LinkedIn Content Marketing: The Ultimate Guide For Businesses and Personal Branding (+Proven Strategies)

It’s Monday morning—your boss calls you and politely inquires about your LinkedIn Content Marketing Strategy for the business.

You freeze, knowing very well that a good content marketing strategy is needed to build the brand image, establish credibility and expertise, and help the business become a thought leader—but you don’t have it ready all this time.

There are plenty of things you can do.

• Resign because you have failed OR
• Figure out how to come up with one and immediately start generating leads for the business

Clearly, your options are tricky, and if you fall prey to them—you’ll be a loser. But you don’t have to fret.

No matter the goals for the business—brand awareness, thought leadership, or lead generation—a LinkedIn Content Marketing Strategy is easy to come up with.  

That’s where this article comes in—to set you down the right path in minutes. So grab a piece of paper and a pen, and let’s dive in!

Is LinkedIn Content Marketing Effective?

The answer is a big, resounding "YES!"

LinkedIn is a professional platform, so content marketing on it is more effective than on other social networks since it’s mostly consumed by target audiences who are professionals.

According to a survey by Top Rank, an average of 35% of B2B companies get sales leads from LinkedIn.

For example, if your business is in the SEO industry, you’ll be targeting professionals who have businesses or who would like to improve their SEO game.

They’re mostly online, and if you want to get to them, you have to be where they’re at—and that’s LinkedIn.

What Types of Content Performs Best on LinkedIn

As mentioned above, LinkedIn is a professional platform, and your content has to be professional for it to be effective.

Here are the types of content you should be sharing on LinkedIn.

• Status Updates - These are short and simple posts that you can use to highlight the business achievements and milestones.
• Photos and Visual Content - You can use the images to promote an upcoming event the business is hosting, or to showcase products or services that are in the pipeline.
• Video - Video content is well known to generate curiosity and stimuli to any audience. In fact, this type of content will involve, inform and evoke a sense of personal connection between your brand and the audience.
• Infographics - You can use infographics to break down industry-related topics, or anything that’s complicated to understand. Infographics can make dry and boring information exciting—and if you think this idea is worthy it, you can get content ideas here to start with.
• Articles - These are more in-depth content than the other types. You can use them to provide more information on a particular topic, product or even a service and they last longer since they are published on a blog.
• Tips - You can use these to share short-form content, information that lasts no longer than a couple of minutes.
• Brainstorming Sessions - You can host brainstorming sessions where you invite guest writers to write on topics that you want to be covered. You can also post a call for guest posts on your page, where other publishers and influencers can submit ideas.
• Polls and Surveys - You can use polls where you ask your audience questions that are relevant to their interests. The best part, if you’re research and data driven, polls and surveys can make it easier for you.
• Live LinkedIn sessions where you discuss and go deeper into a specific topic or present a new project to your audience.
• You can also leverage paid content in form of target ads to gain the attention of your audience and perhaps generate leads.

The following are great examples of content that you can share:

• Lead magnets
• Lessons learned
• Industry knowledge
• Motivational content
• Best practices
• Interestting experiences
• Professional & personal life

With that said, let’s get to the heart of this article in 123…

How To Develop an Effective LinkedIn Content Marketing Strategy

There’s nothing new about the fact that you’ll need to develop a strategy for LinkedIn Content Marketing before you put your foot forward. It’s an essential step to take.

Here are some tips to help you develop a successful LinkedIn content strategy.

1. Define Your Goals

In this section, you want to understand what the ultimate goal of your business is. Here are some of the questions you can ask yourself in order to come up with a robust strategy that is effective.

• Do I want to build a community around my brand?
• Do I want to increase my brand awareness?
• Am I trying to promote my products or services?
• What do you want to get out of the content marketing?
• What do you want your audience to do based on your content?
• Which type of sales funnel are you dealing with? Is it Top of the Funnel (TOFU) leads or Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU) leads through the means of LinkedIn content marketing?
• Does LinkedIn marketing fit into the broader digital marketing strategy? If so, how?

2. Define Your Audience

Once you know what your goals are, you have to identify your ideal audience. It’s important to know who your audience is since you have to tailor your content to resonate with them.

Let’s say you’re a graphic designer. You need to find an audience that is actually interested in graphic design and related items like internet marketing or writing.

In that case, you might consider the following:

• People at lower levels of your sales funnel may be interested in tactical information.
• Those in the middle of the funnel need data to back up their purchase decisions
• Those at the top are searching for ways that they can take the business to the next level.

