LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional networking platform with over 722 million users worldwide. As such, it presents a major opportunity for B2B companies looking to generate leads and drive brand awareness through inbound marketing. An effective inbound marketing strategy for LinkedIn focuses on creating engaging content tailored to your target audience and leveraging LinkedIn’s built-in tools to promote that content across the platform. This drives qualified traffic to your LinkedIn company page, blog, or website where leads can be captured and nurtured into customers.
Some key elements of an inbound marketing strategy for LinkedIn include:
- Creating a compelling LinkedIn company page
- Publishing regular, high-quality content in the LinkedIn feed
- Joining and engaging in relevant LinkedIn groups
- Leveraging employee advocacy on LinkedIn
- Running sponsored content and InMail campaigns
- Promoting content through status updates
- Encouraging followers and shares
- Establishing thought leadership through long-form posts
- Participating in LinkedIn polls, questions and answers
- Using analytics to refine content and tactics
In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore each of these elements in further detail, providing tips and best practices for developing an inbound strategy tailored specifically for LinkedIn.
Creating a Compelling LinkedIn Company Page
Your LinkedIn company page serves as the hub for all your inbound marketing efforts on the platform. That’s why it’s critical to create an optimized, eye-catching page that effectively communicates your brand story to visitors. Here are some key tips for building your LinkedIn company page:
- Choose a unique cover image that reflects your brand identity and industry. This prominent banner image is one of the first things visitors will see.
- Craft an engaging about section that tells your company’s story in a compelling, human voice. Share your mission, values, and unique differentiators.
- Populate the products and services section with detailed descriptions of your core offerings. Include features, benefits, and customer success stories.
- Stay on-brand with your profile photo, background photo, logo, and color scheme.
- Showcase your team and culture by adding employee photos and spotlights.
- Add rich media like videos, presentations, and infographics to stand out.
- Include clear calls-to-action to follow your page, visit your website, contact sales, etc.
Optimizing these elements helps your page attract more visitors organically. It also establishes credibility and gives visitors a taste of your brand when they land on your page.
Publishing Regular, High-Quality Content
Consistently publishing engaging content is the engine that drives your entire inbound strategy on LinkedIn. Your followers look to your feed for valuable insights, thought leadership, and information relevant to their role and industry.
When publishing to your LinkedIn feed, keep these best practices in mind:
- Post at least once per day to stay top of mind.
- Offer a mix of content formats like articles, infographics, videos, and more.
- Showcase thought leadership on industry topics your audience cares about.
- Share company news updates, awards, and announcements.
- Give advice, tips, and how-tos related to your products/services.
- Publish guest posts from partners, employees, and influencers.
- Repurpose existing content from your blog, emails, ebooks, etc.
- Align post topics to stages in the buyer’s journey.
- Use relevant hashtags to extend reach.
Pay attention to which types of posts resonate most with your followers. Then continue to refine your content approach over time.
Joining and Engaging in LinkedIn Groups
LinkedIn Groups offer a way to connect directly with highly targeted prospects and establish yourself as an expert. There are over 2 million Groups on LinkedIn spanning every major industry and niche.
Here are some tips for effectively leveraging LinkedIn Groups:
- Search for Groups related to your target customers and join those with high member counts and engagement.
- Monitor Group discussions and contribute thoughtful insights or content when relevant.
- Share your newest blog posts and content to relevant Groups when applicable.
- Position yourself as a subject matter expert and thought leader.
- Search Groups for prospects to connect with directly.
- Watch for Group members who actively engage and provide value to the community.
The key is to find the right balance between contributing value and promoting your company. Avoid self-promotion and sales pitches.
Leveraging Employee Advocacy on LinkedIn
Your employees can be powerful amplifiers for extending your LinkedIn reach. Their personal networks provide access to new audiences outside your company’s followers.
To maximize employee advocacy on LinkedIn:
- Encourage employees to share company content to their network 1-2 times per month.
- Make it easy by creating an employee advocacy toolkit with shareable content.
- Educate employees on best practices for social media sharing.
- Highlight top employee amplifiers in internal communications.
- Consider gamification through leaderboards and rewards programs.
- Share guidelines for employees on crafting their own thought leadership content.
- Amplify employee content by resharing through your company page and within Groups.
