What Should A LinkedIn Marketing Strategy Include?

As we mentioned in previous articles, LinkedIn is one of the best places for driving awareness and generating leads, especially for B2B companies. According to Hootsuite, 96% of B2B content marketers use LinkedIn for organic social marketing.

But this also means that there is a lot of competition and this is the reason why it's important to create a well-thought-out strategy to make sure that you are using the platform to its full potential.

Below is a list of things you should keep in mind when you are creating a LinkedIn marketing strategy for you or your company. 

‍LinkedIn Marketing Goals & KPIs‍

Establishing LinkedIn marketing goals and KPIs is important for your strategy as it serves as a guide for your marketing strategy, defines what you’re looking to achieve, and sets a path to also think about the different ways to reach those goals. 

When establishing marketing goals, you need to make sure that they are:

• Easy to understand by everyone involved
• Difficult but not impossible to achieve
• Based on sales goals
• Setting specific milestones to achieve desired results
• Easy to measure and compare

These goals will also help you decide when it's time to try different things, by comparing your previous results and determining what has been working for your company.

‍What type of marketing goals and KPIs should be defined on LinkedIn? 

When you are thinking about one to one Linkedin outreach campaigns, they may be linked to: 

• Response rate
• Connection request acceptance
• Qualified leads generated
• Qualified meetings generated

When you're comparing inbound LinkedIn strategies, which are mostly related to creating interesting content, you may want to set marketing goals such related to:

• Impressions 
• Clicks
• Interactions (likes, comments, shares)
• Profile views
• Follows
• Traffic to site
• Asset downloads or calls scheduled through your webpage, etc.

‍Ideal Customer Profile

An ideal customer profile is, as the title defines it, the person you would love to work with because they meet all the requirements you are looking for in a client. They would be easiest to sell because your company, product, or solution can easily solve their problems. 

Developing an ideal customer profile helps you better understand who that person is, what their needs are, and it makes it easier to create content and strategy around what they would react to best. Doing so helps you create custom-tailored assets that resonate with their current pain points. 

More on ideal customer profile

Key Buyers Personas

Buyer personas are the key decision-makers that you interact with within your sales process. 

It's important to differentiate the different types of buyer personas so you can create relevant messages around each one: the qualities that make them different and the best way to approach each one of them based on their specific problems, their decision-making capabilities, and their role in moving the sales process forward. 

Learn what the most common mistakes are when creating buyer personas.

Brand Guidelines

Brand guidelines are created to make sure that your brand is always represented consistently across every piece of content you produce for LinkedIn. It also serves as a guide so that every single person in the team knows how to maintain consistency on already defined processes. 

Brand guidelines define things from logo and color scheme used to how the brand communicates with users and what it represents. 

LinkedIn Profile Optimization 

All of the content created in LinkedIn is stored and archived in its servers. Public information is indexed so that it can appear inside its searches to suggest relevant content based on the information you’re looking for. But Linkedin also lets external crawlers index its webpages so that public information (like profiles, posts, and company pages) are visible in their results as well.

To make sure your information is SEO optimized, it’s important to make sure that your profile has been carefully completed, meaning that the required information is complete, keywords have been smartly chosen, and you're being correctly associated with similar profiles and companies. This will make you and your content easier to find within your target audience.

LinkedIn profile optimization is also a great way to optimize your profile and company page with calls to action to more efficiently convert visitors, connections, and followers into qualified leads. 

Content Pillars

Content pillars are the main subjects or themes in which your content and assets will revolve around. Defining them will help you develop content, ideas, and assets around these topics to better resonate with your audience.

From these content pillars, several subtopics can stem from each one of them, but the important part is that it makes it easy to compare the performance of each one and quantify their results.

Imagine you sell cars online through a platform. A few examples of pillar content could be: 

• Pillar topic: ERP software
• Subtopic: How to choose the right ERP software
• Subtopic: How much should you spend on ERP software?
• Subtopic: 8 things to consider when integrating ERP with CRM
  

These pillar contents will help you better organize your content moving forward. It will help you have more balanced content, keep track of how you're using it and how frequently you're posting about an issue, and making sure you create content that your audience is interested in reading about. 

Content Calendar

A content calendar will allow you to organize your ideas, track content production progress, and schedule publish dates. It will also help you plan out and visualize what content is going to be posted and easily compare the topics more holistically. 

LinkedIn Connection Building Strategy

Building connections through Linkedin can help you not only reach new people directly through conversations but also passively through the content you post in the newsfeed. But not every connection has the same value to you and your company and learning which audience you’ll be targeting first and how to best target them is crucial.