Don’t Hire A LinkedIn Marketing Agency Before You Read This!

Marketing on LinkedIn for your B2B product or service is a great way to reach your professional market and find the quality leads you need. While it’s generally a simple task, it is time-consuming and takes some level of expertise to leverage it most effectively. 

This is why many companies are turning to LinkedIn marketing services; agencies that specialize in marketing on LinkedIn and know exactly how to generate, nurture and convert the best leads for their product. Here we’re going to take a look at why you should be using a LinkedIn marketing agency, what to look for, and how to set it up. 

What is LinkedIn Marketing?

LinkedIn has over 830 million active users, many of whom take advantage of it as a social media platform, even when they’re not looking for professional networking opportunities. This makes it an incredibly powerful outlet for marketing, especially for B2B companies.

LinkedIn marketing offers a fast way to build your network of leads, as well as streamline and improve the effectiveness of outreach processes. People using the platform are already from a demographic that is within the business mindset, so using the platform to market your product or service automatically cuts out a lot of the noise and competition from other service providers that lean more heavily toward the social media side. 

How does a LinkedIn Marketing Agency Work? 

Getting started is relatively straightforward, but does take a lot of work. This is where LinkedIn marketing services come in handy. The process of marketing on LinkedIn can be streamlined or automated, and it’s even possible to get a dedicated marketing agent to do it all.

Among the many ways to market on LinkedIn, a marketing agency might be able to help you with: 

• Setting up your LinkedIn business account. It doesn’t have to take very long to set up a basic profile, but if you go by LinkedIn’s recommendations and fill out all sections without skipping any, it’s thought that you’ll benefit from up to 30% more views, so it’s a good idea to do this thoroughly. 

• Before you start inviting people to your page, you have to create some content for them to engage with when they hit your page. LinkedIn follows a lot of the basic rules as any social media platform, except it provides a great place for more in-depth content than simply memes and shorthand posts. So, while running your LinkedIn page will be similar to running your Facebook page, for example, the depth of the content will be different. 

• It’s a good idea to make use of LinkedIn’s built-in content suggestion tool, which quickly allows you to share relevant content based on the filters you provide. However, don’t simply share content. The platform itself recommends the 5-3-2 rule. This means that for every ten posts, five should be shared content, three should be original content and two should be light-hearted, engaging, and fun. This is thought to be the most effective balance to keep people interested while providing valuable content and drawing attention to useful pages. 

• ‍Shared content is self-explanatory. Just make sure it’s relevant to what you want your page to be. Having a diverse set of shared posts might dilute your theme and make it difficult for viewers to get a handle on what you’re about. 

• For the original content and the fun pieces, posts should be about what you know or do, and try to add value to the reader. Provide insights that aren’t generic and aren’t just a rehash of the content you’ve shared. LinkedIn suggests that the optimal amount of weekly posting should hover at around 3 or 4, which seems to bring in the most engagement. 

• Posting during the hours that your target market will be online, and not posting more than once per day, or your new content might end up covering other posts. Scheduled posting is a very common form of marketing to automate, but posting manually usually results in a higher engagement rate due to features such as native video which the algorithm favors over 3rd party video players.

• Now that you’ve got content, it’s time to start inviting people to view it. You’ll get 100 invites per week from LinkedIn to hand out on the platform. Each time a contact accepts your invite, you’ll be able to use it again to invite another contact, so focus on high-value contacts first, consider aiming for marketing teams and sales admin contacts, and work your way through a list. 

These are the basics any good LinkedIn marketing agency will offer help with, but there are also ways you can go a lot further with LinkedIn marketing from here, and this is where it begins to get a bit complicated and time-consuming.

Other LinkedIn Marketing Services

LinkedIn groups are a good place to post content and if you have a niche that isn’t over-saturated, they are the perfect opportunity to start conversations by beginning your own group to attract like-minded professionals into your network. 

Your business page won’t be able to do this alone. You’ll want users working alongside it to join and interact with these groups from their personal pages. You’ll also want to provide talent attraction by way of a ‘Life’ page, where you can show off your company culture and personality. 

There are also targeted ads and sponsored posts, both of which are a discipline of their own and benefit from skilled marketing approaches. 

The applications for marketing on LinkedIn are therefore diverse. This is why in so many cases it’s a good idea to reach out to one of the LinkedIn marketing agencies that are available. 

A LinkedIn marketing agency provides several services that can help companies with their sales and marketing efforts. Many of the steps outlined in the previous section are candidates for automation, and many more can be run by a dedicated marketing agent. 

There are services that involve a lot or a little, depending on how much you want to take control of. If you’re just looking to streamline the sharing and posting, this can be done with simple automation tools. On the other hand, if you want to totally outsource your company’s LinkedIn presence, there are comprehensive marketing strategies available too. 

What to Look for in a LinkedIn Marketing Agency

We’ve covered a lot of the marketing basics and touched on a few specifics that are available to you on the LinkedIn platform. Still, marketing agencies are relatively plentiful, so when choosing, you should consider the following:

• Lead Generation – This can be in the form of basic automation or it can be more involved, with manual, personalized outreach that will net you qualified leads. Contacting people on LinkedIn will get you leads, but you’re going to want to find a service that has some way of qualifying them.

• Valuable Content – Content creation, strategically timed posting and optimization are some of the most useful elements of a marketing agency for LinkedIn. With a dedicated team, you can post content on your page at the perfect time and with the precisely targeted approach that you need to drive traffic to your page. 

• Conversions – This is where intelligent advertising comes in. Your chosen service should be able to nurture leads all the way through the funnel on your behalf.

Intelus Agency specializes in all three of these marketing strategies and can provide consultations and other marketing services to help you speed up and improve the quality of your marketing efforts. 

Conclusion

 When looking for an agency, it’s best to make sure they’re able to cover every level of the marketing process that you don’t want to do yourself and have a good understanding of your product and your company goals in order to find you the highest-value leads. 

A LinkedIn marketing agency can not only speed up your marketing efforts but can vastly improve their efficiency by leveraging their extensive expertise in the field to find and nurture these valuable leads for you, from their generation all the way to conversion.