Creating a winning LinkedIn content marketing strategy can be a real challenge when you don’t know where to start. LinkedIn offers a host of great options to grow your brand appearance on social media, it’s simply a matter of knowing what to use and how. Parsing through these options can be difficult if you’re just starting out with LinkedIn marketing and don’t know which direction to take your content in.
Thus, we compiled some neat ideas and tricks you can use to help your LinkedIn profile grow through a solid and well-developed content strategy. And while there is no be-all and end-all strategy to LinkedIn content marketing, these ideas will get your page off the ground and on a winning track.
Use High-Quality Visual Content
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When working with content on social media, work with high-quality visuals. This approach is important on several fronts. First of all, using pixelated and blurry images in an age where every smartphone has an AI-powered camera is frustrating for audiences.
Secondly, ensure that all posted and curated content on your page is visually clean and sharp to create great social media branding. Taking extra care to post high-quality visuals on your LinkedIn page communicates to your audience your brand’s work ethic and dedication to quality.
And finally, the biggest reason to prioritize high-end visuals is that countless research has shown that humans respond to visuals more than text content. Since 90% of information processed by the brain is visual, our brains are hard-wired to spot, process, and remember images much better than text. This fact is why visuals are a vital part of your social media marketing strategy; never post blurry, pixelated, or out-of-focus images or videos on your LinkedIn page.
Don’t Forget About Written Content
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Just because visual content is important doesn’t mean you should forget about text. Nothing complements good visuals better than a well-written and structured LinkedIn post.
Don't be afraid to leverage the power of AI content writing tools when crafting long texts for your LinkedIn posts. Other social media platforms, like Twitter, favor concise posts, but professionals commonly use LinkedIn to communicate very complex ideas, ones they cannot sum up in 280 characters. Thus, the LinkedIn community is used to seeing long texts. There are even LinkedIn smart links you can use to share entire presentations and case studies within a post. Therefore, there is absolutely nothing wrong with writing a text wall for your posts.
Don’t be afraid to write long-form passages covering complex ideas. LinkedIn is the place for such content and you will surely find an audience who appreciates all you have to share with them.
Make Your Content Accessible
Imagine a scenario where you create a video about your company, with a solid script, gorgeous visuals, and a ton of useful information. You post it on LinkedIn and get moderate reach and engagement, but not as much as you were expecting. If you’re disappointed by the effectiveness of your LinkedIn video marketing, one of the factors you need to consider is the accessibility of your content.
Here are just a few accessibility elements to consider in your content creation strategy:
- Include Subtitles
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In the example we mentioned above, one of the reasons the video underperformed could have been because of your audience’s English fluency. LinkedIn is used worldwide and many people will be unable to understand your videos. While a large part of the world understands English, you shouldn’t presume that absolutely every person on LinkedIn is a fluent English speaker.
To make your videos accessible to foreign speakers, include subtitles so they can be easily translated. Additionally, this strategy makes your video content accessible to individuals with hearing impairments, which is a huge plus. With how easy it is to add automated captions to your videos, there’s no reason why your video content shouldn’t have subtitles enabled.
- Simple Language
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On the topic of subtitles, language barriers go beyond language fluency. Sometimes, even fluent speakers will have trouble understanding your video if you make use of too much jargon, idioms, and vocabulary specific to a profession.
Keep your language accurate but structured, and worded so it’s understandable even to outsiders of your profession or industry. This approach makes your content accessible to more people, regardless of their professional or educational background.
- Avoid Being Too Culturally-Specific
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Accessibility also involves taking the diverse group of people you create content for into consideration. Exclude culturally-specific ideas and language in your LinkedIn content. If you are targeting an audience from a specific country, including such details in your content can be very helpful. But if you’re putting out content for a mass audience, leave out culturally-specific elements to avoid confusion.
