Creating a Linked in Content Strategy

If you’re not thinking of a LinkedIn strategy for your content, you’re missing out on a very tall platform to get noticed. LinkedIn often goes overlooked because a lot of people don’t see it as a viable, meaningful, or creative way to connect.

But they couldn’t be more wrong! And because so many brands ignore LinkedIn, you have a lot of room to grow.

40% of LinkedIn users check in every day. So if you optimize your profile with content like videos, photos, hashtags and tagging, you have a 24-72 hour window for people to see your posts.

I know you wouldn’t believe it, even if I told you, but audience outreach on LinkedIn surpasses Facebook and other platforms. Businesses that post just 20 times a month – that is way less than once a day – still manage to reach 60% of their followers.

When getting into the business of creating content, it’s easy to get flustered and not know where to start, but if you keep just two things in mind, you’ll be golden: your audience and your goals.

You can’t talk directly to your audience, but your content can. That means that you need to know who your audience is, where they come from and what their interests are.

Second, your content needs to have purpose. And for it to have purpose, you should have clear marketing goals that your content is built around. Figure out which stage of the customer journey your audience is at – awareness, consideration or decision making – and build tailor-made content around each stage. This will help move your customers forward along the funnel and help you achieve your business goals.

Let me break each of these down for you a bit more.

Get To Know Your Audience

You’re not making content for yourself – you’re making it for your audience! So, who is your audience?

Creating buyer personas is a great way to give a human face to your audience and see demographics as more than just data. When your audience has a face, addressing their needs is much easier.

Research and use data to chalk out more complete personas. Find out everything you can, like their age, gender, job, education, where they live, etc.

Then, research psychographics. This data might be harder to pinpoint, but it’ll give you the why behind your audience’s behaviors. What drives their decision making? What are their needs? Are some of the questions you will need to answer to get down to understanding them at their core.

Create Purpose-Driven Content

Purpose-driven content actually has three main goals:

• – Building brand awareness and engagement
• – Generating leads
• – Establishing yourself as an expert in your industry
• 
  

Build Awareness And Engagement

Promoting your brand is as easy as interacting with your followers through comments and messages. This is the most basic way to build relationships with leads and get people talking about your company.

On LinkedIn, the best way to build awareness is by setting up Company and Showcase pages. Company pages are where you get potential leads’ attention and form relationships with current ones. Showcase pages are similar but focus on industries, products, or initiatives specific to your company. These pages will help you connect with other LinkedIn users and promote relevant content.

The content you share should be relevant to your audience and should give them valuable information that can help them solve a current problem. The purpose of any content is grabbing attention and entertaining users.

How-to content does all of this AND takes engagement further while guiding users further along the customer journey. And if you want to get people really interested, you NEED to use visual content like infographics, videos, or photos because such type of content gets viewed 94% times more than non-visual content.

Generate Leads

LinkedIn’s SlideShare feature is the largest professional content-sharing community in the world – and the perfect place to find new leads.

There are 13,000 daily content updates and 4 million check-ins from desktop users every day! With so much traffic, the opportunities are endless.

The best way to convert a reader of your content to an actual lead is by adding a signup form for users to leave their information. You could also connect your SlideShare presentation to your website to get a quality inbound link and have your users learn a little more about your company in the process.

SlideShare is a great place to share value-packed content like company videos, product tutorials, and infographics.

Company videos give your brand a face. Remember how buyer personas make it easier to connect to your target audience? Videos make it easy for people to relate to you. If they trust you, they’re more likely to invest their money in you or your product.

If you want your customers to truly understand the value of what you are offering, product tutorials are the way to go. Teaching them how to use your product brings them closer to that “a-ha!” moment more quickly and easily.

Sometimes, you might have a lot of content and information to share, in such cases, visual aids like infographics make your content easier to digest – and more interesting to look at – so your audience is more likely to read it.

Establish Yourself As An Industry Expert With Your Posts

Over 1 million users have published over 3 million LinkedIn posts.

LinkedIn is the top platform for professional publishing and the perfect place to establish yourself as an industry expert. If you want to become an authority, your content needs to frame you as one, and long-form content is the best way to do that.

You might have heard that only 20% of people read the entire article. But when it comes to long-form content, you can’t go wrong. Longer articles get more shares because it gives people tons of value – by the time they reach the end of your post, you’ve helped them become an expert, too!

Long-form content connects and engages, while promoting your brand. The more long-form posts you create, the more credibility and influence you’ll earn.

LinkedIn Features To Help You Achieve Your Content Marketing Goals

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Set Goals And Add Success Metrics

Are people reading your content? Does it take them to your site? Is it converting leads into customers?

Metrics help you answer these questions – and more. Use them to gauge how well your content performs – or doesn’t, and then tweak them accordingly. 

Metrics also help form meaningful, measurable, attainable goals within a reasonable time frame. You should always assign metrics for each piece of content you publish. For example, as you build brand awareness, track how many follows you get in a month, how many clicks and comments your posts get. Or, when establishing yourself as an industry authority with long-form content, follow your audience’s reactions, like views, comments, shares, and downloads. This will help you assess the performance of your content.

There are many reasons why you should make a content strategy for LinkedIn – it’s a strong platform that receives a lot of traffic and not many companies are capitalizing on it for promoting their brands, driving engagement and converting new leads. This means it’s a HUGE opportunity for you to leverage. As long as you keep your audience and business goals the focus of every decision, you’ll soon have an effective content strategy that will do all of that, and more.