The right advocacy program gives employees content and tools to easily promote your brand while adding value for their own networks.
Running Sponsored Content and InMail Campaigns
Once you’ve built a solid organic foundation, paid advertising can amplify your reach on LinkedIn. Here are two effective options:
Sponsored Content:
- Appear in the LinkedIn feed alongside organic content.
- Target by location, job role, industry, interests and more.
- Ideal for promoting new content, offers, and gated assets.
- Flexible campaign objectives available (video views, conversions, etc.)
InMail:
- Directly engage your target prospects via email-like messages.
- Reach members outside your network with precision targeting.
- Higher open rates compared to email.
- Enable one-to-one conversations and lead nurturing at scale.
Start small by promoting your best-performing organic content and offers. Track results closely to identify winning messages and targets.
Promoting Content Through Status Updates
Status updates provide a simple, quick way to repurpose existing content with your network in the LinkedIn feed.
Best practices include:
- Share snippets or highlights from new blog posts and articles.
- Ask interesting or provocative questions to spark engagement.
- spotlight company news, awards, milestones, and announcements.
- Poll your audience to gather quick feedback and insights.
- Give kudos to partners, customers, and employees.
Keep status updates short, scannable, and optimized with visuals, hashtags, or links back to full content.
Encouraging Followers and Shares
Growing your base of followers expands your ongoing reach and visibility. Here are ways to proactively gain more followers:
- Prominently showcase a vibrant Follow button on your Company Page.
- Add value for group members by providing helpful insights.
- Engage meaningfully with other thought leaders’ content.
- Partner on co-marketing campaigns that broaden exposure.
- Run follower-focused giveaways and promotions.
- Make following your company low-friction and rewarding.
You also want to encourage current followers and visitors to share your content to their own networks. Some proven tactics include:
- Publish content tailored to trigger strong reactions.
- Promote giveaways for shares, like ebooks or event passes.
- Make it easy with share buttons on all content.
- Ask explicitly for shares within posts.
- Monitor analytics to see which posts naturally gain high sharing.
- Test different types of multimedia content.
More followers and shares compound your content reach in a positive inbound loop.
Establishing Thought Leadership Through Long-Form Posts
While most content published to LinkedIn feeds is short-form, long-form posts enable you to dive deeper on topics and establish thought leadership.
For businesses and executives, LinkedIn supports publishing posts up to 10,000 words as articles. Some tips include:
- Choose topics that align with your expertise and audience interests.
- Include actionable advice, tips, and best practices.
- Share unique data and insights not published elsewhere.
- Publish series on specific themes over weeks or months.
- Incorporate visuals like images, graphs, and video.
- Promote your long-form articles through other channels.
These in-depth thought leadership pieces can anchor your broader content strategy while showcasing your subject matter expertise.
Participating in LinkedIn Polls, Questions and Answers
Beyond posting content and status updates, engaging directly with your followers helps humanize your company presence. LinkedIn’s interactive features like polls and Q&A provide easy ways to do this.
- Ask poll questions to crowdsource opinions and spark quick conversations.
- Respond to other users’ questions with helpful advice or insights.
- Pose questions to your followers to get them weighing in.
- Ask for input on topics, trends or types of content they want to see.
- Share poll results in follow-up content.
This two-way dialogue helps build rapport with followers while generating content ideas and insights into what resonates most.
Using Analytics to Refine Content and Tactics
The final critical element is continually analyzing performance to refine your approach over time. LinkedIn provides robust analytics within your Company Page dashboard to identify what’s working.
Key metrics to track include:
- Follower growth over time.
- Engagement rates on individual posts.
- Content types that perform best.
- Most popular content by clicks and shares.
- Referral traffic to your website.
- Follower demographics and companies.
Compare this to conversion goals like form fills, purchases, and pipeline influence to understand your content ROI. Feed these insights back into your strategy and content planning process.
Conclusion
Executing an effective inbound marketing strategy on LinkedIn requires aligning tactics to your audience, consistently creating valuable content, and actively engaging across channels. But the high concentration of professional decision makers makes it a platform with huge potential to drive leads for B2B brands. By following the tips above, you can develop an integrated approach to attract, engage, and convert your ideal prospects on LinkedIn.
