The Ultimate LinkedIn Marketing Manual
by Digital Impact
Created by:
Table of Contents
Introduction: B2B Networking Chapter One: What is LinkedIn Chapter Two: Your Company Page Chapter Three: Building Thought Leadership Chapter Four: Using LinkedIn Groups Chapter Five: Authoring Posts Chapter Six: Paid Advertising Conclusion
The Ultimate LinkedIn Marketing Manual
Introduction
B2B Networking: The rise of the professional network
When you’re talking about social networks for professionals, there’s only one name you need to know: LinkedIn. Simply put, it’s the biggest, best and unrivalled King of professional social networks. Now into its 12th year, LinkedIn has attracted over 380 million registered users. It’s available in 24 languages, it employs over 7,000 staff in 30 different offices around the world, its blogging platform Pulse generates 30,000 long form posts every month and two new members join every single second. Since you’ve started reading this, 40 people
The Ultimate LinkedIn Marketing Manual
LinkedIn currently has 380,000,000+ registered members. - LinkedIn Pressroom
have signed up. And there goes two more. I’ve been a LinkedIn user for a long time now. I’ve seen it grow, add new sections and develop into the modern global professional network you now see. When you spend so much time watching something develop, you get a really good feel for how it works. You learn which strategies bring in results and which ones fizzle out. With so much network watching under my belt, I thought it was about time I shared all the things that I’ve learned. In this manual you will find everything you need to know to establish both yourself and your company on LinkedIn and build an identity as a leader and an authority in your field.
The Ultimate LinkedIn Marketing Manual
Chapter 1
What is LinkedIn: Think Facebook with a tie
LinkedIn is unique in the world of social networks as an online social space for professionals. And that means you need a unique approach. You can’t just copy your Facebook strategy across and expect it to work. Funny pictures of cats won’t get much attention when everyone else is discussing sales strategies and customer care policies. Here are a few facts and figures to give you a glimpse into the world of LinkedIn.
The Ultimate LinkedIn Marketing Manual
Some key LinkedIn Statistics
• 25 percent of adult internet users are on LinkedIn (Pew) • 46 percent of online adults who have graduated from university are on LinkedIn (Pew) • 59 percent of LinkedIn users don’t have a Twitter account; 13% don’t use Facebook (Jeff Bullas) • 63 percent of marketers believe LinkedIn is the most effective B2B network (Content Marketing Institute) • LinkedIn generates 4 times as many homepage views as either Twitter or Facebook (Econsultancy) • LinkedIn accounts for 64 percent of all social referrals to corporate websites (Econsultancy) • 44 percent of B2B marketers have generated leads via LinkedIn, whereas only 39% have generated leads through Facebook and just 30% through Twitter (ReachForce)
The Ultimate LinkedIn Marketing Manual
Chapter 2
Company Page:
Make the right first impression
On LinkedIn, everything starts with your company page. It’s a little like a digital shop window for you to display your services, projects and culture. So it’s gotta be good. Now, some people seem intent on rushing the company page creation process, slapping any old cover photo up and copying some company info from their website. Don’t do make this mistake. LinkedIn can be a brilliant resource but only if you build a strong foundation. Start with the biggest elements: the profile image, cover photo and description. These three elements dominate your page and have to be spot on.
The Ultimate LinkedIn Marketing Manual
Use visually striking graphics to grab the attention of your audience and follow it up with a strong company description. (See our storytelling guide for more information on crafting engaging content.) Once you’ve got the big three elements out the way, select your industry -- if in doubt, check what your competitors are doing. Then fill out the remaining fields -- even the ones that seem a bit irrelevant.
“Authentic brands don’t emerge from marketing cubicles or advertising agencies. They emanate from everything the company does...” - Howard Schultz
We get that including the number of staff you employ might seem like overkill but you’ve got to understand that everything works together to paint a rounded picture of your business. Finally, once you’ve built a solid page for your business, it’s onto attracting followers. After all, without prospects there to read your content, even the best LinkedIn page is worthless. There’s a huge number of ways to attract followers and I recommend you use as many as possible to kick off the promotion of your page.
