The Complete Blueprint for LinkedIn Marketing Success

LinkedIn has earned an impressive name in the race of domineering social media channels existing today. The platform consistently innovates itself even post so many years of its launch.

It has been crowned as a top platform for B2B marketing where with the right strategy, businesses can source quality leads. In fact, as per the latest LinkedIn stats , the platform generates leads for 62% B2B marketers.

But aside from being a resourceful platform for marketers and businesses, it is also a fruitful ground for career-oriented individuals. Those who want to build a professional front for their name and earn credibility, LinkedIn is a go-to choice.

Keeping that in mind, we can categorise the marketing efforts for LinkedIn in two different forms — Business and Career-Oriented.

Business

When LinkedIn marketing is for business use then the focus is on promoting the brand, products or services to a targeted audience. Here the strategy is to focus on:

• Lead Generation
• Sales
• Content Marketing

The common activities involved for business LinkedIn marketing includes but not limited to — creating the company page, advertising the brand, exhibiting thought leadership, sharing helpful content and more.

Career-Oriented

With the intent to further one’s career, LinkedIn marketing can be used to its full potential. Here the focus is on personal marketing where individuals like employees, content creators or an industry expert build their professional front.

Personal branding is prioritised in this form of marketing. As the primary goal is career development, professionals showcase experience, skills and achievements with their connections, industry leaders and potential employers/collaborators.

Personal LinkedIn marketing for career-oriented individuals involve but is not limited to:

• Creating Compelling profile
• Creating and Sharing Engaging Content
• Building Valuable Network

The right marketing strategy that aligns with your personal goals will help you achieve success on LinkedIn.

What Makes LinkedIn Valuable for Business Use?

There are 67 million companies on LinkedIn. This proves the fact that having a company page not on LinkedIn makes you a minority. Businesses from a variety of industries make use of this platform for many critical reasons.

You will find businesses from diverse industries, however, businesses that can achieve maximum ROI are: but some of the most common ones includes:

1. Information Technology and Services
2. Financial Services
3. Retail
4. Accounting
5. Education Management
6. Healthcare
7. Construction

As a matter of fact, it is observed that B2B marketers have immense success on LinkedIn. Especially with some tailored features for business use such as LinkedIn Groups and LinkedIn Ads.

The activities involved in your LinkedIn marketing strategy only maximises your efforts with the help of these features. Let’s check out some of the features that this platform offers that supports businesses to grow and build their presence.

LinkedIn Ads: You can leverage a host of advertising options from this feature. B2B marketers can use Sponsored Content, Sponsored Email and Display Ads options. The ads can be targeted expertly to reach the right audience by selecting criteria such as job title, demographic, etc.

LinkedIn Ads might be expensive compared to other platforms such as Google Ads depending on the industry. However, they deliver better results.

The average conversion rate of LinkedIn Ads is 6.1%, whereas Google Ads have 3-6% conversion rates.

LinkedIn Groups: Finding people that can help you thrive your business becomes easy with this feature. LinkedIn groups are basically community hubs that narrow down the search with specific interests, posts or discussion topics or connect with like-minded people in the group. Businesses can benefit using this feature as they help find and study target audiences.

LinkedIn Boolean Search: It is a type of advanced search on LinkedIn that allows users to combine keywords with operators to produce even more relevant search results. And the good part is, this feature is for use with the basic, free LinkedIn search. Businesses with no LinkedIn Premium plan can work with this feature. By simply adding specific terms (“AND”, “OR”, “NOT”) you can activate Boolean Search functions.

Example: Want to exclude a specific keyword? Here’s how to do it — “Product Manager” NOT “Tech”. This will show you results of “Product Manager” profiles without the term “Tech”.

LinkedIn Lead Gen Form: This feature is a perfect opportunity for B2B marketers to collect qualified leads. It helps businesses to share information easily at their own discretion. Marketers can populate their ads with pre-filled customisable forms by the members of LinkedIn profile data. Hence, when someone views your ad, they will see the pre-filled information such as their name, company name, job role, seniority level, location and more depending on what they’ve filled in their profile.

From lead generation, sales to content sharing, the features offered by LinkedIn platform provide business an upper hand to make their marketing efforts a success.