3. Decide on Type of Content

In one of the sections above, we discussed several types of content that work best on LinkedIn. You will be required to pick the best of them all—and, of course, the one you are able to implement, is affordable, and fits your general content marketing strategy—and use it.

You must be sure to consider the following factors in order to hit the sweet spot with content generation:

• Frequently visit your target audience's profile to identify the subjects that are intriguing and relevant to them.
• Be up to speed with current market developments.
• Consistently gain market knowledge and professional insight to deliver common concepts from a fresh angle.
• Make your publications more current and increase interaction by riding the buzz wave.

4. Define Metrics

Metrics will help you figure out what is working and what is not—which is basically the performance of your strategy. Some of the metrics used on LinkedIn include:  

• Conversion rate, including Click Through Rates
• Impressions
• Engagement rate (likes, comments, shares, etc.)
• Followers

5. Create a Strategic Timeline

It’s not enough to just have content. You have to know when to publish it, and how often. You don’t want to overwhelm your audience with content since they have other things to do besides reading your posts—that’s why it’s important that you have a strategic timeline.

6. Create an Editorial Calendar

You can use an editorial calendar to plan your content. An editorial calendar helps you put your content on the schedule and ensures that you don’t miss a deadline. In the long run, you get to gain trust as your schedule keeps the audience anticipating your content from time to time.

If you stick around to the end, you will learn about some incredible tools that can help you manage your content calendar without a hassle.

7. Infuse Personality

Since your content is on a professional platform, it’s important that you infuse your brand’s personality into it. You can do this by writing in first person and adding some humor.

8. Measure Results

A successful content marketing strategy for LinkedIn requires a long-term investment to drive long-term results, however, from time to time, ensure you look back and see if anything has changed, make the necessary adjustments. If possible, do not shy away from walking out of a strategy that does not work.

How To Implement Your LinkedIn Content Marketing Strategy

Once you’ve come up with a strategy for content marketing on LinkedIn, you have to make sure that the strategy is implemented effectively. Here are a few tips to help you implement your strategy.

• Plan Your Content in Advance

When you have a content plan, you not only save time, but you are able to focus your energy on finding the right content for your audience.

• Be Consistent

Once you have a content strategy, you have to make sure that it stays consistent. If you publish content once a week, it has to be published every week.

• Be Interactive

One of the best ways to make your content marketing strategy more effective is to make it interactive. So, ask questions, invite people to comment on the posts, and promote healthy discussions to make it more engaging. While at it, always be genuine with your content to reflect your authencity. To drive more engagement, use hashtags to keep your content in front of the right set of audiences.

• Be Relevant and off Eclusive Content

It’s important that the content you publish is relevant to the industry your business is in and sounds relevant to your audience. While you're at it, make it exclusive and unavailable elsewhere—this will make them feel special and build trust in you.

How To Effectively Distribute Your Content on LinkedIn

Once you’ve created an amazing piece of content, it’s important that you distribute it well on LinkedIn.

Here are a few tips to help you effectively distribute your content on this platform.

• Use the “Share” button - Using the “Share” button will help you schedule the content to be published on the schedule you’ve set up, and also help you repurpose your content to be shared on other platforms.
• Use the “Suggested Post” feature - The suggested post feature allows you to publish your content once, and have it appear on other people’s feeds.
• Share on Groups - Most groups on LinkedIn are open to guest posts, and you can share your content on these groups and help grow your reach by engaging with people. Here you can talk about an event you’re attending or you attended and share some insights as well.
• Use Influencers - You can also collaborate with influencers in the industry, and ask them to share your content with their followers. While at it, you can also try to mention the people of interest in your niche and let them share your work.
• Use LinkedIn Publisher - Publishing an article on LinkedIn Publisher is an effective way to distribute your content. You can host polls, quizzes, and much more on Publisher.

6 Benefits of LinkedIn Content Marketing

You now have more benefits than ever when it comes to distributing that content on LinkedIn.

From B2B and B2C businesses to personal branding, content marketing on LinkedIn can benefit you through:

• Gain Access To A Wider Audience

LinkedIn has a pool of 250 million active users every month that you can contact each day with your content. This means more qualified leads can easily come out of your content marketing efforts—if done well.

