How to create an effective LinkedIn marketing strategy

LinkedIn is a powerful platform for marketing. It’s got a huge daily active user base, high engagement rates, and diverse content types to play with. It’s renowned for being one of the best business-to-business (B2B) marketing channels, but anybody can get value from LinkedIn marketing by approaching it the right way.

We’ve put together a list of our 10 best tips for creating a LinkedIn marketing strategy that works. Whether you’re trying to grow brand awareness or drive leads to your website, following this guide will give you a head-start on achieving results.

A LinkedIn marketing strategy is a well-developed plan to use LinkedIn as a way of reaching specific marketing goals. It can involve diverse activities, from publishing content to running paid ads. But all elements of a LinkedIn marketing strategy will relate back in some way to the main objective.

It’s separated from non-strategic LinkedIn marketing by its deliberateness. Instead of posting random content whenever you feel like it, setting out a LinkedIn marketing strategy will guide your efforts and make sure they’re contributing to tangible business goals. 

Going through this process will involve more up-front work than a casual approach to LinkedIn marketing. But it’s also far more likely to make an impact on your business’s success – driving brand awareness, lead generation, and overall growth.

To make sure your efforts are rewarded, follow these 10 simple tips for creating an effective LinkedIn marketing strategy.

The first and most important step in creating a LinkedIn marketing strategy is to decide what you want to achieve. This step will influence the rest of your planning, so it’s important to put proper thought into your objectives.

Thanks to its diverse user base and broad functionality, LinkedIn is a versatile marketing platform. You can use it to achieve various marketing goals, like:

Increasing brand visibility: LinkedIn has over 930 million users, which makes it ideal for growing overall brand awareness.

Generating leads: LinkedIn is particularly suited to B2B lead generation, with 40% of B2B marketers naming it the most effective channel.

Creating a personal brand: People use LinkedIn as a source of industry news and expert guidance, so it’s the perfect platform to grow a personal brand on.

Expanding your professional network: Connections are the lifeblood of LinkedIn activity. You can use them to significantly increase your professional network.

Driving website traffic: LinkedIn drives up to 46% of social media traffic for some B2B companies, making it ideal for getting users onto your website.

You can choose multiple objectives, but make sure they’re compatible with each other and your broader marketing aims.

And when you’ve chosen what your general aim is, try to make it specific by creating tangible key performance indicators (KPIs) to work towards. If you want to increase brand visibility, for example, set a realistic target like growing LinkedIn page impressions by 50% in a 12-month period. 

LinkedIn is home to a community of users from hugely diverse backgrounds and sectors. But you don’t need to target all of them – nor should you want to! Honing in on your specific target audience will make sure your LinkedIn marketing strategy is geared to succeed in impacting the right people.

You might already have an idea of what demographics your business addresses, sourced from existing analytics or market research. Use this as a jumping-off point to create well-defined audience personas.

These personas should outline key facets of your audience that will help you build a strategy suited to their needs. That might include:

▫️Basic demographic details like age and gender
▫️What sector they work in, their job position, and seniority level
▫️Their interests, both personal and commercial
▫️Challenges they face in their day-to-day work
▫️What kind of content they like, and how they engage with it

With completed audience personas, you have a solid source of information to refer back to as you develop, roll out, and refine your strategy. This will help make sure you’re always focused on addressing the right people to drive marketing success.

There are two ways to market on LinkedIn – through personal profiles or company pages. The best strategies use both approaches, maximising visibility by engaging with an audience on a personal and professional level.

Personal profiles are all about an individual. They offer the chance to broadcast your job experience, skills, background, and qualifications. They’re also the main way of engaging with other people on LinkedIn, whether by connecting to grow your network, creating or sharing content, or using the built-in messaging feature. 

Company pages, on the other hand, are less geared around social functionality and better suited to explaining and marketing your company. They act like a company showcase, giving you the opportunity to really sell what your business does and build a following.

To make the most of both opportunities, flesh out your personal profile and company page with useful information. Be comprehensive, because company pages with complete information get 30% more views. 

And when it comes to developing your content strategy, consider how you can maximise reach by posting on both your profile and page. Some content will be better suited to one or the other, but you can always reshare company content on a personal profile, and vice versa.

Generally speaking, the more connections you have on LinkedIn, the more people will see your marketing content. This is obviously a good thing, so focusing on growing your network is an important part of preparing to roll out a LinkedIn marketing strategy.

But there are some caveats. The most important is that you should prioritise connecting with people who either fit directly into your target audience or are likely to have connections that do. This will maximise the value of your network. You’ll be marketing to an audience made up of potential leads and people who know potential leads.

There are very low barriers to connecting with someone on LinkedIn, and people tend to accept connection requests even from people they don’t know. So don’t be shy! If you come across someone’s profile and they seem interesting or relevant, send a request. If you engage with someone in a comment thread, send a request. 

To increase the chance your requests are accepted, include a brief message introducing yourself and saying hello. Be proactive and consistent with this process and you’ll have a bigger network in no time.

It doesn’t matter how well-laid your strategy plans are if your content falls short. At the end of the day, it’s the content you create that will actually be seen by your audience. Optimise it accordingly – aiming to make the biggest impact on the most important people to your business.

