LinkedIn is the best platform for both B2B and B2C marketing. Over 44% of marketers find leads from LinkedIn to be of higher quality compared to other sources.
B2B marketers have managed to leverage the platform to produce a whopping 85% conversion rate through InMail messages and messaging directly to connections.
Moreover, 70% of brands involved in digital marketing rated LinkedIn as the most reliable platform to increase their visibility, credibility, and authority in the niche.
You will learn the following contents in the Complete Guide to LinkedIn Marketing 2024:
- Organic Marketing (Best Practices)
- How to monetize your Organic Audience base
- Different Approaches for B2C and B2B marketing
- B2B Marketing Funnel Strategies
- How to figure out whether LinkedIn is the right platform for your Business
Organic Marketing
Five years back on LinkedIn, you could gain tons of engagements by posting a simple poll asking whether you had your breakfast or not.
However, that’s not the case anymore due to the rise in content. People have realized the potential of the platform and started leveraging it in every way possible, one of which is content marketing.
Content Marketing is the proven way to increase your audience base and expand your network organically.
Now, don’t start writing a post right away. Let’s break down the types of posts available on LinkedIn and see which one would fit you better.
Normal Post
Standard textual update or post that allows you to share your opinion, question, or insights.
Image Post
Similar to a Normal post, which allows you to add an image along with the text. Users can add images appropriately to support the text or caption that they’ve made. Images are usually quotes, screenshots, or infographics.
Carousel Post
A multiple-slide post that has the highest engagement rate on LinkedIn (second only to Video posts). It offers a slideshow experience for the users. To post a carousel post, a PDF file should be uploaded (not multiple images). Click on the Add Document feature to upload your PDF file.
Video Post
Depending on your niche, video posts can bring in a lot of impressions and engagements from users who could become your long-term followers. Best suited for companies involved in Visual production, advertising, and 3D designing.
Poll Post
Used to gain valuable insights from your following base. It’s a great way for brands to interact with their audience without being too pushy. Most users participate in poll posts as it is easier and makes them feel included.
Event Post
Can be used to promote events such as webinars, workshops, conferences, and sometimes lead gen forms. Brands that have established their presence on LinkedIn and have engaging followers can leverage this post feature.
Now that you know the types of posts on LinkedIn, later we will learn to utilize different post types to get the best out of them.
Before that, let’s learn what makes a post engaging.
A good post consists of these three features to have a high engagement rate:
- Hook
- Value
- CTA
Hook
“You never get a second chance to make the first impression right.” – That’s true in so many ways in the marketing world.
The first line that the person views should have a captivating opening. For example, “LinkedIn is the sexiest platform for Startups” or “How I got my first freelancing client with LinkedIn.”
The hook is to grab the attention of the viewers for a short span until they are engaged with the value that you are offering.
Make sure to keep your Hook short, precise, and engaging. It might be controversial, exciting, or insightful. Avoid these kinds of sentences which will turn off your audience immediately:
- “In the ever-evolving world of marketing…”
- “Navigating through the realm of…”
- “Introducing our brand new…”
Instead, use these hook lines:
- “Did you know that 90% of marketers fail to do this one thing that could yield 5x returns?”
- “3 years of my Content Marketing journey summarized in One post”
- “This is how I reached 25,000 followers in 3 years on LinkedIn“
Feel free to customize these hooks to be appropriate for your Niche.
Value
You got your viewers hooked, great! You will have to offer them something valuable so that it’s worth their while to spend time on your post.
Values can be in the form of industry insights, expert opinion, solutions to your audience’s problems, statistics, or even news.
Make sure that the value that you offer is unique and helpful for the audience. Posting without clear value offering might backfire on your LinkedIn marketing efforts.
CTA
CTA stands for Call to Action. What’s your ultimate goal with your LinkedIn post? How are you going to monetize the traffic? Depending on your answers, add a CTA that redirects your audience to your website or lead gen forms.
If you are a Content Marketer who wants to offer your service, add a Calendly link to your CTA to book a call with you.
CTA Example: Want to grow your brand visibility on LinkedIn? Book a call with me at www.letmehelpyou.com
Congrats! You’ve mastered the creative aspect of the post. Now let’s look at the technical factors that will determine the reach of the post.
Hashtags
Like every social media platform, LinkedIn uses hashtags to feature the post to people who might be interested in the topic.
Including hashtags like #Marketing or #Business will enhance your post to be featured to users who are interested in these topics.
