Thriving in 2021 is still 100% possible now that everyone’s online. With a well-researched social media content strategy, you can reach and engage more of your LinkedIn audience to increase your website traffic, sales, and revenue.

Social media channels like LinkedIn are largely free, well-targeted, versatile, and effective. They also typically offer tracking, so you’ll be able to confirm performance and avoid wasting your marketing dollars.

Research Your LinkedIn Audience

As you would for any content or marketing strategy on any platform, you should do a bit of research before churning out content on LinkedIn, and the difference between B2B and B2C is massive. Social media offers a wealth of tools you can use to investigate your audience and discover what type of content they’re looking for.

You can also look at your past LinkedIn content and determine what performed well and what didn’t. Look at your most successful competitors to see what kind of content they’re posting and which posts have the most engagement.

Prepare Content for LinkedIn

Before you start to develop your content, make sure you’re fully prepared to create and publish content that will achieve your goals. First, you’ll want to have a designated company LinkedIn page, as opposed to a personal profile.

Even if you’re a sole proprietor with no employees, having a LinkedIn page offers more features that you’ll need down the road. Once you have your page all set up, work on developing a set of realistic but challenging goals for your company and the content itself. You have to know what your goals are to create a content strategy that will meet them. Then, you can identify your content style.

On LinkedIn, the most effective style is slightly different than on other platforms because followers are there for different reasons. Keep content conversational and professional and in line with your brand goals.

Outline Your Plan

Start by clearly defining your goals and identifying the key performance indicators (KPIs) that will help you track your progress and execute any necessary course correction. You’ll need to monitor your chosen metrics regularly to identify strengths and weaknesses in your strategy. This will help you grow your content’s market share and drive engagement.

Don’t be discouraged if your metrics are slow to grow. Content strategy is more of a long game than other marketing campaigns that offer immediate results. Give it time to grow your following and establish a solid base of quality material.

Recommended KPIs for LinkedIn Monitoring

• Audience growth
• Reach and impressions
• Demographics
• Engagement (likes, comments, shares)
• Clicks

Get in Your Reader’s Head

Consumers are looking for different solutions at different stages of the buyer’s journey. The buyer’s journey is the process a consumer goes through when they become aware of a new paint point. The early awareness stage is the perfect opportunity for brand awareness and informative content.

As they progress into the consideration stage and begin looking into different solutions, you should focus on educational content – different from ads – that gives your brand credibility and builds trust with the reader. Offer more value at this stage.

The last stage is when the buyer makes a purchase decision. Figure out where on the buyer’s journey your content comes into play and design your content strategy around that moment. Most of this step will happen when you perform your audience research.  

Grow Your Content’s Market Share

Your content is almost a product in itself and you want people to buy into it, so it needs to have its own place in the market. You might find yourself competing against content creators in addition to your regular industry competition. Run an analysis that compares what your audience wants to what they’re currently getting and the existing quality of each category. If there’s a gap or a weak point, consider how that niche might fit into your strategy and exploit it if possible.

Create a LinkedIn content calendar.

Do a brain dump of engaging content ideas and start plotting them out on a calendar. You should have a few ideas from investigating your audience and your competition. Other popular post topics are seasonal or holiday, weekday hashtags like #MondayMood, subtle promotions, live streams, shared blog content, tutorials, testimonials, user-generated content, contests and giveaways, quotes, behind-the-scenes, and brand news/update.

Include a mix of post formats to keep your page visually appealing and interesting. LinkedIn offers an invaluable tool called “Content Suggestions” that can identify content that’s popular with your audience right now. Take full advantage of that tool and use a content planning platform like Google Sheets or Trello to map it out.

Gather resources.

Once you have enough refined topics for the time period you’ve chosen to plan, start gathering resources for content creation. Using stock photos and graphics takes away from the quality and perceived value of your content, so get original imagery and video whenever possible. Some posts and formats will require more resources and more time than others, but they’ll probably earn a more significant return too.

Create content for your LinkedIn audience

Trying to create content consistently on schedule can be a major undertaking. Make things easier on yourself and your team by content batching.

Content batching is when you create batches of content at a time and scheduling it for automatic posting with a content scheduler. Keep your videos under two minutes unless they’re educational, listicles, or interviews. Ask questions to get your audience engaged in your content and be sure to provide value in every post, no clickbait.