7 Steps To Create a Successful LinkedIn Content Marketing Strategy

Intro

Content marketing is more powerful, potent, and lucrative than it has ever been. This is due to the proliferation of content dissemination platforms across the online world, such as social media platforms, websites and blogs, news outlets, and more.

Small wonder: content marketing generates three times as many leads as outbound marketing while costing 62% less.

When it comes to social media, personal and business accounts live and thrive on the content they produce, as well as the way they engage with their following. It should go without saying that content marketing should be a significant part of your digital marketing campaigns on all platforms, and LinkedIn should definitely be a major part of your overarching strategy.

LinkedIn is a professional social network where you can not only find the top talent in your industry for your business, but also build a powerful brand image, generate leads, and take your company to the next level.

If that sounds like a good opportunity to you, then let’s break it down into actionable steps and talk about a winning LinkedIn content marketing strategy.

Know Your Goals to Plan Your Content

Content planning for LinkedIn starts with clear and concise goal setting and understanding what you’re trying to achieve on the platform in a specific time period. Putting a timeframe on your goals is imperative if you want to be able to measure performance and the effectiveness of your content and adapt accordingly along the way.

Let’s look at some typical examples of LinkedIn goals:

• Establishing yourself as an authority in the space
• Generating a set number of leads via outreach
• Boosting CTR and website traffic through engagement

All of these goals demand high-quality content and posting, as quality content establishes you as a thought leader, generates followers and engagement, and sets you up for successful outreach campaigns. That said, you can combine these goals and aim to achieve them in parallel.

A robust posting strategy will allow you to do that, so long as you have the internal workforce to handle content creation and find new content ideas, posting, follower engagement, reposting and commenting, and - of course - outreach and prospecting.

Typically, you’d want to post on your relevant personal accounts and your corporate page every day. This ensures the algorithm keeps an eye on you and keeps pushing your content to your following.

Remember that inactive accounts or those that post irregularly get forgotten really quickly.

Integrate Relevant Keywords in Your Posts

Integrating relevant keywords in your social media posts is just as important as integrating them into your blog posts, website, and online ads. A good keyword strategy on LinkedIn can mean the difference between an obscure profile, a company page that barely gets any visits, and a thriving ecosystem of high-value accounts that get traction and engagement.

It’s important to keep in mind that all of your LinkedIn profiles that are tasked with boosting your company’s image (more on that in a bit) need to use the right keywords. The goal is to boost LinkedIn profile visibility by integrating brand, general, and niche-specific keywords in all of your copy, profile descriptions, and all the content you post.

This will incentivize the algorithm to showcase your content to the right people and will make discovering your content and your profiles via search engines far more effective. Always remember that LinkedIn profiles and posts will appear in the search results if they’re properly optimized, which is where keywords play a vital role.

One of the best ways to automate the keyword research process is to use a profile scraper that will analyze the keywords used on similar profiles. You should also use keywords as hashtags to boost visibility, and make sure to include keywords in your titles, descriptions, and copy in general.

Leverage the Power of Internal Influencers

One of the major things that business leaders tend to overlook is that building success on LinkedIn demands a multi-account approach. Companies tend to think one-dimensionally when it comes to LinkedIn posting and engagement, believing that one personal and one corporate profile is enough to build authority, visibility, and social proof.

In reality, the key to success on LinkedIn is building an influencer network that will post and promote relevant content about your brand and your work in general. In other words, you need to assign internal influencers, which are notable positions in your company that will instantly generate interest and follow requests.

These are your CEO, CFO, and COO positions, for example, which have that innate ability to get people’s attention and elevate your brand image. These are the people that others want to be connected to on LinkedIn, so posting on these profiles every day is a powerful way to generate clout for your business.

Make sure to:

• Post on these accounts daily
• Mix your content output between blogs, opinion posts, actionable steps, and videos
• Engage with people in the comments
• Tag relevant and notable individuals in your space or from your company
• Cross-tag in posts between these positions and invite others in your company to chime in

You can also engage with external influencers on LinkedIn if you have the resources to do so, which means finding notable figures in your space who can share your posts or tag you in their original posts.

Remember that Video Gets Plenty of Engagement

Social networks rely heavily on video content, and there’s no denying that videos are the most engaging type of content on the web right now - partially short-form ones. The same is true on LinkedIn, where you should post videos regularly to boost engagement and get more people to interact with your posts.

So, what kind of video content can you create? The good thing about video content is that diversification and variety are easy to achieve. Here are a few ideas:

• Product Showcase
• Service overviews
• Tool guides and tutorials
• Employee advocacy
• Day in the office videos
• POV videos
• Meme videos and pop culture

Keep in mind that the type of videos you create, just like any piece of content, needs to be in line with your brand’s image and identity, as well as what your audience wants and expects from your business. This means that tapping into the meme culture will work for some brands while ruining the image of others - so tread carefully and know your audience.

Create and Disseminate Valuable Lead Magnets

What’s another powerful type of content you need in your LinkedIn strategy? Lead magnets.

A lead magnet is a highly valuable free piece of content that you give to your followers and prospects to incentivize them to engage with you. You also use them to procure contact information such as phone numbers and email addresses.

A lead magnet is an invaluable tool on LinkedIn because it adds value to your outreach efforts. When you do LinkedIn outreach and send messages and InMails to potential clients and even job seekers, you can generate interesting replies by offering them something valuable, free of charge.

This is where a lead magnet comes in as captivating content that helps people get to know your brand and what you do.

Here are some types of lead magnets you can push via LinkedIn:

• Guides and tutorials
• Cheat sheets and templates
• eBooks and free reading material
• Video sequences
• Free demos
• Research, white papers, and reports

Be sure to include this type of content in your posts and outreach messaging to boost your engagement and set prospects up for follow-ups.

Bring a Human Element to Your Strategy

Lastly, keep in mind that LinkedIn is currently plagued by corporate speak and personal and corporate profiles that all look and sound alike. There’s nothing the modern LinkedIn audience hates more than reading self-boasting corporate posts that sound like they’ve been created by a robot or a corporate drone.

If you’re going to use AI for content creation, make sure to do it wisely.

If you want to stand out on this platform, you need to create content that is relevant, valuable, and inherently human. Remember, you’re creating content for humans - people who want to interact with posts that are approachable and speak their language.

With that in mind, make sure to humanize your content with your tone of voice and style, as well as the way you present in your videos. Natural hand and body movements, adequate attire, and non-corporate backgrounds will go a long way in making your content more familiar and relevant for your audience.

Be sure to work on humanizing your scripts, and always give them a second pass to see where you can tone down the corporate speak while staying professional and to the point.

The Bottom Line

Content marketing is one of the most important elements of a successful digital marketing strategy. Without quality content, you can’t build a successful social media strategy, either. You need to rely on good content, regular posting, and high-quality engagement with your audience to achieve your short-, mid-, and long-term goals.

By knowing your goals and understanding your audience on LinkedIn, you can adapt your content creation process and answer the needs of different groups and subgroups. This will allow you to personalize your content offering and make it more relevant to your target demographic, which will, in turn, get you more exposure, engagement, and lead gen opportunities.

You can then use your sales team to reach out, book calls, and convert leads into paying customers.