Don’t use ChatGPT or any AI to create hashtags as they create some random hashtags based on the caption which won’t be available on LinkedIn. Instead, use hashtag generators which pull actual hashtags from LinkedIn.
It’s recommended by Hubspot to include only 3 hashtags per post on LinkedIn for better reach.
ALT Text
Alt text has been used to help visually impaired people to understand the contents of the image. Later, search engines and algorithms have used it for better indexing experience.
Describe the image as vividly as you can in the alt text feature. When you upload a photo, click on the Alt icon at the bottom to perform this action.
Example: A pie chart breaks down the demographics of LinkedIn users by country. The United States is at the top with the most users, followed by India, China, and Brazil. The United Kingdom is in 5th place, making up only 6% of the platform’s total users.
Tag
LinkedIn allows you to tag its users. Make good use of this by tagging your employees after a fun outing or CSR activity. It will make them feel included and validated.
Carousel Post
Only PDF files can be made into a slideshow on LinkedIn. If you upload multiple images, the post will be an image collage and not a slideshow.
Once you’ve uploaded the PDF file, make sure to name it appropriately.
(The file has been named as “CFA Cheat Sheet” to give a quick idea of what the PDF is about. Don’t repeat the exact contents of the first slide.)
Organic Marketing Best Practices
Organic marketing is indeed a slow process that requires consistent efforts. It seems more expensive than PPC campaigns at the beginning, but in reality, it is more affordable in the long run.
Consistency is the key to LinkedIn Organic Content Marketing. Post consistently from a few times a week to a few times a day. But stick to the routine.
Quality over Quantity. LinkedIn users are professionals and prefer something rich in value rather than mediocre content.
Go through our guide once before you start creating content to refresh the concepts to yield better results.
Bonus Tip: Remove people from your connection list who might not be your target audience. I personally used this method and my post went viral the next day.
How to monetize your Organic Audience base
Unlike other social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok, LinkedIn doesn’t pay its content creators anything, making it hard to monetize.
However, the platform compensates for this issue by offering high-quality users who actively engage with the community. 77% of marketers say LinkedIn is the best organic marketing platform in 2024.
There are several ways to monetize your LinkedIn traffic.
Offer Solutions
Yeah, you read it right! Offer solutions in the form of services. Here’s what you can do based on your profession:
Individuals – Offer your specialization as a service
B2C Brands – Redirect to your website
B2B Business – Message Outreach or Lead Gen forms
When you are offering a solution, make sure to highlight the pain points that you are going to solve for them. Most often, people highlight the features of their services or products and overlook the potential solution that you could offer to your customer.
No one wants to hear about how great your features are (although it’s understandable the reason you are emphasizing is because of its potential.) So focus on how you can solve the prospect’s problems and explain how your feature would help them do that.
We will explore more marketing strategies and sales funnels in the upcoming topics. This section teaches you the different ways to monetize your LinkedIn traffic.
Different Approaches for B2C and B2B LinkedIn Marketing
Different approaches are required for B2C and B2B marketing. However, both involve the same Marketing Funnel.
Top of the Funnel
The initial phase, or Top of the funnel, involves building awareness about your product or service. People need to know what your business does to brand it. For that, you will need to create awareness about your product or services among your audience base.
Addressing industry trends or providing insights while hinting about your business will be a good start.
Middle of the Funnel
Once you’ve created awareness by producing content revolving around your brand, switch to addressing the audience’s pain points.
There might be a lot of pain points that your audience might be struggling with, but pick the most important aspects that your service provides a solution to.
For example, I work with Amassing Investment (Fintech stock analysis and investment platform). These are the primary pain points of our ideal customer:
- High subscription cost
- No one-stop platform in the market
- Hidden Fees
- Lack of sophisticated analysis tools available to retail investors.
The application was developed around solving these pain points. So, Amassing Investment is a one-stop stock analysis platform with high-end sophisticated tools available at an affordable price suitable for retail investors.
Similarly, find the pain points of your ideal customer and explain how you can solve them.
Bottom of the Funnel
Once you’ve created enough brand awareness, established your authoritativeness in the niche or industry, and addressed the pain points which made your audience consider your service or product, you can focus on the last stage of the funnel.
The ultimate goal of marketing is to convert your audience into customers. You can do this by redirecting the traffic to your sales landing page.
