LinkedIn Marketing: How to Grow Your Brand and Generate Leads (in 4 Steps)

LinkedIn is the best platform for lead generation, according to a HubSpot study which found that the visitor-to-lead conversion rate for LinkedIn is 3 times higher than that of both Twitter and Facebook.

For B2B, it is especially useful, with marketers saying that 80% of all leads come from LinkedIn.

Here are 4 ways to effectively use LinkedIn to generate leads:

1. Optimise Your Profile

LinkedIn’s VP of Marketing Justin Shriber said in an interview to HubSpot regarding what small businesses need to do to become larger: it “always starts with the individual LinkedIn profiles of the employees at the company, and in particular, the executives at the company.”

The LinkedIn profiles are your online resumes, and even for B2B businesses, people making the purchasing decision want to see and hear from the person behind the company name and logo.

Setting up a profile means filling in all the sections with relevant details, targeted content, and strategic keywords. This is helpful so that when prospects land on your profile because of the actions you are going to take later, they are going to read what you want them to see. This means having a professional picture and a headline and summary that highlights your title, area of expertise, and results you have been able to achieve for your clients. Adding in experience, skills, courses, and certifications also help with both keywords your prospects are searching for, and for you to highlight your expertise. Receiving and giving recommendations helps add credibility to your profile by adding a third person to back you.

Another thing is ensuring your profile is set to public so that your profile comes up in search results and people can connect with you and see the content that you are going to post later.

2. Grow Your Network

LinkedIn’s senior director of product management Pete Davies revealed what kind of content LinkedIn’s algorithm shows in people’s feeds: “People you know, talking about the things you care about.”

This means personal connections with whom you share interests are the kind of contacts you should add to your network. It means not the people that you follow like Barack Obama but your colleagues and classmates. LinkedIn determines who those personal connections are via who members work with, interests, and skills.

It is because the LinkedIn algorithm boosts a post to a larger audience only if the initial engagement is high. A post would initially be shown only to about 1-5% of your audience — the audience that you personally know and share interests with, but if they don’t engage with it, it would not be shown to more people. “However, if five or ten people for example like it within the first 30 minutes, the algorithm identifies it as a good piece of content that people want to engage in and sends it out to a higher proportion of your connections,” writes Business2Community.

Over time, though, you want to grow this network of “people you know talking about things you care about”. Because it is mutual, the more such people in your network, means you are also that person for more people.

So start to connect with influencers in your field as well as with your target audience. Use LinkedIn’s search people by filter feature to narrow by industry, location, past companies, and more. For example, for B2B, the designation of your target audience might be Head of Marketing or Head of HR depending on your product/service.

To connect professionally and not come across as spammy, send a personalised note along with a connection request. You may share a common interest like a mutual friend or a common university or college to build connections in that initial message.

3. Engage With Others

As mentioned in the above point, LinkedIn gives more weight to personal connections. It determines who those personal connections are based on “signals”, which also includes your direct engagement with anyone via likes, comments, and shares.

Now the aim is to get the people you have sent the personalised connection request to, to be considered as your personal connections by LinkedIn once they accept the request. Hence, the best way is to start engaging with their content. Even if they have not accepted your request, you can follow them, and react or comment on their recent posts. It would also make them more likely to accept your request. Commenting or replying to comments on posts of people with a large audience gives you a chance to interact with their audience in the right context.

Another way to be active is to follow industry hashtags. It would start showing up relevant content on your feed, which you can interact with.

Joining groups and participating in conversations help you influence and meet other influencers in a niche area.

All of this would boost your profile as “the LinkedIn algorithm favours those who engage,” writes Daniel Hopper.

4. Post Content

Now if you have done the previous three steps effectively, then you have set yourself up to start creating content. Following hashtags and influencers and being part of group conversations would have also given you ideas for what kind of content people are posting and what you can post too.

According to HootSuite, there are two primary goals of the LinkedIn algorithm:

• To prioritise relevant content, and
• To promote engagement

Relevancy is measured by personal connections and shared interests. Engagement is measured by reactions, shares, and comments.

Hence, when creating content do the following so that your content is relevant as well as gets engagement:

• Create high-quality content
  

The LinkedIn algorithm and human editors work specifically to weed out any low-quality content. Here is a detailed post by LinkedIn team members on how it works.

As an example, Brand Watch shows that spam would be poor-quality content that would not go past the algorithm filters — and hence won’t be displayed to any of the poster’s connections. After that would be a self-promotion post that is not spam but which also doesn’t have much substance. It would be shared with a few of the poster’s connections. But because it doesn’t offer anything of value, it would not receive much engagement, and in turn, would soon be lost in the sea of content. A good post, on the other hand, would be one that has “some depth in the form of some thoughts and opinion, while it also asks a question.”

