LinkedIn generated $3.8 billion in ad revenue in 2021 and is expected to jump up to $7.7 billion by 2026. This may not be the social media platform to find trendy Gen Z audiences, but it is the best place to go for professionals or B2B marketing. LinkedIn users also tend to have a higher monthly household income.
LinkedIn marketing has different standards than marketing on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. If you plan to set up a LinkedIn account for your business — or to create LinkedIn ads, it’s a good idea to look through some of the LinkedIn marketing tactics that have worked in the past. Let’s go over some of the best LinkedIn marketing ideas.
Use LinkedIn’s Sorting Features to Zero In on a Target Audience
LinkedIn allows you to search for professionals and businesses by industry, company size, job role, and more. If you have a SaaS product that IT professionals, in-house legal counsel, or HR managers would love, you can put actual faces to your target audience quite easily on LinkedIn. Make connections with these potential customers. This will help you to more precisely target your audience and get the best chance on follow-ups and leads.
Invite To Your Email List
LinkedIn allows you to email 50 connections at a time, which is a great way to follow up with those targeted connections. Send a message thanking them for connecting with you on LinkedIn. From there, you can invite them to join your email list and get more information about your services and any special offers.
An non-personalized invitation is always a gamble, so it’s a good plan to recognize this and apologize in advance in your message. However, if your offerings speak to the contact’s needs and interests, they will likely take an interest in joining your email list anyway.
Don’t let this be your only interaction with them, as this can come across as a little too mercenary. Make sure you also react to their posts, respond to their messages, and show that you are interested in a connection — not just a new lead.
Use Pay-Per-Click Text Ads
LinkedIn has a pay-per-click program that allows you to set your own daily budget for text ads. With this system, LinkedIn will boost your text ads until they have reached the amount of clicks equal to your daily budget, then stop. During the time that your ads are boosted, they can reach more targeted audiences — the kind of readers that are likely to become leads. You can also choose to do pay-per-click or pay-per-impression, based on your goals for the ads.
Create Content Marketing Through LinkedIn Articles
LinkedIn makes it easy to create articles from your profile. These articles can be viewed by anyone who looks through your LinkedIn profile, as well as anyone who searches the relevant tags that you add to the article. This is much like posting a regular website blog. In fact, some LinkedIn users copy their website blog over to their LinkedIn articles.
Use best practices for content marketing in your LinkedIn articles: high authority outbound links, engaging and informative content that goes in-depth into the subject matter, and eye-catching imagery. Make sure you use relevant tags and SEO practices so the right readers can find your content marketing.
Track Your Marketing Performance
Once you have some ads and content marketing going, track your performance so that you know what is and isn’t working. One easy way to do this is to use pay-per-impression ads rather than pay-per-click. Impressions are only counted once someone starts scrolling through the webpage, thus demonstrating interest. And the amount you paid for your boosted ad can tell you how many impressions you received.
You can also use a social media analytics dashboard to track your performance. LinkedIn uses ad reporting analytics for your paid ads. You can also use an outsourced LinkedIn analytics dashboard that takes into account all your LinkedIn marketing. You can even keep your own count of how many email list contacts you’ve gained through LinkedIn.
Marketing analytics will give you perspective to determine the best way to proceed with your LinkedIn marketing in the future. If one aspect of your marketing proves ineffective, you can let that go. On the other hand, if one method surprises you with how effective it is, you might choose to invest further in that marketing strategy. Like anything else online, LinkedIn is a frequently shifting landscape. Analytics will help you stay on top of what’s relevant now.