There are lots of factors to consider when striving to boost content quality, but the most important ones are:

Audience relevance: Whatever content you create has to be relevant to the people you’re sharing it with. Refer back to your audience personas when planning content and prioritise topics that your audience will care about to maximise engagement.

Value and actionability: Every piece of content you share should have a clear purpose, even if it’s as simple as sparking conversation. Keep this at the front of your mind in the content creation process, and make sure every post has a tangible takeaway.

Originality and credibility: LinkedIn is notoriously full of uninspired, copycat content. Spending more time than your competitors coming up with original ideas is the easiest way to stand out, and reinforcing your thoughts with credible sources or examples can make your content even more compelling.

Messaging resonance: The way you deliver your message is just as important as the message itself. Make sure your LinkedIn content aligns with your brand’s tone of voice, and focus on making it resonate with your audience’s needs and values.

If you manage to achieve each of those four factors in every piece of LinkedIn content you share, you’ll be rewarded with increased engagement and better results.

To help you get there, make use of tools designed to help you create better LinkedIn content, like our AI post generator and optimiser.

LinkedIn content comes in many forms, from basic text posts to embedded long-form videos. Each content type has its own strengths and weaknesses – best suited to achieving a specific aim or getting across a particular message. Using the full range helps you make the most of the platform.

The main LinkedIn post types that you’ll see on your feed are:
 

Text-only: Simple text-based posts that allow you to share updates, insights, or advice.
 

Image/s: Posts that include a gallery of one or more images alongside a text field.
 

Native videos: Video posts displayed natively on-platform, up to 15 minutes in length.
 

LinkedIn articles: Long-form text content hosted through LinkedIn’s own article platform.
 

Image carousels: Another way of displaying image content or presentation decks.
 

LinkedIn polls: Posts that feature a live-updating poll for users to vote on.

Each of these post types has its own unique advantages in a marketing strategy. Some are better at encouraging engagement, while others are suited to generating leads. Video content, for example, is shared 20x more than any other type of post.

Consider each one when you’re developing your LinkedIn content strategy and aim to use as many different post types as possible. This’ll help each of your posts do its job a little better, while also making your feed more interesting, varied, and engaging.

Consistency is a central component in the success of any marketing campaign, and things are no different on LinkedIn. The more regular your posting schedule, the more likely you are to make a long-term impact on your audience. 

LinkedIn themselves say that companies that post at least two times every week see increased engagement. Other sources say a higher number of weekly posts has even stronger effects, although there’s no real data on the optimum amount. 

Whatever your posting frequency, what really matters is that you remain consistent. Creating a comprehensive content calendar covering all of the pages and profiles you manage can help you do that. It gives you the chance to plan ahead up to 12 months and make sure you always have relevant and interesting content to post.

You can even schedule your posts in advance to make sure that you never miss an opportunity for engagement. Try a LinkedIn content calendar tool like ours and see how consistency can impact your marketing results.

The entire LinkedIn platform is designed to encourage content sharing, and you can take full advantage of it by encouraging your entire team to get involved in your marketing strategy. 
Whether you’re posting content from a company page or your personal profile, encouraging other team members or employees to engage with or share your posts will amplify their reach. 
You can also benefit from the diversity in each team member’s network to get more impressions from a wider audience.

Going a step further, you can even integrate different members’ LinkedIn accounts in the strategy directly by planning to post your content from various profiles. 

If your head of marketing has a particularly strong network of marketing connections, for example, try using their profile to share marketing-focused content and see if it makes a difference to engagement.

Handling the content distribution process across multiple LinkedIn accounts is now easier than ever. Tools like our multiple LinkedIn account manager give you access to a single dashboard that allows you to schedule and monitor content for up to 10 accounts at once.

LinkedIn is a great platform for organic growth, but it’s also got an in-built ads platform that works great to speed up marketing results. LinkedIn ads are especially useful for B2B businesses with clearly-defined audience personas, since you can target specific job roles, seniority levels, and sectors. 

There are various ad types to consider on LinkedIn, including:

Sponsored content: Multimedia ads (with options for carousels, image posts, or videos) that appear natively in your target audience’s feed with a ‘Promoted’ label.

Sponsored messaging: Text-based ads with multimedia options that you can send directly into your target audience’s LinkedIn inbox.

Text ads: Ads that show up at the top and to the right of the main LinkedIn feed on desktop, offering broad reach and high visibility.

Dynamic ads: Dynamically-generated ads that are automatically tailored for engagement, appearing in the right-hand sidebar on desktop.

One of the key advantages of LinkedIn ads is that you’re able to engage with a relatively warm and highly relevant audience, unlike on some other social media platforms. You already know that people browsing the platform are in ‘work mode’, and you can target them granularly.
That might be why LinkedIn ads audiences are 6x more likely to convert than those on other platforms.

Finally, make sure you’ve considered how you’ll measure the success of your LinkedIn marketing strategy, so that you can learn from the data and make continual improvements. 
Keeping a close eye on your LinkedIn analytics can help you pick up on what types of content work, when the best time to post is, what kinds of audiences you’re impacting, and much more. All of this data can prove instrumental in refining your strategy to increase success, guiding adjustments to the content you create and your posting habits.

LinkedIn has a rudimentary analytics platform built-in, but to get the best data, use a dedicated third-party tool like our LinkedIn post analytics dashboard.