LinkedIn Marketing: 5 Mistakes You Can’t Afford to Make

There are 500 million people who use LinkedIn to connect with others in their industry and advance their careers. With so many decision-makers, influencers, and other important members of your target audience gathered in one place, including LinkedIn in your marketing strategy is key to your company’s success.

Whether you already have a LinkedIn marketing plan in place or not, it’s important to reap the benefits of a focused and effective program and to avoid these LinkedIn marketing mistakes:

LinkedIn has become an important tool for content distribution, with 130,000 long-form posts generated each week. These posts are shared through LinkedIn’s publishing platform, Pulse, where you can post company news, stories, and thought leadership pieces, and share them with your audience.

“Writing posts just for LinkedIn is the fastest way to grow your brand and connections on Linkedin,” says Neil Patel, co-founder of KISSmetrics and a top digital marketing influencer.

But writing a post or sharing an update without a clear plan won’t get results. To ensure your posts are read and shared, you first need to understand your target audience.

Fifty-eight percent of marketers name audience relevance as the top factor contributing to content’s success. Ask yourself, who are you trying to reach and why? What are the goals of your audience and how can your business help achieve them?

Once you can answer these questions, you can create content people enjoy, driving leads and traffic to your business.

Though your primary goal with LinkedIn marketing will be to promote your business, you don’t want to turn your audience off by being too promotional in your updates or content.

Content gets 15 times more interactions than job postings on LinkedIn, but if you’re posting content that isn’t attractive to your audience, you won’t see any of the rewards. This is where understanding your audience and what they want from your brand comes in.

Focus on adding value with your posts and content. How does your audience benefit from what you’re saying? This doesn’t apply to just your original content either. When sharing content from an external source, make sure it is relevant and has a purpose for your audience.

You should also be adding value in LinkedIn groups. I run several where people can come together and discuss issues, share content, and ask questions. If your aim is to grow your brand’s community on LinkedIn, groups are a good way to do it, whether you join an existing one or launch your own.

That said, if all you post in groups is how great your brand is, you’ll lose followers fast. Instead, start by engaging users on topics unrelated to your brand. When an opportunity arises to bring your brand into the discussion, take it, but avoid sending a sales pitch.

RELATED: How to Build Trust With Your Buyers—With the Help of L i nkedIn

To further grow your community, look internally first. Your employees are a powerful resource for spreading the word about your company and gaining new leads and followers on LinkedIn.

Ninety-two percent of consumers trust recommendations from their peers over advertising. Your employees, as peers, can have a powerful impact on the opinions of your audience. Plus, content shared by employees has two times the engagement of content shared by a company. Your audience sees your employees as more credible than your business, so the information they share is more likely to be read and paid attention to.

LinkedIn’s tool Elevate helps companies empower their employees to share content on their behalf. Jason Miller, global content marketing leader at LinkedIn, says, “I use it to share, organize, and measure all the content I post across my main three social accounts: LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. I share daily from Elevate and track engagements.”

LinkedIn offers paid advertising just like Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms, but there is another option in the form of sponsored content that may offer you more benefits.

LinkedIn Ads limit you to only 90 characters of text and a small image, and are displayed on the sidebar of a user’s page. Sponsored Content, however, appears in your audience’s feeds as a native piece of content. Because of this, I’ve found that Sponsored Updates are more likely to drive results than ads.

Beyond my own experiences, HubSpot is one company that’s found success with Sponsored Content. “LinkedIn’s Sponsored Content is the perfect marriage between its professional audience and our content-based approach to advertising,” says Kipp Bodnar, HubSpot’s CMO.

When HubSpot used LinkedIn Sponsored Content the company gained 400% more leads than it did from its efforts on other platforms. Similarly, Hootsuite found its LinkedIn Sponsored Content delivered a conversion rate 22.8 times higher than banner ads on other platforms.

With so many features to play around with on LinkedIn (Sponsored Content, Pulse, and Elevate), it can be easy to forget the basics. Your company page is the first thing your audience will see when they click on your company’s name, and if you don’t make a good first impression, they’ll navigate in another direction.

Start by ensuring your company description is up-to-date and accurately describes your business. Include relevant keywords, and be clear and concise in your messaging. Use images to make your company page as attractive as possible to visitors. Research shows that when a visual is paired with information, people retain 65% of that information, compared to only 10% without a visual.

Don’t forget to check how your page looks on mobile, too. Sixty percent of LinkedIn traffic comes from mobile, so if your page isn’t optimized for those users, you’ll lose their interest.

RELATED: LinkedIn Dos and Don’ts: 10 Influencers Share Their Best Advice

Post by: Aaron Agius

Aaron Agius is an experienced search, content and social marketer. He has worked with some of the world’s largest and most recognized brands, including Salesforce, Coca-Cola, Target and others, to build their online presence.

Company: Louder Online
Website: www.louder.online
Connect with me on Facebook , Twitter , LinkedIn

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