The Ultimate LinkedIn Marketing Manual
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ADD TIPS Your community will become one of your key marketing assets as time goes on. Invest time earning followers and it will pay off later.
1. Employee promotion. In the early days of your LinkedIn campaign, your employees are your best marketing asset. They have access to huge personal networks which can be redirected to support your business but only if you get them onboard. Ensure your employees personal profiles are tied into the company page and then ask them to share links to the company page on their personal networks. 2. Existing customers. Your existing customers are another easy win for your LinkedIn platform. These are people who already like and use your service so it’s not going to be a hard sell to get them to like your page. Send an email
The Ultimate LinkedIn Marketing Manual
blast out to all your existing customers and invite them to follow your new page. Remember to sell the benefits of following you on LinkedIn and explain how your LinkedIn content will differ from content on other platforms. 3. Link your website. Movement between your website and your social media shouldn’t be one-way. Add a link to your LinkedIn page on your website and allow users to move to and from the platforms.
“You can never go wrong by investing in communities and the human beings within them.” - Pam Moore
4. Announce your arrival. LinkedIn has millions of pre-existing groups just waiting to hear about your business. As I’ll discuss later, there’s communities for almost every conceivable niche. All you need to do is find them, introduce yourself, post a link to your page and invite interested users to follow you.
The Ultimate LinkedIn Marketing Manual
Chapter 3
Thought Leadership:
Become the person people turn to
Ah, thought leadership. You might be forgiven for thinking that it’s just another marketing buzzword like synergetic or storyscaping but it’s not. Thought leadership is an immensely powerful tool and it’s hugely important if you’re trying to build a name for yourself on LinkedIn. Before we go any further, I should probably explain what thought leadership actually is. I define thought leadership as tapping into the talent, experience and passion inside your business to consistently answer new questions, problems and challenges presented by your audience. It’s not being the biggest name in your niche. It’s not
The Ultimate LinkedIn Marketing Manual
shouting the loudest. It’s not regurgitating old content. It’s not outsourcing your writing. It’s not answering your buyer persona’s pain points in a skin deep sort of way. Being a thought leader means digging deeper and providing a genuinely valuable experience to your readers. It isn’t easy, though. Becoming a thought leader in your industry requires a solid strategy and a lot of elbow grease. While the specifics of your each strategy will differ industry to industry and company to company, there’s a basic five-step process we use as a foundation for all strategies. Here it is.
The Ultimate LinkedIn Marketing Manual
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KEY TIP
1. Curate news. Not all the content you post has to be your own. In fact, it shouldn’t all be your own. Pick out particularly impressive content from other creators and republish it along with your mark of approval. If you act as if your approval means something, other people will think that too.
Be opinionated. Include your point of view in your profile and experience where appropriate. Join groups where you can 2. Publish unique content. This is the biggest part share opinions related to of your strategy: creating unique content which your area of expertise. provides your users with genuinely valuable resources. If you do that, you’ll quickly earn yourself an enviable position at the front of your industry. 3. Build a personal identity. While you want
The Ultimate LinkedIn Marketing Manual
to promote your company, you’ve got to remember that we find it much easier to relate to people than businesses. Post under your own name and make sure you personally respond to comments. Yes, you can amplify content with your business page but always pull it back to you as an individual
“The very essence of leadership is that you have to have a vision.” - Theodore Hesburgh
4. Participate in groups. LinkedIn has millions of groups dedicated to every conceivable niche, industry and specialism you can think of. Find groups related to your industry and impose yourself as an authority. Answer questions, challenge statements and test claims. Act like an authority and that is how people will see you. 5. Found your own LinkedIn group. If you can’t find a popular group for your niche, consider making one. While it’s a lot of work to create, manage and promote a group, you’ll gain a fair bit of authority from being seen as the owner of a popular community.
