Building an Effective LinkedIn Content Marketing Plan

Content marketing is essential while marketing your business in this technology-driven era. LinkedIn is also a platform used for marketing by various companies these days. Research shows that this social media platform is enjoyed by a wider audience, with about 66.8 million monthly active users in the United States and 849.6 million monthly active users all over the globe. 

LinkedIn allows businesses to build up their brand awareness and generate many leads. LinkedIn content marketing plans, designs, and publishes relevant and valuable content to attract your target audience using this platform. In this article, we will explore all the benefits of LinkedIn content marketing and the best practices that can generate engaging content and blog posts.  

What is LinkedIn Content Marketing? 

LinkedIn content marketing is creating and generating an informative and relevant piece of content about their business on LinkedIn to engage and attract a larger audience. LinkedIn content strategy involves sharing content in several formats, like articles, images, videos, blog posts, and graphical information. Businesses can share this valuable content on their company's LinkedIn profiles and other LinkedIn groups.

The primary goal behind LinkedIn content marketing is to build brand awareness and increase broader audience engagement with the business. Further, this step helps drive more leads, sales, and revenue for your business.

Benefits of Developing Content Strategy on LinkedIn

In several ways, LinkedIn content marketing is beneficial for business owners to build up their brand's reputation in front of the target audience. Some of the main benefits are:

1. Allows You to Reach More of Your Target Audience

As we all know, LinkedIn is a social platform with almost more than 750 million active members. Because of this, people consider LinkedIn to be an ideal professional platform for connecting with your audience.

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2. Helps in Building Network

Publishing valuable, informational, and relevant content on LinkedIn shows your credibility and expertise. This further helps build up your professional network connections and gain trust from your potential customers. 

3. Generates a lot of Leads and Drives Back Traffic to Your Brand's Website

When you share informative and valuable content with your audience that directly addresses their needs, they quickly get attracted to your brand. This way, you can drive a lot of customers back to your website, ultimately driving more sales for your business.

4. Allows you to Engage With Your Audience

The original content you share on LinkedIn is available to many users to like, share, and comment on; this increases your visibility on the platform.

How to Build a LinkedIn Content Marketing Strategy That Generates Leads?

Below are the critical five steps that can help in creating the most innovative LinkedIn content marketing strategy:

•  Establish Your Marketing Goals

Defining your marketing goals is the first and foremost step for any business. Some common goals are achievements after content marketing, generating leads, building brand awareness, and getting an engaging audience.

• Get to Know More About Your Target Audience

Knowing your target audience is essential; Who are you contacting"? What are their needs or pain areas? When you learn basic things about your LinkedIn audience, you can easily create valuable and relevant content that resonates with their needs and interests.

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• Deliver Written Content to Build Authenticity

LinkedIn will allow you to LinkedIn post content in various formats like images, videos, graphics, and standard text. But your content must be well written to look authentic and straightforward.

• Work on the Promotion of Your LinkedIn Content

After posting the content about your brand on LinkedIn, your next step should be promoting it. You can share that content on your personal or professional LinkedIn pages and other LinkedIn groups to reach more customers. 

• Review Your LinkedIn Analytics

Last but not least, measuring the performance of your content is crucial for your businesses. This way, you get to know how much your content affects your audience and, among them, how many are becoming your leads.

How to Create Engaging Content for LinkedIn?

Creating engaging content for LinkedIn is a tricky task as it requires strategy, attention, and creativity, and when all these combine, they attract your audience. You can follow the below tips to understand how to create creative and engaging content:

1. Ask Questions to Your Audience: Is your content's opening lines in the format of a question? That increases the curiosity of the reader to read and answer it. This increases the interaction level between the reader and you.

2. Involve Attention-Grabbing Headlines in Your Content: The headline is the first line anyone will read, so it must be perfect and compelling. You can use numbers or some action-taking words in this section.

3. Keep Your Content Valuable and Relevant: Avoid using any vague phrases about your brand in LinkedIn content. It should be utterly relevant to the needs and interests of the audience. 