• Gain Access to Key Decision-Makers

A simple content marketing strategy that you'll come up with out of this article can give you access to large proportions of key business decision makers such as human resource managers, accountants, and sales executives who matter in your niche. If you do, it means a potential growth door has been unlocked for your business.

• Expansion of Your Reach

With LinkedIn, you’re able to reach and connect with prospects and customers while leveraging their networks. This is possible because if you analyze the network of one of your connections, you’ll find tons of more incredible leads who might be interested in your content and business.

• Increased Networking Opportunities

You can cultivate a huge following on LinkedIn if you’re going to be active on the platform. You can also create personal relationships with your audience by sending DMs and congratulating them on their work anniversary or birthday.

• The Possibility of Increasing Traffic to Your Website

Have you ever seen an incredible post on social media and said well, I have got to see who these guys are? Of course, you clicked on their website link and landed on their site to learn more about their offers. That’s what happens when you share stellar content on LinkedIn.

• It Provides a Way to Become a Thought Leader

In case you didn’t know, thought leadership is a hot cake when it comes to a platform surrounded by professionals like LinkedIn. You need to leverage the opportunity and be different from the rest. This will help you become the go-to person for your audience. If that happens, you build trust and authority—the best part is, it is easier to find a LinkedIn Thought Leadership expert to help you gain all those things from Legiit.

Examples of Effective LinkedIn Content Marketing Strategies

• SEO Brand Example - SEO brands can use content to help them better understand their audience, and how to better suit their needs. For example, if you notice that your target audience consists of mostly local businesses, you can publish content that is related to local lead generation techniques and proper content development. You can also publish articles on new trends in the industry, and how your product can be used to solve issues.
• Event Planner Example - Event planners can use content to promote their upcoming events, and use it to help gather more attendees. To do this, you can publish articles that are related to the event topic, and publish polls to get people’s opinion on the event, and get them more enthusiastic about it. You can also host guest posts to help bring in more experts to assist.
• Gift Shop Example - Gift shops can use content to promote their products, and provide details about them. You can publish gift guides for occasions and events, and publish articles that are related to the shop, and how-tos.

3 Awesome Content Scheduling Tools on LinkedIn

• SlideShare - This is a content marketing platform where you can create and host presentations, infographics, and articles. You can also embed these on your website.
• Hootsuite - This is an all-in-one social media management platform that has a content scheduling feature. You can create and share posts on all your platforms at one go.
• Post Planner - This is a tool that helps you create content on a regular basis. You can use this to post on your social platforms at a particular time of the day, and regularly.

Wrapping Up

LinkedIn content marketing is very much alive and kicking—therefore, the ability to command a large audience while achieving all of your business goals is possible—and those who will follow this marketing channel to its logical conclusion will reap big rewards.

For it to work for you, as it has worked for many other businesses and personal brands, you need to do extra, or if you are not able to keep up to speed, outsource the work to a pool of experts who can run your errands quickly.

Legiit, for example, is a freelance marketplace that has become inevitable when it comes to producing lead experts in the digital marketing space—if you haven’t put the skills to work, now is the right time to do so.

All you need to do is sign up for Legiit to start selling or outsource your digital marketing tasks. Join the Official Legiit Facebook Group to network with your peers and experts, or you can even contact their customer support in case of any queries.

All the best in your LinkedIn Content Marketing venture. Hope you did’t get fired. Adios!

LinkedIn Content Marketing Frequently Asked Questions

LinkedIn article vs. post: what’s the difference?

You can publish much longer material for LinkedIn through articles, but it won't receive as much engagement as posts do or as many views as on other content sharing platforms like Medium.

How do I post an article on LinkedIn?

To write an article, go to your LinkedIn homepage, click "Write Article" under the "Start a post" column. You can share your article in a post after you've written and published it.

How long should a LinkedIn article be?

The maximum word count for a LinkedIn article is approximately 14K, but most articles won't be that long. Generally speaking, the ideal content is between 1,000 and 5,000 words, but bear in mind that you are writing for people, not machines. Write as much as is necessary to make your point and produce a work that your readers will find enjoyable.

How long should a LinkedIn post be?

There are character limits for LinkedIn posts: 700 for individuals and 1,300 for businesses. In light of this, make an effort to limit posts to 12 lines of text, each of which contains 1-2 sentences.

How often should I post on LinkedIn?

One post each workday is the recommended frequency for LinkedIn. This schedule will yield the finest outcomes. However, you can start with just once a week and work your way up from there if you are just getting started with your LinkedIn content strategy.