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Top LinkedIn tips for your B2B marketing strategy

Are you marketing to business owners?   If you are, LinkedIn is the best place in the world to reach your target market.   With this in mind, we created the following LinkedIn tips to help you with your journey.  The days of putting your needs first are long gone (if they were ever there in the first place). But if you take the time and provide people with insights and answers they’re looking for; you’ll immediately gain their respect and become an expert in their eyes.  Hence if you have this attitude, you’re on your way to creating a successful LinkedIn marketing strategy.

Follow these LinkedIn tips for success when creating a b2b LinkedIn Marketing Strategy

#1 – Document your LinkedIn Marketing Strategy with help from these LinkedIn Tips

Like every social media platform, LinkedIn has unique characteristics that require a tailored strategy.  Like any other strategy, you need to document your LinkedIn marketing strategy with specific actionable items, or it won’t happen.  Whether you’re trying to sell your products or services or looking for employment, having a well documented LinkedIn marketing strategy, is a great way to reach other business owners.  Continue reading our LinkedIn Tips and make sure you don’t make mistakes.

#2 – Never stop building your LinkedIn audience.

Follow this Tip by connecting with everyone on LinkedIn.  Don’t forget to include those in your professional and personal life.  Don’t stop doing this, because the more people you connect with, the more visibility and reach you have on LinkedIn.  Why?

  • Continually building your connections improves your chances to rank well when someone does a search on LinkedIn for your expertise.
  • A more extensive network of connections means that your activity will reach more people. Because your LinkedIn activity appears in the news feeds of your connections with every status update, comment and like. Likewise, your contacts activity as it relates to engaging with you and your posts will also appear on their connection’s feeds.

Thus the more connections you have, the broader your potential audience, so don’t stop building that audience.

#3 – Views are second to engagement.

When you create a post, LinkedIn will tell you how many views that post receives.  Post views are a great snapshot of how well you are doing promoting your business on LinkedIn.  Don’t get discouraged if your first post does not get a ton of views.  Use each post as a lesson learned.  Your LinkedIn marketing strategy should focus on strengthening your brand instead of lead generation.  Once you see it’s possible to reach a broad audience and not attract a single new client, you’ll quickly understand.   If you take this approach, when the right person views your message at the right time, then sales will follow.  The next few LinkedIn Tips teach you how to create content to engage and inspire.

#4 – Helpful content with great value can strengthen your brand.

If you’ve read some of our other articles on creating content for your blog that is search engine friendly, you already know there is no substitute for being helpful. Now it’s time to utilize that knowledge to strengthen your brand by posting helpful content on LinkedIn.  Your contacts will see it, and if it’s excellent, they might share it with their circle of contacts, who can also do the same, and so forth. Do you see the potential here?  If you need a refresher on why people share review this NY Times study, “Why people share content online.”  Statistics from Noah Kagan and Search Wilderness show that helpful articles like how-to posts perform best for post views, likes, comments, and shares than any other post type.
Wait!  There is something even better than helpful content.   Knowing you want the best, we dug a little deeper to uncover what it takes to go viral.   This is the highest level of engagement anywhere.   Because being helpful is not enough to achieve this level of engagement, continue reading our LinkedIn tips, and you’ll see what’s even better.

#5 – The most effective content on LinkedIn involves inspiring others through storytelling and sharing human experiences.

Have you ever connected with someone for the first time in a business meeting?  You recognized that there was something you both had in common.  You took the opportunity to build rapport by telling them a personal story with which they could relate.  This particular tale helped you connect with them because they could relate or they shared the same experience.  The connection or rapport enabled you to win them over.  Hence you accomplished this by telling a personal story, and it showed you were authentic and approachable.  Herein lies the secret of creating the most shareable content on LinkedIn. People like people who are like themselves, or people like people who are like how they would like to be.   Anthony Robins best explains this in his video below on “The Power of Rapport building.”

Note: Anthony Robins didn’t create this video for our blog post, but it gets our message across and strengthens our LinkedIn Tips, so we want to thank him.

#6 – Viral messages only work if they reinforce your brand with the right audience.

Let’s take this a step further.  What if you could tell a story that could build a rapport with millions of people?  Furthermore, your message made people feel an intense emotion and a desire to share that news with their contacts.  Congratulations, you just created your first viral post on LinkedIn.   However, it only helps you if you reach your target audience with a positive message about your business.   Creating a viral message on social media is hard enough, but making one that promotes your business and reaches your target audience is a rare occurrence.  Keep trying and you can do it!