The Ultimate LinkedIn Marketing Manual
Chapter 4
Using Groups:
Establish yourself as an authority
I truly believe that your business should be represented in every single LinkedIn group which is relevant to your niche. If you represent a law firm based in Edinburgh, you should get active on all of Edinburgh’s regional groups and all legal industry groups. It’s a lot of work but the benefit you gain from dominating your sector’s discussion areas is immeasurable. To find relevant groups, I recommend a two pronged approach: competitor analysis and traditional research.
The Ultimate LinkedIn Marketing Manual
Firstly, look at what your competition is doing. What groups are they active in? What groups are they members of? If you see competitors picking up work, take a look at their new client. Where else were they posting? Where else were they active? Start thinking like your prospects and predict where they would go. Secondly, sit down on LinkedIn and do some traditional research. Go to the groups directory and search for your target keywords -- geographic, industry and sector being the three core keyword groups you should search for. Using these two methods you should find a wealth of useful groups. Getting the most out of LinkedIn groups, however, is a tricky process. It’s not just a matter of finding a load of groups and spamming your content. You’ve got to watch where you put your feet or you could quickly lose the support of a group’s members and get shown the door. After much trial and error, here’s my advice for turning LinkedIn groups into your own personal marketing resource.
The Ultimate LinkedIn Marketing Manual
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KEY TIP Don’t put a limit on the number of groups you join. Join groups related to your area of expertise, industry, alumni, passions, social causes, and other aspects of your identity.
1. Join the right groups. There’s no point in investing hours of your time into a group which isn’t going to offer any return. I recommend evaluating each group on three basic qualities. One, rules. Can you link to or promote your own content? Two, engagement. Do discussions generate responses from members? In other words, are people active in the group? Three, promotional content. Is there a lot of other promotional content floating around. Will your posts get read? Only three yeses means a group is worth your time. 2. Think member first. Although the ultimate goal is to transform these groups into a mar-
The Ultimate LinkedIn Marketing Manual
keting resource, you’ve got to approach them as a member first. Share your experiences, post questions and interact with other members. Establish yourself as a core part of the group before you start promoting your content. 3. Build connections. If you find yourself interacting with certain group members more frequently than others, add them as connections. That way they’ll be more willing to support and amplify you and your content.
“Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.” - Steve Jobs
4. Generate discussion. You want to get people asking the right questions so you can provide your answers. Regularly post open ended questions related to the content you’ve created and wait for a prompt to slip it in. 5. Impose yourself. Once you’ve established yourself as part of the group, you can start to impose yourself a little more. That doesn’t mean being confrontational but it does mean acting as an authority on your subject. If someone posts assertions, challenge them and ask for verification. Become the yardstick that others have to measure themselves up to.
The Ultimate LinkedIn Marketing Manual
Chapter 5
Authoring Posts: Putting pen to paper
LinkedIn has gone a very different direction to other social networks. While Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have focussed on concentrated micromoments, LinkedIn has built a bespoke long form blogging platform named Pulse. Pulse sits alongside a more traditional social network and allows users to write, publish and promote long form content on whatever subject they wish. For example, our digital marketing manager has used Pulse to promote recently completed projects, write about our agency’s culture and big up the charity work we’re involved in.
The Ultimate LinkedIn Marketing Manual
Articles on Pulse are available to everyone on LinkedIn and this gives you access to an unbelievably large audience. If you strike a chord with the right people, your content can spread across the network like wildfire. LinkedIn Pulse is an open platform and that means the quality of blogs varies hugely. While it’s possible to stand out from the crowd, it’s just as easy to get lost in the noise. The most read articles on Pulse are featured in a sort of automatically curated frontpage. However, these tend to be dominated by individuals like Richard Branson with huge personal followings. So what does it take to make it big on LinkedIn? Let’s find out.
