If you want to succeed in LinkedIn outreach, it’s only a matter of time when you’ll come to the necessity of compiling an affective LinkedIn marketing strategy.
That’s what we’re going to touch on in this article.
Let’s proceed without… a further ado, yes.
What is a LinkedIn Marketing Strategy
LinkedIn marketing strategy is a scope of measures dedicated to growing business using LinkedIn. It’s your ultimate approach to how you grow your business on LinkedIn: with the help of cold outreach, tuning profile, connecting with influencers, — anything. All combined together defines your LinkedIn strategy.
Strategy execution is a planned scope of actions that derive from your brand positioning & market research. The latter two refers to strategy itself.
Why Do You Need a LinkedIn Marketing Strategy
You need a LinkedIn marketing strategy to reach your business goals faster and more effectively. Without appropriate strategy, you’re like blind, moving through the dark forest, clueless about where to turn next.
Strategy pinpoints where exactly you’re heading, while tactical measures define the appropriate ways to reach the defined destination.
Building the Best LinkedIn Marketing Strategy for Small and Large Businesses
Find below a tiny guide to how to arrange things in the best way and give a birth to incredible, powerful marketing strategy.
Market Research
The first and foremost is distinguishing and finding your target people. Depending on specifics of your product, you need to start compiling a respective list of prospect customers. Just ask yourself a question “Who might be your target audience?”
If you have a B2B product, create a list of companies that would be an ideal fit for your product. Take into consideration the following points:
- Size of a company.
- Location.
- Decision makers — who will decide on buying your product? Write down job titles.
- Pain points — what bothers your target audience most of all?
Once you have a picture of this, you’re good to proceed to crafting an ICP (ideal customer profile) — that’s a fictitious description of the ideal types of companies that would be ideal fit for your product.
Take a look at the example of an ICP.
Write down your business goals
In order to achieve your business goals as fast as you can, you have to first articulate them.
Put together and write down your business goals. Be specific about:
- the timeline (when do you want then to be reached?);
- metrics that you’ll use to gauge the results;
- what result will be satisfactory for you.
Single out long-term goals and short-term goals. Strategy is usually compiled to help you achieve long-term goals (like, yearly ones).
Design Your LinkedIn Profile
Your LinkedIn profile is your business card in a digital world.
If you want it to sell, your profile should be designed spotlessly.
- First, you need to upload a professional picture of yourself.
- You have to fill out a profile summary.
- Add skills and work experience.
- Add banner (aka background image).
Again, we don’t imply that this is something that should be considered as benchmark, but this one adheres to all the recommendations. 👇
And it works well:
5. Connect with as many like-minded individuals as possible. This can be done easily with the help of a LinkedIn automation software — the kind of software that will grow your network quickly and hassle-free.
The more people you have in your connections, the bigger chances are there that your profile will be visible, heavy with content and favored by LinkedIn algorithms and security system.
When you’ll begin your outreach, there won’t be problem with profile safety, since LinkedIn only hunts fresh, newly created LinkedIn profiles, especially those with no or few connections.
6. Post regularly. Yes, we’re all aware that “quality of content matters more than its quantity”. But… does it really? We don’t mean that you have to post purely low-grade bullsh*t (sorry), but there is a point in balancing between posting timely and creating content itself. Just don’t invest too much time in creating one piece of content — rather spread time equally between posting regularly and creating content.
Timely posting matters a lot. Better opt for good content that’s posted regularly — as opposed to perfect content that’s pumped out once in 100 years. Perfection is illusion… remember? Well, at least if you work in business or marketing, and not ART. And that is what you do, don’t you?
If you think that you can post once in a while and it’s going to be a masterpiece, then marketing may be a wrong line of work for you, because it can’t stand inconsistency.
Work on Brand Identity
Brand identity is power. Work on making your brand recognizable on target markets. Ideally, you should reach the point where your brand can be recognized by:
- Its colors;
- Its logo;
- Its tone of voice. Technical? Friendly? Implies safety? Self-assurance?
Tone of voice usually reflects brand positioning and its vibe. What works for offline brands can be pretty much transmitted to digital brands and products. It doesn’t truly matter whether it’s a B2B business you’re running or B2c, small business or an enterprise-level corp.
Perceptual maps may not be necessary to build for your digital brand, but looking through the concept of one can give you the clue where to start.
However, your brand’s “vibe” should not necessarily correlate with your audience’s preferences — remember, you don’t have to tell everything they want to hear — you’re not an uneducated psychologist.
You can let your brand be itself — just like letting you be yourself, without any hassle.
Actually, your audience are the people who’re on the same page with you — marketing will just let those two parts of the bridge get linked.
- Its image — a very close term to tone of voice. But it also includes how well all parts of your market presence are combined together and work in integrity. This includes how fast your support replies, what language it talks to you, how your copywriter puts together words, what feeling your customer have when stumbled upon your product and interacting with it. Vibe, in other words. Remember, your brand is fixed and stays in your audiences’ minds as a whole fingerprint. It also consists of lots of details.
Your leads may remember how your support manager addressed them — with lack of respect or carelessly. They can remember how slowly your pages are loading or how empty your Instagram page looks like. You need to take care of every part of your digital presence and glue them together to work in silos — especially if you position yourself as a state-of-the-art solution.
Create Community
It’s very hard to grow a solid brand without community. It’s a free way of generating leads — so why not trying?
Community is there to gather people who want to read about something very specific — that will let them hit their business goals or achieve current goals faster.
Position your community as some place where everyone can just hang out and learn. Latest hacks, tips — whatever you wish, just no brand advertising.
By the way, you can join our Closers Community on Facebook here. As you can see, it’s named not after Closely’s brand, but salespeople — closers. Because it’s full of hacks and tips for sales reps.
Pull People From Your Competitors’ Communities
If your competitors have flourishing communities — they’ve probably come through ups and downs of building this community — and it’s probably full of your prospects.
Joining your competitors’ communities and then inviting your prospects to join your community is totally fine, given that you really post useful content that will help them to tackle current struggles.
Create a habit of scouring your competitors’ groups and joining them. After a while, comb through those that accepted you and scrape its members. Closely will easily do this job for you: it’s a platform for LinkedIn outreach automation.
Start building your outreach campaign and paste a link to a selected group when asked for the source of your audience.
Create connection request message + follow-up. In a follow-up, add invitation to your community. You can add as many follow-ups as you want.
Once finished, click Next & Verify: Closely will launch an outreach campaign, sending one message after another, adhering to the schedule you’ve set up.
Why? Well, you don’t want to waste time on sending messages manually — in 2023, it would imply that you’re very old-fashioned. But that doesn’t really matter — what matters is that you won’t be productive sticking to some outdated ways of generating leads. Routine automation is there to let you drop all the heavy-lifting tasks and focus on what you do best — closing deals.
Grow Network At Speed
Automation tools will grow your LinkedIn network fast & eliminate needless hassle around routine work.
Just 4 steps for you to go through:
- Register at closelyhq.com
- Go to LinkedIn Campaigns and Hit Create Campaign
- