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LinkedIn
9 Steps To Building a LinkedIn Content Strategy That Brings $$$
Mihaela Cicvaric
July 12, 2023
January 15, 2022
|
7 min. read
Mihaela Cicvaric
LAST UPDATED
May 21, 2024
READING TIME
7 min.
Ready to start building or upgrading your brand? Then it’s time to put together a killer LinkedIn content strategy for your business.
And now, we’re going to share the exact steps we followed, so that you can get the same results.
Here are the 9 steps that you should take to start building your LinkedIn content strategy.
1. Set clear goals for your LinkedIn content strategy
First, decide what your main goal is with your LinkedIn strategy, as well as how you will measure it.
In other words, what do you want to achieve, and how will you know that you've achieved it?
For example, you may want to:
✔️ hire exceptional talent for your team
✔️ connect with sales prospects
✔️ build your brand awareness
✔️ increase your website traffic
Depending on which of these goals you choose, you’ll make different posts, connect with different accounts, and track different KPIs.
Basically, if you don’t set goals before creating your LinkedIn content strategy, you’ll be posting in the dark. You’ll have no way to know if there’s a return on your investment, or how to tweak your strategy to better meet your needs.
So choose one or two of these goals that most align with your business objectives, then pinpoint metrics that will help you track them.
For example, if a clear objective of yours is to hire exceptional talent, you could track:
→ organic reach of LinkedIn job listings
→ number of applicants per opening
→ offer acceptance rate
→ source of hire
Linkedin company pages come with a range of analytics that you can track automatically.
Once you’re sure of what you want to accomplish and how to measure it, you’re ready to start on your greater LinkedIn content strategy.
If you’ve already researched your target audience, the next step is to find out who they are on LinkedIn.
One way to do this is to look at the profiles of your current customers, read their descriptions, and check their previous professional experience.
But also check their activity 👇
This will help you understand their tone, if they use a lot of emojis or figures of speech, if they post serious updates or memes and jokes, etc.
You'll also be able to get a better understanding of how they interact with people, what kind of content they engage with, and who they respond to in the comments.
All of this is information you can use to tailor your content to be the kind that they start following and reacting to.
For more information on using the LinkedIn platform to find your target audience, use our guide on LinkedIn search.
3. Find your content topic niche
Decide what areas of content you would like to post about. It needs to hit two main criteria:
→ content that you or your brand has unique expertise in
→ content that your target audience likes to read
For the first criterion, think of topics unique to your brand identity and the problems that your business solves. These are areas where you are the expert.
For example, if you work in the sales industry, you could post about:
→ best cold outreach practices
→ sales success stories
→ multichannel case studies
The second criterion is where the time you spend defining your target audience comes into play. Consider the types of content that your buyer personas interact with, comment on, and share.
For example, if you’re targeting freelancers and solopreneurs, they may like:
→ storytelling posts that end with a clear takeaway
→ carousels, infographics, and other resources they can use to grow their business
→ productivity tips
Pinpoint where these two types of content overlap (i.e. your expertise and your target audience’s interests), and make this your primary topic area.
4. Build your LinkedIn profile or company page
If you haven’t yet, your next step will be to create your official LinkedIn profile.
Here are some of the most important components to focus on:
Profile photo/page logo
If you already have an official logo for your brand, you should add it at this point.
If you’re creating a personal brand account, choose a professional photo that showcases your personality.
Give it a bright or colorful background to ensure that it stands out on the page. And don’t change it often, so that people can immediately associate it with you.
Cover image
When picking your LinkedIn cover image, design it to catch the eye and blend well with your company logo.
That’s important because, on the public view of your page, your logo takes up a small portion of the cover image. For example, here’s what it looks like on our page:
From the cover image and profile photo alone, visitors should get a clear idea of who you are and what you can offer them.
Finally, make sure it matches LinkedIn’s official image specifications: 1584 x 396 pixels for a personal profile and 1128 x 191 pixels for a company profile.
This part of the profile is a mini sales pitch to your visitors. It should communicate:
→ this is who I am/we are
→ this is what I/we do
→ this is what you’ll get from this LinkedIn page
For example, here’s our tagline:
You can see we went for a tagline that communicates:
→ what we do (cold outreach)
→ a brand identity (cheeky, playful, informative)
→ FOMO (you’re ‘missing out’ if you haven’t heard of us)
Pick a tagline that fits best with your brand identity and what you want to accomplish with your LinkedIn.
Company bio
Your “About” section should include more in-depth information about what you offer to your followers.
Include keywords and phrases that people might search to find brands like yours, as LinkedIn pages can be indexed by Google and appear in search results.
If you need a little inspiration, here’s ours:
5. Set up your LinkedIn publication calendar
The key to success on LinkedIn is consistency.
It’s a bit like working out. If you only put effort into it every other month, you won’t get much in return. But if you put in the work every day, or even just a few times a week, you’ll see results.