The Ultimate LinkedIn Marketing Manual
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ADD TIPS
1. Research. If you want to genuinely contribute to a discussion, you’ve got to know what you’re talking about. Break out the textbooks and get stuck in. Oh, and research doesn’t just mean understanding your content. You’ve got to understand who you’re writing for and what it is they want.
LinkedIn Pulse is a premade platform, allowing you to promote your content to millions of people. All you’ve got 2. Copywriting. Good quality writing is worth its to do is make them pay weight in gold. If your copy is speckled with attention. spelling mistakes and grammatical errors, your audience will struggle to see you as an industry-leading expert. 3. The hook. It’s the headline that makes someone read your content, not the content itself.
The Ultimate LinkedIn Marketing Manual
An old copywriting mantra says you should spend 90 percent of your time writing your headline. I’m not going to suggest you go quite that far but I will recommend dedicating a good half an hour to crafting the perfect headline. 4. Think visual. Humans are visual beasts. We love things that instantly tell us stories - illustrations, drawings, photographs, videos and so on. A study
“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” - Ernest Hemingway
from Buffer showed that Tweets with images received 18% more clicks, 89% more favourites and 150% more retweets than those without. If you want people to engage with your content, you have to engage their eyes. It’s as simple as that. 5. Promotion. Content creation doesn’t stop when you hit the publish button. You’ve got to take that content and make people read it. Promote your content in groups, social media and via email. The if-you-build-it-they-will-come approach is certainly attractive but it simply doesn’t work in content marketing.
The Ultimate LinkedIn Marketing Manual
Chapter 5
Paid Advertising: Shelling out for exposure
For the vast majority of us LinkedIn is a free social network. We use it to communicate with colleagues, connect with co-workers and network with others in our industry. Only 10 percent of users actually pay for the service. With such a tiny fraction of users on the premium tier, how on earth does LinkedIn actually support itself? Well, the answer to that comes in three parts. First, the premium subscriptions we mentioned earlier. For between ÂŁ19.99 and ÂŁ79.99 per month users can unlock new layers of features, including unlimited profile searches, InMail messaging and advanced search. Second, talent solutions. This is the biggest revenue
The Ultimate LinkedIn Marketing Manual
driver for LinkedIn and is basically fancy sounding data sales. For a subscription, recruiters and companies can buy access to a database of active and passive jobseekers. And third, marketing solutions. This is what we’re here to talk about, the paid advertising on LinkedIn. I get asked about the value of paid advertising on social networks a lot. And I mean a lot. Is it worth devoting all your time to organic? Can’t you achieve the same results with a paid campaign? Can they work together? The questions are endless. Unfortunately, there’s not really an answer to most of these questions. Without knowing about your business there’s no way to say whether you could benefit from advertising on LinkedIn. However, there are a couple of big differences between LinkedIn’s advertising and alternative services and it’s worth bearing them in mind. One, the cost-per-click tends to be higher and that pushes up the price for your overall campaign. And two, there’s no goal-based pricing so you can’t optimise campaigns for page followers or website traffic. If you want to test LinkedIn advertising, it’s reasonably easy to set up and the minimum spend is fairly low. The best way to find out if they work for you is simply to get out there and find out. Also, look out for our ultimate guide to LinkedIn advertising which is out soon.
The Ultimate LinkedIn Marketing Manual
Conclusion
Tying It All Together: Get out there and make it happen
So there you have it, that’s all you need to know to market your business on LinkedIn. If it sounds simple, that’s probably because it is. There’s nothing hugely complicated involved in social media marketing, it’s about doing the simple things and doing them well. If you stick to the manual, you’ll quickly enjoy the lead generation benefits of LinkedIn. And finally, if I can give you one last piece of advice, it would be this: get active and experiment. While these tips and tricks are proven to work, there might be new strategies out there which work fantastically in your niche. The only way you’ll discover anything new is to get out there and try them. So what are you waiting for? Get going!
The Ultimate LinkedIn Marketing Manual
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