Tailoring Content for Business LinkedIn Marketing

Using LinkedIn for achieving your business goals begins with a solid content strategy. For all intents and purposes, the content you plan, create and share must be for the benefit of your business.?

If you are serious about your business then you must be serious about tailoring your content for business LinkedIn marketing.

Follow The Rule of 1 Audience-1 Message-1 Solution

To make the most use of your business page on LinkedIn, you want your content to be optimised and make it impactful for the audience. In a sea of countless content that are bland, boring and self-centred, crafting content that’s catchy and resonates with the audience is key to LinkedIn marketing success.

• One Audience - Keep a specific audience in mind when tailoring your content. Your goal should be addressing concerns of this target audience. The specificity of your content makes the audience feel that they have been crafted just for them. This ensures to build a trustworthy connection with the audience.
• One Message - No matter the type of content you develop to share through your business page, it needs to be crisp, clear and instantly understandable. Aiming to convey too many messages, using complex language, brings down the impact of your content. Cut through the noise and make your content simple, relatable.
• One Solution - To make your LinkedIn marketing work, create content with actionable steps or advice. Since this type of content means more than content that merely informs. Your audience should be able to take the information you offer through your posts and put it into action immediately.

Example:?

Address Your Audience Directly

Many businesses fail to make a connection with their audience when they become too professional with their content. Although you are using LinkedIn for business use, using bland and formal tone all too often can make your audience feel detached from your content.

Whatever you post should make a connection with them. The best way to achieve that is to speak to them directly. Using “you” and “your” to address the audience sets the right tone to make more impact.

Tailoring your content by addressing your audience directly boosts the chances of them being more receptive to your recommendation/advice.

Creating Headlines To Be Short, Scannable & Benefit-Focused

Your headline should draw attention to your content. The best way to achieve that is to keep them short, preferably under 60 characters. Keep them easy-to-digest at a glance while giving them the idea that reading more would benefit your audience.

?? Headlines like this is too lengthy: “The Latest Strategies and Best Practices to Optimise Your Approach to Content Creation on LinkedIn in 2024”.

?? Tailor your headline like this for optimisation: “7 Content Creation Strategies to Boost Your LinkedIn Engagement in 2024”.

Add Visual Media to Your Content

Bringing your content to life is a sureshot way to grab the attention of your audience. Nothing works best like adding visual media to the content you are planning to post from your LinkedIn business page.

Photos, infographics, videos, GIFs, etc. relevant visuals give your content the boost. They help in breaking up the text, add colour and give information with visual appeal.

Post About Your Company Wins

Make content that showcases your business’s achievements. Posting about your company’s wins allows you to demonstrate expertise and reliability in the industry.

Showing how your business is reaching new milestones and making successes can attract potential partners or more clients. Some of the achievements that you can post on LinkedIn are:

• Awards
• Successful project completions
• Milestones reached
• Earning authorised certifications
• Launch of a new service or product
• Positive media feature or mentions

These posts are not about being self-centred, instead, they are to give your audience the proof of your business’s ability to deliver results.

LinkedIn Marketing for Career-Oriented Intent (Personal Use)

Aside from B2B brands and businesses, LinkedIn serves well for personal use. With the right approach, it is a great platform to further your career and seek fruitful opportunities.

With more than 41000 skills listed, individuals like job-seekers, students and even content creators can build their profile for career development. It is observed that 6 people in every minute tend to get hired on LinkedIn.

So, how exactly should someone use this platform to unlock its full potential?

No matter which category you belong to, LinkedIn for personal use connects you with the right people. Provided you know how to make your profile and posts optimised to gain desired results.

Job-Seekers

Treating your LinkedIn profile like a portfolio sets you on the right path of seeking best job opportunities. Given the fact that 77% of recruiters use LinkedIn to find candidates, readying your profile to be the best is the first step to get closer to your goal as a job-seeker.

So, here’s how you create and boost your profile —

• Use the headline field to say more about yourself rather than just your job title. Add your expertise, what makes you tick, etc.?
• Upload a professional and friendly image to attract the attention of people.
• Transform your summary into your story or journey. Avoid just listing your skills, instead tell how those skills matter and can make a difference.
• Get recommendations from your employer, co-workers, clients, etc. to highlight your profile.
• Don’t leave any fields blank.

