LinkedIn is an excellent location to use for content marketing. Content marketing is an essential part of doing business today, whether you have an online or offline business. You need content to communicate with your audience, to produce useful information, and maybe even to create your products. To use LinkedIn for content marketing, try following these tips for success.
Know Your Content Marketing Goals
Do you want to generate more leads, grow brand awareness, promote your products or services, connect with your ideal customers or clients, or build a community around your brand? LinkedIn can do all the above. But before you publish anything, know what your goal is and what the point of the content you'll publish is.
Understand the Places You Can Publish Content on LinkedIn
When you think of content marketing, you are probably thinking about publishing articles on LinkedIn. That is one way, but you can also use your profile page, your company page, groups, InMails, emails and other people’s content to participate in content marketing via LinkedIn’s platform.
Understand the Various Content Types You Can Publish on LinkedIn
You can publish articles, posts, photos, videos, links, and you can also publish comments and other types of engagement on LinkedIn, such as within groups. Try to mix up your content between promotional and other types of content. Your directly promotional content should constitute no more than 20 percent of your content marketing on LinkedIn (this goes for all platforms, not just LinkedIn) and do mix up the types, focusing mostly on what’s popular at that moment. For example, right now video is very popular and gets more engagement.
Pick the Right Subjects to Publish
This goes back to your purpose and the goals you have set for your content marketing on LinkedIn. It must be something that your targeted audience wants and needs to know about, that shows your experience and expertise, and that lets your audience feel trusting of you. You can publish informational articles, an opinion article, share industry news and your thoughts about it, and much more.
UseYour Sales Funnel as Your Guide
The point of posting articles and content anywhere is to offer more opportunities for your ideal audience to find you. Then your job is to move them from LinkedIn to your website and ultimately onto your email list so that you can nurture them and get them to purchase your products and/or services.
Respond to Those Who Like or Comment on Your Content
When you do publish something, be sure to ask for feedback and engagement. Then make sure you engage with the people who comment on your content. If you see people are liking your content but not commenting, reach out to them to ask them what they liked most about the piece.
Be Sure to Engage with Other Content Too
LinkedIn, like most social networks, works due to reciprocity. The idea is that real people are publishing useful content, and more real people are responding to the content. That’s what makes the internet work at all for networking, relationship building, and business. The idea that people will engage and converse about topics together online in a mutually beneficial way is compelling.
Finally, remember to include a call to action (CTA). Your CTA can be a question, asking people to like, follow, share, use your #hashtag or something like that. Give them instructions on what to do next, and you’ll be a lot more successful with all your content marketing. Aside from making sure your profile is targeted and complete, publish content two to three times a week or up to daily to get the most results.
Rebecca Paciorek is an Online Business Manager specializing in assisting in the growth of your business through traditional and digital means.
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