Content is the cornerstone of any B2B demand generation campaign and efforts on LinkedIn are no different. It’s the most important thing after you create a profile that talks to your prospects and not HR.
To create an effective content strategy, you need to set goals, define your audience clearly, and identify topics your targets will find most relevant. The content you post on LinkedIn will reinforce your personal and corporate brands, so make sure it aligns with what you do and differentiates you from other posts on the platform.
Once you have these pillars in place, you can set yourself up for a successful demand generation campaign by attending to these three crucial elements of your LinkedIn content strategy.
Create a calendar to post regularly
The first key element of your LinkedIn content strategy should be a calendar to keep you posting regularly. Prospects won’t visit your profile every day: you need to catch them with content while they’re scrolling through their feeds if you want to stay visible.
While there are different opinions about what it means to “post regularly” on LinkedIn, people generally agree you don’t need to be putting up content multiple times a day as with other social media platforms. Even posting daily can be a lot of work. That’s why, to get started, I suggest you commit to posting weekly. You can increase the frequency from there but weekly will give you a base of content and ongoing visibility.
To get started, I suggest you commit to posting weekly. You can increase the frequency from there…
Realistically, it can be hard to generate new content even once a week. The good news is that each content piece does not need to be created by you or be about you. The 4-1-1 rule recommends that for every piece of content about you, you should share one update from another source and share four pieces of content written by others.
Make sure your content is valuable
The other guideline I make sure to follow is the 80/20 rule: for every promotional piece of content you share, you should post four educational pieces. Educational content makes your contributions most valuable to the prospects you want to reach.
Posting only about your company or products will quickly become tiresome and come off as salesy. When the time is right, prospects will want to hear more about your solution — but in the early days you want to talk about their problems and challenges, not about you.
Producing your own thought leadership content, while taking more time, will really increase your profile. When done properly, it’s what prospects find most valuable. Giving your perspective on industry trends, outlining a new approach to one of their challenges (without talking product), or sharing how others have solved a similar problem all make for valuable content.
Producing your own thought leadership content, while taking more time, will really increase your profile.
You can combine the 4-1-1 and 80/20 rules by sharing industry news that fits your topic and adding some commentary or perspective that builds your profile and position as a thought leader.
Use different content formats
Even if you create a calendar and put in the effort to generate valuable content, your posts may not get the engagement you want, or may level off over time, if your formats never change. Posting the same kind of content all the time makes your material start to look the same even if the topics and authors are different. The good news here is that LinkedIn supports a lot of different content formats. Try as many as you can.
LinkedIn supports a lot of different content formats. Try as many as you can.
The days of basic text posts with graphics are over. You can still use them but mix in other formats too. Try some longer posts to get your insights across in-platform so readers don’t have to click through. A personal post can have up to 1,300 characters and company page posts can have 700. Use these lengthier formats on occasion.
Short videos are interactive, super easy to put together, and tend to get a lot of engagement. They’re a way for prospects to see you and your personality without getting too personal. Stick to around one minute or less. I strongly recommend using a great mic when you record, doing some quick editing and adding captions because not everyone has their sound on when going through their feed.
LinkedIn doesn’t allow carousels like other social media platforms, but LinkedIn Documents allow you to post PDFs that look similar and gives you as much length as you need (up to 300 pages). My recommendation would be a PDF of about 10 pages with a caption to grab attention. This can be very effective as it allows the prospect to stay on the platform and for you to communicate a longer message in an interactive format.
There are other content formats that you can leverage on LinkedIn as well. I would be remiss in not mentioning polls, which are a great way to do market research and have prospects help generate content for you — by providing results you can discuss. You can also launch a newsletter on LinkedIn, allowing interested readers to subscribe for you to push content to.
Clearly, you can’t use all these formats all the time, but it’s worth trying them out. Your audience may clearly have a preferred one that you can double down on, or you may find one that best represents you and is easier for you to produce as a result.
Putting the strategy into practice
These three keys are really just the start of your LinkedIn content strategy. Each audience is different and what you publish will be engaged with at different levels and in different ways. You should try as many as make sense and that you have time for. Discover new topics and try them, too.
Carefully analyze your results. See what’s working in terms of topics, content types and format. Focus on the ones that work best. Tweak the ones that are doing OK, and stop anything that doesn’t get you the engagement you are after. There is a lot of experimentation here to find what works for your audience and will help you reach your goal.
If you want more best practices on how to leverage LinkedIn for B2B demand generation, we are hosting a webinar on April 11 at 11am ET. Register now for Amplify Your LinkedIn.
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