the fields that were configured. This is a great asset for downloadable whitepapers or a webinar sign ups. One of the benefits of doing this is that you can later download the generated list or integrate the form with your CRM.
• Retargeting ads: To display ads to people who have already interacted with your content, you need to add a Linkedin tag to your webpage. You can find it in the Linkedin Campaign Manager. After configuring it, you’ll need to create audiences for the tag to track. Essentially, you’ll select who will be receiving the ad based on the interactions they have had on your webpage. The audience will take some time to grow - since it needs to collect data - and will continue to grow as people continue to engage with your site.
  

Sales Navigator

Sales Navigator is a paid tool in LinkedIn specifically designed for people who need to reach out to certain segments of the audience, gain key company information and interact in a more personalized manner. It lets you have better segmentation and interaction with prospects and target groups by giving you less limitations as to who and how many people you can reach out to and by creating lists based on characteristics you are looking for. 

Some of its benefits are that it lets you send InMails to people who are not in your connections, allowing you to have a broader reach; it lets you create lists based on advanced filters that aren’t available in a regular account; lets you create lead and account lists for better segmenting and tracking, among other benefits.

Company Pages

These pages are a great way to show important information about your company in a simple way in which users can easily read about who you are and what you do. It is generally divided into these sections:

• About: in which you can write a description about your company and add info like the number of employees, industry and company address.
• Posts: in this section you can view the latest posts from the company.
• Jobs: where you can find the company’s latest openings that have been posted in LinkedIn Talent Solutions.
• People: where you can see the people who work at the company, giving you visibility about the structure of your company.

How Effective Is LinkedIn Marketing?

LinkedIn marketing is especially effective for B2B content. In fact, 59% of B2B marketers say LinkedIn generates leads for their business. One of the benefits of LinkedIn’s algorithm is that shared content can have exponential visibility because, unlike other social networks, people who are not part of your contact network can see what you share. This increases the number of users you reach by including people with whom you would not have come into contact otherwise.

The key is to generate interesting content for the audience and analyze multiple variables to get the best result.

To illustrate this idea with a concrete example, a client of ours generated content that previously got an average of 12 likes. After hiring our services he started generating approximately 150 likes in each publication. Why? Because attractive information gets shared!

How Much Does LinkedIn Marketing Cost?

It can be as cheap as $0! You can do it yourself! But at this price, it’s important for you to take into account the following:

• Do you have the time and knowledge to create quality content?
• Are you aware of the best strategies to get the most out of your content? 
• Are you investing your time properly? Could you get a better ROI by hiring an expert to do it?
• Will you get the results you’re expecting?
  

So, how much does it really cost? It can go anywhere from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand. These services generally involve anywhere from a couple of posts per week, to full service content marketing, outreach, and intelligent reporting. Take your time to evaluate both the offer and the knowledge of each service provider in order to choose the service best suited for your business.

How Do You Market Your Business On LinkedIn?

There is no single solution to marketing your business on LinkedIn. Your company should have a company page so people can quickly understand what it does. It’s also important that top managers as well as employees share information about the company and interact with others on LinkedIn (especially if they’re in the B2B segment) to reach wider audiences. Another key step is to define what type of activities you want to do on the platform and whether you wish to invest in Ads or Sales Navigator.

Conclusion

LinkedIn has definitely evolved through the years, from being a platform centered around networking and hiring to now being more focused on enabling genuine connections that benefit from educational content and selling efforts.

Doing marketing on LinkedIn is not difficult, but it does take a high degree of knowledge, a considerable amount of time and data analysis to truly understand and maximize results.