4. Use Story-telling: Telling stories is an effective way to engage your target audience. Because after hearing stories, the original content stays in the audience's minds.
   

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5. Take Care of Your Tone: As LinkedIn is a social network, ensure your tone in the LinkedIn content should be a normal conversational tone.

6. Include Some Visual Content: Including visuals like images, emojis, graphics, and videos attracts the audience and makes your content more engaging.

7. Share Your Expertise: Sharing your own experience in the market increases your credibility in their mind.
   

What to Maximize Your LinkedIn Content Engagement and Reach? 

You need to be very creative to maximize your engagement and reach with your LinkedIn content. Because engaging the audience to re-share and comment on your Links posts or any other content is challenging. So follow the below tips that can help you in maximizing the engagement with your audience:

• Know Your Target Audience: While publishing content on LinkedIn, you should be well aware of the needs and interests of your audience. Because if the audience feels your content is relevant, they engage with it.

• Optimization of Your LinkedIn Profile: Your profile is the first thing your audience looks at, so optimize it well to increase your visibility in the market.

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• Use Appropriate Hashtags: Using hashtags in your content helps increase the visibility of your content to a large number of people active on LinkedIn. 

• Timing of Posting Content: Posting at the correct time is crucial to make your content visible to a large audience. Typically, the best time to post on LinkedIn is 9 a.m. on Tuesday or Wednesday. However, weekends are worst time for the same. 

• Relationship with influencers: In this digital era, having a good relationship with influencers is like the cherry on the cake. People believe what others say these days, so why not take advantage of it?

•  Use Sponsored Content: When posting sponsored content on LinkedIn to target that specific audience increases your visibility on the platform.

What are the Four Pillars of LinkedIn Content Creation for Content Marketing?

Research shows that 2 million blogs are posted every day on LinkedIn. So to make your content or blog stand out from this number, it must be effective and influential. Below are the four pillars of LinkedIn content creation you can follow to increase your reach:

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1. Audience

Before you start writing any content, the first thing you need to do is known about your audience:

• Who can be your potential customers?
• Who finds your content to be useful for them?
• What are the interest areas of your potential customers?
• Also, you can create buyer's personas depending on their generic demographics like age, sex, location, etc. 

So after knowing all this information about your target audience, you now know what kind of content you should create for them that can resonate with their pain points, interests, and needs. 

2. Authentic Content

The authenticity of the LinkedIn content is a critical component because this content is the only voice that speaks for your brand. And when you post authentic content that resonates with the audience's needs, they get attracted and build trust in your brand. The content you post on LinkedIn should demonstrate what you have to offer to your audience and what your expertise is in the same. 

3. Relevant Content

Now, when you are all about the needs and interests of your audience, so your content should be all about that only. Stay up-to-date with the industry trends and what people are interested in to create that relevant content for them. 

4. Consistency of your Content

You should never ghost your audience. Staying consistent with your content is typically the critical pillar of LinkedIn content creation for content marketing. When you are regular with your content posting, that displays your presence on the platform. From a customer's point of view, if a customer is going to read content about your brand frequently, they get involved with you and become loyal to your business.

What Metrics to Consider to Analyze and Measure Your LinkedIn Content Success?

Reviewing and understanding what is working and what is not working in your content is the primary step for analyzing and measuring the success of your LinkedIn content. Here below are some ways in which you can measure success:

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1. Understand Your LinkedIn Analytics

LinkedIn analytics shares insights about your content, how it performs, how many people it has reached, how much audience engagement rate, and how many clicks there were on the content.

2. Reviewing the Key performance indicators

• Impression rate: How many times did the LinkedIn members see your content?

• Engagement rate: How many re-shares and comments are there on your content?

• Click-through rate: How many people clicked on the links included in your content?

• Lead generation rate: How many leads have you generated with your content?
  

3. Listening to Other People

When visiting social events and listening to what other people say about your brand and the quality content posted on LinkedIn helps you get a better view of what people expect from you.

4. Increase of Followers

If you see a good increase in the number of your followers, that means your LinkedIn content is booming.