#7 – It’s all about interaction – Create conversations.

You don’t just post an article on LinkedIn and leave it sitting. Think of it as a launching point from which to start a discussion with your readers. You see, LinkedIn openly reveals the identity of those who, for example, decided to “like” a particular post. Whenever someone leaves a comment, even if it doesn’t contain a question, you should still respond to it, thanking the person who started it.

#8 – Get inspired by reading other people’s comments.

Are there any particular things they’re mentioning? Do you recognize a pattern of people asking for a specific type of content? Comments contain a goldmine of information; it’s just as if people were to come to you and reveal what it is that they want to see. Then, all you have to do is write an article that answers these queries. Simple as pie.

#9 – Most LinkedIn users are professionals.

Keeping this in mind will help you a great deal when structuring your responses and posting new content. Knowing your target demographic will allow you to custom-tailor it to their needs and expectations. What you’ll find is that most of them are professional (at least when it comes to what they do) and are less likely to engage in petty arguments with others, unlike what’s rather commonplace on other social media.

#10 – Master the art of refining your writing.

If you didn’t get the response, you were hoping for, learn from your experience, and try to make it better next time. Was the title not exciting enough? Was the content a bit too dull and non-revolutionary? Letting your experience guide you makes all the difference. Hence once you learn what’s working from a bit of trial and error, you can apply that knowledge to all the other content you produce.

#11- Make sure you regularly update and keep your contacts engaged

Updating your article is one of the most exceptional tricks of the trade, especially if you haven’t attracted many readers when publishing it the first time around. Even if you add a paragraph or two, a graph, or maybe even an image, this is enough of a reason to let others know what you’ve changed. There is another benefit to this: you’ll be giving off the vibe that you’re pouring a substantial amount of effort into your work, which is bound to motivate plenty of those who missed out on it before to check you out.

#12 – Stay professional and positive!  Avoid posting controversial content.

Unlike Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube where you can go viral by posting issues that are controversial, a good LinkedIn marketing strategy requires a more professional approach.  For this reason, it is often more challenging, but not impossible, to go viral on LinkedIn.  It is the same reason you would not bring up politics in a business discussion.    Politics polarizes and therefore should never be part of your marketing strategy.  Thus a robust LinkedIn Marketing Strategy should steer clear of politics unless elections are your business.  Then, by all means, be a democrat or republican or whatever suits your fancy.

#13 – Publish on LinkedIn Pulse and your blog.

LinkedIn Pulse, much like LiveJournal, Blogger, and other free providers.  The service offers you a way to host your content for free. Yes, you don’t get much control regarding inserting your squeeze pages and ads. Yes, LinkedIn’s editors can take it down at any time if they so choose.

But (and this is a big one), in return, you can tap into an already-existing audience LinkedIn has established, and articles published on LinkedIn Pulse show up in LinkedIn’s search results more often, as well as in organic search engine results. You probably don’t need us to tell you the amount of authority LinkedIn has in the eyes of the search engines, and they’re giving you the option to ride that wave free of charge.

Of course, having your blog is essential as well, and you should not neglect this aspect of your business either. Now here’s a neat trick if you want to leverage the same piece of content and double-dip it by posting it on LinkedIn Pulse as well. Just be sure to mention where it was published originally in the opening paragraph. That should cut it. If you’re keen on siphoning that traffic and sending it to your website instead, you can also just copy and paste a snippet, and leave a link to where they can read the full version.

#14 – When is the best time to post to LinkedIn?

According to research done by Hubspot the best time to publish content on LinkedIn is during off work hours   This means, to get the best click-through rates, you should schedule your posts to release on LinkedIn after and before work and during lunch.  Hence you should target posting your content in the middle of the week between Tuesday – Thursday at times that correspond with the morning and evening commute.  (roughly 7:30-8:30 a.m. and 5-6 p.m.) as well as the lunch hour, around 12 p.m.

LinkedIn Tips Conclusion

Follow these LinkedIn tips as a guide.  In doing so, your LinkedIn marketing strategy can be one of the best ways to reach other business owners. Having access to such a highly targeted demographic is something you should take advantage of to get new clients. The final question is, are you willing to put in the sheer amount of work it takes to succeed?  Only you can answer that question.

Do you need help managing your social media marketing?  If you liked our LinkedIn Tips you will love what we can do for your business.  We can help everything from web design, LinkedIn marketing strategy to creating engaging content for your blog.  Contact our team at 978-851-9077 for a consultation.

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