Developing a LinkedIn marketing plan for your company will help you ensure your efforts on LinkedIn align with your business goals.
If you aren’t familiar with using LinkedIn for your business, it provides you with a company page similar to your business page on Facebook. In addition, you can create showcase pages to highlight services, products or subsets of your business.
Benefits of LinkedIn for Businesses
LinkedIn offers businesses six key benefits.
1. Brand awareness: Optimizing your LinkedIn company page will help it show up in relevant searches, while sharing company news and educational content on your page will also increase brand awareness.
2. Targeted advertising: LinkedIn’s ad capabilities continue to expand. Examples include:
- Promoting content to users based on job title, industry, group membership, location.
- Sending InMail to a retargeting audience (users who have visited your website but haven’t converted).
3. Lead generation: LinkedIn supports lead generation both through its organic content features and its advertising capabilities.
4. Sales enablement: With its Sales Navigator tool, LinkedIn can offer value to your sales team through identifying prospects based on key characteristics and enabling you to message them or even initiate a drip campaign through InMail.
5. Thought leadership: Positioning key figures in our company as thought leaders within your industry can improve credibility and brand awareness. LinkedIn provides a number of features that support this.
6. Recruitment: LinkedIn enables recruiters to find potential candidates who fit your needs, as well as post jobs so candidates can find you and easily apply.
Creating Your LinkedIn Marketing Plan
Step 1: Review your business goals. Before your start creating your LinkedIn marketing plan, re-visit your goals and identify how LinkedIn can support these goals.
Step 2: Define your target audience. Having a clear understanding of who you are trying to reach will help you craft relevant, useful content. In addition, it will help you create highly targeted ad campaigns that are more likely to convert.
Step 3: Identify your key performance indicators. Your KPIs are the key to tracking your LinkedIn marketing plan’s success. Examples include post reach, engagement, website traffic, number of leads generated, and sales closed. To track your KPIs, you can use a combination of LinkedIn’s insights and Google Analytics.
Step 4: Allocate resources. Who will be responsible for sharing your content? Responding to comments and messages? Monitoring your competitors? Managing your ad campaigns? Clearly define roles and responsibilities and — most importantly — do not underestimate the investment if you want to reap the benefits of LinkedIn.
Step 5: Create your LinkedIn content strategy. Quality and consistency are key when it comes to sharing content on LinkedIn. Identify the types of content that your LinkedIn audience will find useful and relevant and create a regular cadence for sharing content. Make sure to incorporate LinkedIn into your company marketing and editorial calendar.
Step 6: Create your promotion plan. LinkedIn promotion opportunities include:
- Company status updates (encourage your team to share these on their individual profiles)
- Sharing content in relevant LinkedIn groups
- Advertising
- Cross promotion (promoting your LinkedIn page on your other social media page and website and including LinkedIn share buttons on your content)
Want to ensure your LinkedIn profile will be found by the right people or help your sales team improve their profiles? Read Nine Tips to Improve Your LinkedIn Profile.
Bonus: Ideas for LinkedIn content
- Your latest article or blog post
- A product launch
- New hire announcement
- White paper or case study
- Webinar or event
- Press placements
- Survey data
- Video interview with a company thought leader
- How-to guide
- Customer testimonial