Once you update your profile, start your hunt with the right activities.

Using #OpenToWork Feature: As a job-seeker, you want to let everyone on the platform know your job status. Activating the #OpenToWork feature is the first move to let recruiters and connections know.

However, if you are currently employed and still looking for a better job opportunity then you might want to change visibility of this feature. It is recommended to use the “Recruiters only” option in the setting which shows Recruiter users of your availability.

Tracking Interesting Job Offers: Activating the #OpenToWork badge on your profile is not enough if you want to land interesting job offers. You need to actively seek out the right offers.

• Follow the companies that you have interest in. Keep up-to-date on industry news and participate in posts they publish.
• Add new skills to your profile. 90% of people recruited on LinkedIn have five or more skills on their profile.
• Expand your connection by adding new ones. Networking gets your foot on the right door. In fact, of the job seekers who were hired quickly, 87% have added 10 or more connections in the past 3 months.

The more work you put into your LinkedIn profile, the better opportunities come your way.

Students

Among 660 million LinkedIn users, 46 million are students and recent graduates. As a go-to platform for professionals, LinkedIn presents great scope for college students to find the right internships, mentors and jobs to further build their career.

Here are some ways to make the most use of LinkedIn as a student —

• It is recommended to start using LinkedIn right from your first year of college. From then on build your profile and showcase your progression across your 3 years of course.
• Leverage the feature of LinkedIn Group to keep track of information on industries you're interested in and participate in conversations.
• Complete your profile and use it as your extended CV to apply for jobs directly on LinkedIn.
• As a student, improve your networking efforts by adding your professors, academic advisors and mentors. You can also follow the companies that you look forward to working with.

LinkedIn also offers a robust online learning platform, LinkedIn Learning, which empowers universities and colleges better opportunities for their students.

Content Creators

While professionals and businesses have a lot to do and gain on LinkedIn, in recent years, content creators are also using the platform to gain personal goals. As a content creator, the use of LinkedIn involves a blend of personal branding, strategic content creation and community engagement.

A host of tools and features provide content creators to engage with their audience and expand their reach. Here are top tools and features to use on LinkedIn —

• Turning on “Creator mode” lets people know about your profile as a content creator. It also gives you access to a bunch of streamlined tools to make your content thrive.
• Newsletter is the feature you get to use once the creator mode is active. This lets you regularly share content about your favourite topics and notifies your follower automatically whenever you post.
• LinkedIn Live is an exclusive feature that content creators can use to do live video broadcasts. Your followers get the latest updates and notifications too.
• Keep track of your posts’ performance with the Creator Analytics feature. You can also get access to in-depth audience insights to grow your followers.

There are plethora of ways to enrich your personal profile on LinkedIn, thanks to the tailored features on the platform available.

How to Optimise Images for Your Business & Personal Profiles on LinkedIn?

To make your LinkedIn marketing efforts shine, you need to target in optimising images too. No matter the type of visual content you share on your business page, they have the power to make a difference to your efforts.

Whether it is choosing the right image size or deciding on the right image to upload on your business profile, these little things make a major impact. Here are some of the image size recommendations to follow:

Company Page:

• Logo size: 300 x 300 pixels (min); 400 x 400 pixels (max); File size: 4 MB (max)
• Cover image: 1128 x 191 pixels

Personal Page:

Your profile picture and profile cover picture should be optimised by choosing the right size.

Profile Picture

• Recommended profile picture size: 400 x 400 pixels with an aspect ratio of 1:1.
• The maximum file size is 8 MB.

Profile Cover Picture

• Recommended image size: 1584 x 396 pixels with an aspect ratio of 4:1.

??Pro Tip: The cover pictures are cropped differently on mobile and desktop respectively. So, make sure to view your profile on both devices before finalising your cover picture for your personal profile.

Blog post image: 1350 x 440 pixels

Square logo size: 60 x 60 pixels

File size: 10 MB (max)

Image Size for Life Tab

The life tab is dedicated for your business profile to show the human side of your brand. This section helps in giving everyone who comes across your business page a sneak peek of your company’s culture, ethics and everything what your brand is all about.