Customer Retention
A golden business rule – It’s easier and cheaper to retain a customer compared to bringing in a new customer.
Hence, engage with your existing customers based on sending them newsletters and offering new discounts, appreciating their loyalty.
You can also make use of LinkedIn Poll posts for your existing customers to offer valuable feedback. It will make them feel involved, hence retaining the customers.
Now, saying that, the only difference between B2C and B2B marketing on LinkedIn is the mode of targeting.
For B2C, you can focus on creating organic campaigns and promoting your business through content. You can even boost your post with PPC facilities available on LinkedIn and redirect them to your website.
For B2B, it is a bit different. The marketing mode we follow for B2C might work with B2B audiences too, but the results are suboptimal. Hence, we use a combination of messaging the connections on our network and InMail messages to close deals.
B2B Marketing on LinkedIn in 2024
LinkedIn is the most appropriate platform for B2B marketing. It’s rich with high-quality leads that are actively looking out for business opportunities, collaborations, or solutions.
Since it’s so good, people started taking advantage of the features and started spamming their connections with sales messages. So, conventional sales pitches aren’t going to work.
To get the latest converting LinkedIn messages, sign up for Free here.
Imagine going to a car showroom where a salesperson is tagging along with you and saying only good things about all the cars. You get immediately turned off because the person is obviously trying to sell you something instead of helping you pick the best car for you.
Similarly, the best practice is to avoid sending out messages featuring your services to your connections. Instead, engage in real and meaningful conversation without trying to sell them anything.
Introduce yourself with very short text and let them know you are happy to have them in their network. Ask about their business, nature of service, business landscape, pain points, long-term and short-term goals, and anything that might request any confidential data.
Once you’ve got this information, figure out whether your service would benefit them anyhow. Offer your service personalized to their current need and follow up from there.
The goal is to genuinely help their business and not try to close sales.
Bonus Tip: If they’ve posted any content recently, appreciate them about it. It showcases your sincerity and authenticity towards them.
How to figure out whether LinkedIn is the right platform for your Business
Is LinkedIn a great platform for marketing? A big YES!
Is LinkedIn suitable for all businesses? No.
LinkedIn is more suitable for businesses in industries such as:
- VFX & Animation
- Financial Services
- Software Solutions
- Coaching and consulting
- Real Estate
- Advertising
- Marketing
- Consultancy or Recruitment
- Legal Services
- Design & Creative Services
Though LinkedIn is great for most businesses across various industries, some businesses might find it hard to grow on LinkedIn, such as:
- Clothing & Fashion
- Home Services
- Crafts
- Gift shops
- Local services
This doesn’t necessarily mean businesses in these industries should avoid joining LinkedIn but rather find a different approach toward their marketing.
Final Thoughts on LinkedIn Marketing in 2024
LinkedIn is a great place to brand and promote your business. If you are a B2B marketer or salesperson, LinkedIn is a gold mine rich with high-quality leads.
With our Complete Guide to LinkedIn Marketing in 2024 with actual marketing strategies that are tested and proven to yield results, you can leverage the platform and scale your business.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What kind of content should I share on LinkedIn?
LinkedIn users are primarily professionals and would appreciate content such as industry reports, insights, thought leadership, informative articles, infographics, company updates, and achievements.
2. How often should I post on LinkedIn?
The key to organic growth on LinkedIn is consistency. Post in a fixed routine from a few times a day to a few times a week. Make sure to stick with the schedule. Once you’ve posted enough, you will gain insights into your audience’s peak timings, and you can post at those times.
3. How can I increase engagement with my posts?
Encourage discussion by asking questions, responding to comments, and participating in relevant conversations. Use relevant hashtags, tag industry influencers, and visually appealing content (images and videos) to grab attention.
4. How can I measure the success of my LinkedIn Marketing efforts?
Track key metrics like profile views, post engagement (likes, comments, shares), website traffic generated from LinkedIn, and leads acquired. Utilize LinkedIn analytics tools to gain insights and optimize your strategy.
With a passion for SEO, digital branding, and social media marketing (SMM), this expert brings extensive experience in driving online visibility and engagement.
As the founder and CEO of Rank Brand Social, they leverage expertise in SEO strategies and digital branding to help businesses achieve their marketing goals effectively.
With a proven track record of success, they are dedicated to delivering impactful solutions that elevate brands and drive measurable results in the competitive digital landscape.
Connect With Me on LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ezekiah-livingston/
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