To help keep you or your social media team consistent, make a plan in advance of what you will post, and when.
The ideal frequency of LinkedIn posts
If you can, work up to one post per weekday to get the most reach and engagement.
But when you’re just getting started, keep it to 1 new post per week as you build your business’s network. Then increase the frequency as you get more engagement and a larger audience.
Remember, you are building a brand, and this requires persistence.
For example, Briana was building her personal brand as a Creative Marketing Manager. She started posting once every few months, with an organic reach of only 370 views:
And in 2 months of posting multiple times a week, she built an organic reach of thousands per post:
But as a general rule of thumb, the best time slots are before work, after work, or somewhere around 2 p.m. Test each of these and see which works for your target audience.
If you're posting for an international audience, vary the times of your posts so that different time zones are included.
6. Start writing LinkedIn posts for your business
Everything’s now ready for you to start posting on LinkedIn.
When you create your first posts, keep these best practices in mind:
Hook the reader with your intro
LinkedIn displays the first couple of lines of your post and leaves the rest in "see more." So your goal with your hook is to make it catchy enough to attract your audience.
Just like you want a subject line that corresponds to the body of your emails, you want your intro to be in line with the rest of your post.
Think of the goal of your post: what value are you bringing to people, or what story do you want to tell?
Show that off in the intro. For example:
Here, Guillaume shares right off the bat what his post is about: Google Sheets replacing Excel. But you have to click “see more” to understand exactly why.
Another tip is to make the intro like a preview. So keep the main idea of your post, but don't give away all the information.
With this intro, Tal previews what you should STOP doing, but to find out what you should do, you’ll have to keep reading.
Use short phrases
You might have already noticed this, but the LinkedIn platform favors posts with short phrases.
Posts like this are also appealing to readers. A post with one-line sentences or short phrases is easier to read, even if it's the same amount of content.
To formulate this, make every idea a new phrase. You should also simplify your phrases to increase readability.
Check out this LinkedIn post:
He uses simple words and phrases that seem powerful, so you’re able to skim through the post easily. And at the end, you arrive at a call-to-action that is building his brand and his business.
If you need help thinking of things to post about, you can use a tool like Taplio to get AI-generated LinkedIn post inspiration.
Increase your reach by tagging relevant people & pages
Once your post is ready, there are a few more things you can do that will encourage engagement.
The first of these is tagging all relevant parties. The more people you tag, the more visibility your posts will get, and of course, the more likely these people will be to comment on your post.
See how Guillaume managed this in an earlier post that drove hype to lemlist:
lemlist was a younger company at this time, and getting attention from big names helped boost our awareness.
If someone said something that inspired you to write the post, tag them. If you are writing a post about your experience with a company, tag them.
Especially for small or emerging companies, this can be a great way to get a boost from established brands and their followers.
Add images and videos to your LinkedIn posts
The LinkedIn algorithm favors adding pictures and videos to your posts. So one of the best ways to get more engagement is to use them!
In general, posts with images, videos, and other media get better results, because they are eye-catching to your followers.
See how Lucas did this by sharing useful information in the LinkedIn carousel format:
On LinkedIn, you can share:
→ plain text posts
→ photos
→ videos (native performs better than links)
→ documents (PDFs, carousels, etc.)
→ articles
→ LinkedIn polls
Use a variety of these formats to test which types of visuals, text, videos, or other great content on LinkedIn resonate with your target audience.
Include hashtags
Thankfully we are well past the days of filling social media posts with endless hashtags that nobody understands.
Still, adding a few hashtags to posts is still a relevant practice, especially for businesses.
This is because hashtags allow you to essentially label a post under a certain category, which can help boost its ability to pop up on the top of searches.
Add 1-3 targeted hashtags to appear on the feeds of people who are following the topics that are relevant to your brand.
7. Interact with other LinkedIn accounts
Take a few minutes a day to comment on and engage with relevant posts on your business’s LinkedIn feed.
Here’s how:
Step 1 - Search for things that matter to your content niche
For example, your content niche is B2B sales. Follow all the people and brands who are leaders in this space, and connect with other accounts who share this topic - your competitors included.
See what they're up to.
Step 2 - Check out their posts & read their articles
Get a feel for what your network posts about, and what you or your brand can add to the conversation.
Step 3 - Leave thoughtful comments
Leave real comments on the content that people and businesses in your network are posting. Aim to add value and insights where you can.
For industry leaders and popular accounts, try to leave your comments as soon as you can on their posts. You can sort your feed by most recent posts to ensure you’re the first to the table.
This gives you the best chance of grabbing the attention of the post’s author and their audience.
The more you interact with other accounts in your topic areas, the more likely they are to interact with you and boost your engagement in return.
8. Promote your LinkedIn content
Simply posting new content and interacting with other accounts isn't enough.
To get your LinkedIn content seen by as many people as possible, you’ll need to promote it.