Recommended image sizes for the Life Tab —

• Hero image size: 1128 x 376
• Custom module image size: 502 x 282 pixels
• Company photos size: 900 x 600

Image Size for LinkedIn Ads

• Company logo size for ads: 100 x 100 pixels
• Spotlight ads logo size: 100 x 100 pixels
• Spotlight ads custom background image: 300 x 250 pixels
• Sponsored content images: 1200 x 627 pixels (1.91:1 aspect ratio)
• Sponsored content carousel images: 1080 x 1080 pixels (1:1 aspect ratio)

Adding Alternative Text to Images for Optimisation

Aside from image size optimisation, adding alt text to your images also favours optimisation. Often overlooked, alt text is a short description that gives info about what’s in the picture.

Adding alt text to images will boost your LinkedIn marketing in significant ways:

• SEO Boost - Search engines can’t “see” images but they can read the alt text added to the images. By including relevant keywords to the alt text, you can optimise the images and rank your posts better in search results.
• Better Accessibility - Screen reading tools can read out the alt text of the images, allowing visually impaired to understand the pictures. Your content gets more accessibility to all LinkedIn users.
• Image Loading Issue - Alt text conveys the message to the audience even if the image fails to load.

Optimising your images with these tactics severely impacts the way your content is viewed and valued. Whether it is for business or personal use, images need to be optimised for improved LinkedIn marketing.

LinkedIn Powers Your Marketing Efforts with AI Integration

LinkedIn evolves consistently with trending technologies that have the power to change the course of our future. In the last year, AI has been proven to be the most controversial yet intriguing trend that has proven to be transformative in several areas.

LinkedIn being a highly adaptive platform, has made many integrating AI. The result is creation of new and improved native tools and features. These updates are made with the intention to boost different aspects of the platform.

Let’s take a look at some of them powered by AI.

AI-Powered Profile Building: This is a boon for users who want to build their profile. If you’re using LinkedIn for career-oriented purposes then this AI tool serves you in the best way possible.

This is an effort from LinkedIn to enhance individual user experience. The AI-powered feature identifies the key skills and experiences of the user and suggests presenting them in About and Headline sections.

Premium users are able to reap the rewards of this feature as it helps them in profile building in half the time it usually takes.

The “Grow” & “Catch Up” Tabs: To make networking more efficient, the new AI features give users more advantage. In a redesigned Network tab section, there are inclusion of two new sections — “Grow” and “Catch Up”.

Using the AI algorithms, the “Grow” tab helps users in managing connections and coming across new relevant contacts. The recommendations are personalised via the “People You May Know” feature.

Whereas, the “Catch Up” tab is to maintain meaningful interactions with the connections you already have. This one prompts users to reconnect with their network based on updates such as work anniversaries, job change, new hires or birthdays.

Collaborative Articles: This feature helps users in developing professional front and share your expert insights on relevant topics. Collaborative Articles is an application of AI developed in association with the LinkedIn’s editorial team.

The articles here are collated insights from the LinkedIn community and results in creating an interactive platform for learning. The AI works its magic to match the articles with member experts through the LinkedIn Skills Graph, therefore, promoting insightful discourse and shared learning.

AI within Sales Navigator Tool: ?The Sales Navigator Tool is utilised for business use for pushing their marketing strategies in the right direction. In order to give businesses more power, LinkedIn has further amplified the features of this tool with inclusion of AI.

For example, Account IQ is a smart feature within Sales Navigator tool that uses generative AI to provide in-depth summary on accounts. It blends real-time LinkedIn first party data like people, workforce trends, posts, etc. with third party data to develop a holistic snapshot of a company.

There’s a host of several high-end features on LinkedIn that not only improves marketing efforts for business use but personal use as well.

Wrapping Up

Over the years, LinkedIn has become a powerful platform that not just empowers businesses but individuals in meeting their professional goals. The resources available in this ever-evolving platform are constantly upgraded for the benefit of the users.

With the right marketing strategies and use of relevant tools, features, you can make the best use of LinkedIn. The power is in your hands when you use this platform, all you gotta do is learn, experiment and hone the efforts you implement for fruitful outcomes.