Best Practices for LinkedIn Content Creation

Some of the best practices you can follow to increase the effectiveness of your LinkedIn content marketing strategy are:

1. Consider Your Target Audience: Creating LinkedIn content with keeping the needs and interests of your target audience in mind is essential, but it works like magic. 

2. Write Engaging Content: Writing attention-grabbing content helps get your content engaged and sugared a lot.

3. Be Genuine in Your Content: Avoid using any spamming words or vague phrases that bore out the audience. Stay genuine and original in your LinkedIn content and tell them what you have to resonate with their needs.

4. Include Hashtags: Hashtags do magic for your content marketing. It simply increases the visibility of your LinkedIn content.
   

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5. Stay Consistent: Keep posting your content consistently on LinkedIn; you can create calendars for yourself. When you make a strict and regular schedule for your LinkedIn content posting, the audience will wait for your content. 

6. Keep Your Content Short and Straightforward: Readers usually avoid long paragraphs, so ensure your exclusive content is short and sweet.
   

Types of Content for LinkedIn

The LinkedIn platform is designed for professionals to connect even after staying in different locations. There are various categories of content available on LinkedIn, such as:

• Articles
• Blogs
• Job opportunities
• Careers advice, etc.
  

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To understand the best type of content for Linked, you can go through the below examples:

1. Text Only Content
   

LinkedIn also allows you to write whatever you want about your brand in a text-only format. It is considered the best way to convey your ideas or concepts to your audience. Best practices for sharing text-only content on LinkedIn:

• The text-only content should be precise and up to a point only.
• Include attention-grabbing headlines in your content
• Make use of relevant hashtags 
• Avoid any typing or grammatical errors in the range. 
  

2. Blog Posts
   

In this technology-driven world, where multiple options exist to publish your articles and blogs, LinkedIn is one of the most influential platforms, with millions of active users here. Hence, it helps in getting a higher reach for your blog posts. If you are an individual, you must visit your LinkedIn page and write your article there. Also, business owners can visit their company; 's LinkedIn page and write blogs there. Best practices to follow for posting blog posts on LinkedIn:

• Share your blog posts on both your personal and professional LinkedIn pages.
• Start your content with compelling headlines and use relevant keywords in your post.
• Ensure to include images, graphics, and videos in your blog posts to make them more exciting and engaging.
• Share your blog posts with other LinkedIn groups as well.
  

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3. Third-Party Content‍

We all know that LinkedIn is all about getting into conversations with people and building relationships with them. Sometimes, you can also discuss other businesses or brands with your brand. However, taking your audience away from your brand and discussing another would look counterintuitive. But it is an excellent initiative to share third-party content and give valuable information to your audience. Best practices to follow for posting third-party content on LinkedIn:

• Share good-quality and relevant third-party content on LinkedIn per the audience's needs.
• Spice up the third-party content with some of your experience comments to make it look more valuable to your audience.
• To increase the visibility of this content, including the original author's name as well.
  

4. Native Video
   

In LinkedIn, a native video means an unsponsored video that can be shared on your LinkedIn profiles to market your brand. Native video content increases the visibility of your content, as one research proved that 51% of video marketers promote their content through LinkedIn only. From those, 84% of people have been successful with all their efforts. Best practices to follow for posting native video content on LinkedIn:

• Your video content should be short in length.
• Include call-to-action buttons at the end of your video
• Include subtitles in your video
  

5. Images and Graphics
   

Conversely, images and graphics have a glancing view on LinkedIn posts. This makes the content look engaging and interesting to your audience. Images like Excel sheets provide an informative look at your content. Best practices for sharing images and graphics content on LinkedIn:

• Ensure to include high-quality photos and graphics in your content
• Include some captions for all the photos being added
• Do not copy-paste generic images from the Internet into your content.
  

Final Words

To increase your customer base, consider content marketing on LinkedIn. This significantly increases the visibility and reach of your brand. When you consistently post and follow several other steps mentioned above, it will generate many leads for your business. However, success with LinkedIn content marketing takes effort and time but is the forever lasting success for your business.

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