If you insist on including culturally-specific elements, you have the opportunity to create educational content. For example, if you include a name of an influential person from your country that most people in the world don’t know, instead of simply throwing their name into the script with no explanation, offer a quick summary of the person and why they are influential. This approach adds an extra dimension to your LinkedIn content and offers more educational value.
Understand Your Audience
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All this talk about accessibility is pointless if you don’t know your audience. Understanding your audience is the cornerstone of any successful marketing strategy and, luckily, LinkedIn offers tons of great analytical tools and metrics. With this information, you can optimize your content to fit the demographic preferences of your audience.
For example, if your LinkedIn metrics show that a majority of your audience is located in a particular country, you can tailor your content to suit this demographic. Translating content to local languages, optimizing LinkedIn posts for timezones, and including topics that these demographics enjoy hearing about are all great examples of using such information to your advantage.
Here are the basic performance metrics to track and their role in your social media marketing strategy:
- Visitors
This metric includes page views and unique visitors, which tells you the number of times your page has been viewed and how many of these views were from unique accounts respectively. This data reveals the reach of your content and how effectively it entices viewers to visit your page.
- Followers
Metrics such as total followers, organic followers, and follower trends are the number of accounts that are actively subscribed to your LinkedIn account, how many of those followed you without any additional advertising, and the number of followers that were gained in a particular amount of time. Sponsored followers are those that subscribed to your LinkedIn page through paid advertisements and promotions.
- Engagement
Engagement is all about how audiences interact with your content. Reactions, comments, and shares are all examples of engagement. The more your audience performs these actions, the higher the user engagement. Impressions are another metric to track; they represent the number of times your content is visible on any screen. To calculate the engagement rate of your LinkedIn account, add all engagement statistics of a post (views, click-through rate, comments, shares, reactions) and divide it by the total number of impressions.
Influencers Can Help with Promotion
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Influencers are very helpful in promoting the online presence of your brand and offer a great source of audience expansion. They already have followers drawn to their content, so collaborating with them could expand the reach of your LinkedIn page.
There’s no strict rule as to what LinkedIn influencer to collaborate with, but it’s generally a good idea to find those that cover the same topic or industry as your own. If you work with AI, collaborate with an influencer that covers the same topic, since their followers will be naturally interested in your content as well.
Don’t prioritize popularity when choosing an influencer to work with. Sure, more followers potentially mean greater reach for your content, but there are other important factors to consider. Their content format, style, and tone are also crucial elements for seamless collaboration. If your company has created a brand image that’s more laid-back, casual, and fun, find an influencer who makes content with a similar style.
This approach doesn’t necessarily mean you should avoid online personalities who approach content creation with a serious tone, but rather that their audience is more attuned to that particular style and it’d be hard for them to transition to your content. If the influencer matches your voice and tone, the transition from their content to yours will be much more seamless.
Encourage Interaction
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Interacting with your audience is a surefire way to improve engagement on your LinkedIn page. Simply posting content on social media is never enough. Create content that is engaging to viewers or use social media messaging to interact with your audience directly.
One of the easiest ways to create more engaging LinkedIn content, for example, is to ask questions that will elicit answers from the audience. This strategy involves the audience in your social media content creation process. LinkedIn polls are another great way to elicit engagement from your audience, since polls offer low-effort interaction for your audience. They simply have to click or press one of the options to participate instead of typing an answer from scratch.
Best of all, by carefully planning out the answer options, these polls can act as additional research into your audience. If you’re working in B2B sales, for example, create polls about your products and do a little market research. The poll results could be invaluable for your next sales strategy and offer great insight into how your audience thinks.
In Conclusion
These are just a few tips to consider for your content marketing strategy on LinkedIn. We tried to exclude some of the more obvious tips, such as “post regularly” or “be nice,” since those strategies should be common sense.
A key to a successful social media marketing strategy on any platform is experimentation. There’s no one winning LinkedIn content marketing strategy; however, these tips will surely put you on the right track.