Your Ultimate LinkedIn Marketing Strategy Guide for 2022

1. Be clear about your marketing goals for LinkedIn

• As with any other digital marketing strategy, begin by being very clear about why you’re using this platform. These goals should be SMART – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely. 
• The great thing about LinkedIn is you can then use the data on your Linkedin Page analytics to measure the effectiveness of your marketing goals and engagement with your target audience while building brand awareness. This way, you can maximise LinkedIn’s potential to attract key leaders and customers.

2. Be clear about who your Target Audience is

• Knowing your target audience is key. For instance, if you’re selling to teenagers, you’re better off using your marketing funds on Instagram or Tik Tok campaigns.
• With B2B especially, understand the demography of the managers and leaders in the specific companies that would be interested in your products. Your LinkedIn Page analytics will once again prove useful here as it will provide you with information on the kinds of users visiting your page if your business is currently on LinkedIn. One of the ways you can use these analytics, for example, is to find patterns among those who like and share your posts. 

3. Curating a seamless LinkedIn experience

• Your company page is the virtual version of your physical business so feature your company logos, colours, fonts and website links.
• Keep your page informative and engaging while you build brand recognition. While information like what you do, where your offices are and who’s in your management team is important, used LinkedIn to showcase the more human side of your business.
• Use storytelling to sell your company and the ‘why’ behind your business. Highlight all its achievements and create posts that talk about your people and their personal achievements as well. Social networks are about people, so humanise your content by featuring them as well as anyone who is the public face of your company.
• Keep your page updated and add content regularly.
• Use relevant keywords in all your text for SEO.

4. Encourage Users to Follow Your Company Page

• Get all your employees to follow your company page. This will beef up numbers for your following, especially when your first start your LinkedIn page and eventually attract an even greater following from visitors.
• Use the LinkedIn logo wherever you can, for example on your company website, email signature and other social media accounts to direct traffic to your LinkedIn page. 
• Invite your existing customers to visit and follow your company on LinkedIn once your page is up and running.

5. Stay active on your LinkedIn account

• Social media engagement is not a one-off form of marketing. You have to stay active and engaged in order to keep your customers engaged. 
• Because LinkedIn is a more serious, professional form of social networking, the content you share needs to reflect that. LinkedIn is definitely not the place for personal political opinions, ‘dad joke’ memes or social quizzes to find out what your name says about you.
• Create your own company blog with the LinkedIn Publishing Platform. Encourage your employees to contribute to the blog, duly edited. This not only gives them the platform to showcase their professional knowledge and expertise but also enhances your company’s image and professionalism with your target customers.
• If you are unable to create original content regularly, at least collate and share other LinkedIn articles that are relevant to your target audience. 
• LinkedIn algorithm is more favourable to sharing links from within the social media platform and not offsite links so try to share materials from within the platform as much as possible.
• Feature more ‘thought leadership’ type articles that showcase your company’s expertise in its niche. 

6. You can’t go wrong with pictures and media

• Images play a crucial role in attracting customers to your articles. So while your blogs are written in a way that piques the curiosity of your customers, with the hopes of encouraging them to explore and find out more about your company, well-selected images are necessary to capture your audience’s attention in the first place. 
• The images, videos and other media you use are meant to enhance the content of your articles, as well as customer experience, so use them to further reflect the nature of your business and the types of products and services you provide. 
• Images and videos also help convey the intangibles of your business like your company values, for example ‘service with a smile’ or the importance your company places on diversity and inclusion in its employee profile. To many, your articles are their first interaction with your company, so ensure that experience is a memorable one.
• Upload videos directly to LinkedIn’s Publishing Platform if you’re including them in your article, instead of sharing from YouTube and other social media, as this is particularly favoured by LinkedIn algorithms.

7. LinkedIn Groups

• Join LinkedIn groups where you can actively participate in discussions to network with your target audience themselves, be it business leaders and managers or customers. Focus on groups that comprise your target audience to maximise the potential of this feature as part of your overall digital marketing strategy. You can use the LinkedIn search bar to find relevant groups. 
• Create your own group for your target audience. Here, you can moderate discussions on specific topics and keep abreast with your market’s interests with real-time accuracy.
• Be prepared to invest some time once you create a group, as your audience will feel that it is worth their time to engage in discussions if you make it worth yours. 

8. Using LinkedIn ads as part of your marketing strategy

LinkedIn’s wide reach and extensive targeting capabilities make the platform a great choice for delivering your company’s advertising to your specific target audience. So to maximise the network’s capabilities, consider using their ads as part of your overall digital marketing campaign to amplify your presence on the platform. 

• Sponsored content: paid ads that reach a much wider audience 
• Text ads: ads on LinkedIn pages including Group pages, profile pages, search results pages and the LinkedIn homepage itself. 
• Sponsored InMail: similar to email marketing but done within LinkedIn instead, delivering personal messages to targeted members. 

Once your company starts maximising the potential of LinkedIn as part of its digital marketing strategy using these tips above, remember to use LinkedIn Analytics to provide your marketing team with invaluable data as a means to measure its effectiveness. This will go a long way in helping you reach your SMART LinkedIn marketing goals for 2022.