High-quality content is content that offers value. Posting content on LinkedIn is a form of content marketing. Content marketing, by definition, is marketing your business by providing helpful content that builds trust with your prospects. It is not salesy content but one that provides all the information in a human and helpful way. This is the kind of content that is likely to get good initial engagement on LinkedIn. This, in turn, would make the LinkedIn algorithm push your post out to a larger audience and create a positive feedback loop.

There are two types of high-quality content you can create depending on your business goals.

• • Thought leadership content

This kind of content is to build brand awareness for your business. People start to know about you and your company because you set yourself as someone with unique insights into industry issues and trends. This type of content does not generate leads right now but make people trust you in the long term.

Thought leadership doesn’t have to be long posts. Even short memes and one-line comments on your industry and niche works. Check these examples from a recruiter:

This meme takes a jab at the common trend in the recruiting industry of not sharing compensation details while posting job openings. Companies that have started doing so recently are few and far between, and candidates love transparency. This short meme on LinkedIn, a hub for job seekers, received 2000+ reactions.

Similarly, this post makes the case of valuing a candidate’s time as well as being transparent with them about what they could expect in the application process.

We can see that this is strategically created content because both posts set him as a recruiter who values candidates. This comes at the back of the changing industry where job seekers now hold more and more power to impact a company’s reputation and influence other candidates and even the customers via their Glassdoor reviews and social media posts. Companies that want to grow in the future would value recruiters who think like this.

• How-to content

This is the kind of content that looks like “10 ways to build a website in WordPress” or “How to measure ROI on social media”. Such articles generate leads because people search for exactly such phrases that are in the heading. These are the people who are directly your potential customers. Because they are looking for how to do the things that are exactly the services or products that you provide — they are most likely to convert into leads.

For example, Thrive Global is an online platform and app to help people struggling with stress and burnout. It’s CEO Ariana Huffington recently posted relevant how-to content.

Such content works for direct lead generation because people interested in this topic would click on the blog link and might take action on your call-to-action (CTA) on the blog page, for example, to give their email address in exchange for a trial to their platform.

Unlike the thought-leadership content, this type of content would usually be long-form content that would not fit into the character limit for a LinkedIn post. Hence, it would most likely be published initially on your website’s blog page and then that link would be posted on LinkedIn. You could also post this directly as an article on LinkedIn using LinkedIn Pulse, LinkedIn’s publishing platform, as Huffington has done here:

Both these types of content — how-to and thought leadership — work together to make your lead generation process more effective. “…when it comes to thought leadership content, your lead generation content will be much more fruitful in the long run, as more people will already know and trust your brand,” writes Neil Patel.

Here are some things to keep in mind while creating and posting content:

• Create the content on your area of expertise and that your target audience is interested in.
• Write on niche topics instead of broad topics. “We know from our data that members are more interested in going deep on topics they’re interested in,” tells LinkedIn’s Davies.
• Post consistently. This makes you a reliable source of new content to your audience.
• Use hashtags on your posts so that people interested in the topic can see it. Using many might look spammy, but up to 3-5 is optimal. Business2Community recommends using one for a broad sector like #marketing, another more niche like #ContentMarketing, and one branded one for your company.
• Ask questions at the end of your posts and tag relevant people to generate comments.
• Respond to comments. Pete Davies from LinkedIn says, “As a rule of thumb, the better conversations are authentic and have a constructive back and forth.”
• Post content at a time when people are more likely to be browsing. According to HootSuite, the best time to post on LinkedIn is 7:45 a.m., 10:45 a.m., 12:45 p.m., and 5:45 p.m. EST. The best day for B2B brands on Wednesday.
• The LinkedIn algorithm likes people to stay on its site. So posts with native content are promoted over posts that have links to external sites, according to Brand Watch. One way to get around it is to post the link to your blog posts or external page in the comment section of the post.
• Every once in a while, add in relevant CTAs that would generate leads. Make sure those are still useful to the audience and don’t come across as salesy. For example, if you post helpful and useful content every day, once a while you could post about a free webinar or a live Q&A session, which users can sign up for via their email ids. “It’s quite a balancing act, but a solid mix of calls-to-action (CTAs) and other content is healthy,” writes HubSpot. The people who exchange their email ids are the leads, which you could then nurture further down the funnel outside of Linkedin. For example, they could be engaged further via your weekly email newsletter or discount codes sent via email, if they allow being sent those messages.

Conclusion

The daily efforts of providing valuable thought leadership insights, how-to content, and engaging with the target audience pays off in the long run. LinkedIn helps you build a community of people who know you and have the same interests. This is a very valuable human currency, which becomes useful when they are ready to purchase.

 

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Curzon PR is a London-based PR firm working with clients globally. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact our Business Development Team bd@curzonpr.com