Here are a few LinkedIn promotion techniques to get you started:
Leverage your team
Engagement from your colleagues and team members is a key factor in increasing the reach of your brand’s LinkedIn posts.
That’s because, in LinkedIn’s algorithm, your post is shown to your team members’ network after they like and comment on it.
So for every person in your network who gives your many posts a like, you’re multiplying your reach by their follower count.
At lemlist we frequently share our social media posts with each other to encourage engagement. It’s an automatic distribution system built into our company culture, and it works!
Every LinkedIn profile within your team is an opportunity for brand awareness and business growth.
Leverage your network
You can reach out to people outside of your company to promote your content as well.
Never be afraid to use the power of your network. After all, they connect with you because they are interested in what you are doing.
You can simply connect with people who might be interested and ask them to check out your content or share it with others in their network.
And if you’ve ever responded to someone in your LinkedIn DMs asking you to promote their work, now is the time to ask them to return the favor!
Leverage LinkedIn groups
LinkedIn groups are a perfect opportunity to connect with people in your target audience or your ICP.
Why? Because you can easily find an entire group of people that you know will be interested in connecting with you based on specific attributes.
Once you do that, you can share relevant content that the group would appreciate.
For example, in a cold calling training group, we might share one of lemlist's cold calling webinars, or share a post we made with some cold calling tips.
This boosts your reach and also provides value to your target audience.
Leverage other social media channels
As long as your profile is public, you can share your LinkedIn posts on other social media sites.
Sharing your LinkedIn posts across other channels introduces a new audience to your content. They get a link to your LinkedIn profile, which can help build your network and follower count.
Simply copy the URL of the post and share it with individuals or groups in your target audience.
Send direct messages to people in your target audience
To make the most personal connections with your target audience, send them messages directly.
One option is to do this manually, by choosing profiles one by one and typing out personalized messages. It will get the job done, but you’ll spend hours targeting the right people and personalizing each message.
Instead, we recommend combining LinkedIn searches with lemlist's automated messages to personalize at scale with your target audience. You can even get an AI-generated sequence that’s ready to connect with hundreds of LinkedIn prospects in seconds.
This works best when you have content that is targeted towards a certain group.
For example, at lemlist we’ve worked on more content for multichannel sequence users. When it was ready, our sales team used lemlist campaigns to share the content with people in our target audience.
Send LinkedIn voice messages with lemlist
Written messages, like emails and chat messages, are fine, but what if you could also send your leads audio messages?
Well, you can send LinkedIn voice notes straight from within lemlist.
These voice messages integrate perfectly into any multichannel lemlist campaign.
When you use more channels and mediums in your outreach, your engagement will skyrocket!
Make sponsored posts
If you really want to invest in the reach of your post, you can do a LinkedIn-sponsored post. It’s essentially just an ad.
It costs money and doesn’t always guarantee a high ROI, so if you are a small company, we only recommend using it as a last resort.
Now, that isn't to say sponsoring a post is a bad thing. In fact, it can really boost your reach.
But if you can get similar benefits for free, you should try that first.
9. Edit your LinkedIn content strategy according to your results
The strategy you implement when you first start posting on LinkedIn will evolve with time as you find out what works and what doesn’t.
In fact, a strategy that changes periodically is proof that you’re evolving as a brand and learning from your actions.
Go back to the metrics you defined in step 1 of this process and keep track of how they grow, and what actions drove the change.
This way, you can pinpoint the content types, messages, and topic areas that most contribute to your goals.
Here’s an extra process we recommend to measure the impact of your LinkedIn activity on your website traffic and conversions:
→ Open this tool and UTM the website link you’re sharing in a DM, post, or comment.
→ Go to Google Analytics → Acquisition → Campaigns to analyze traffic from LinkedIn.
→ Set events and goals in Google Analytics to measure metrics beyond traffic (e.g. conversions, free trials, form submissions, etc.).
The key takeaways
Here are the key steps you should take for a killer LinkedIn content strategy:
→ Set clear goals and metrics to measure success.
→ Define your target audience and tailor your content to their interests.
→ Choose a niche that aligns with your expertise and your audience's interests.
→ Optimize your LinkedIn profile or company page with a professional photo/logo, compelling tagline, and informative bio.
→ Establish a consistent posting schedule and vary your content formats.
→ Engage with other LinkedIn accounts by commenting and interacting with their posts.
→ Promote your content through your team, network, LinkedIn groups, and other social media channels.
→ Evaluate your results and adjust your strategy based on metrics and feedback.
→ Track website traffic and conversions using UTM parameters in Google Analytics.
Remember, consistency, engagement, and value-driven content are key to a successful LinkedIn content strategy.
For a complete course on using LinkedIn to build your personal brand and boost your revenue, follow the lemlist Personal Branding School. It’s completely free and comes with a value-packed Notion template and resources to guide you through every step.
Mihaela Cicvaric
Content Marketing Manager @ lempire | Sharing everything you need to get replies to your cold emails
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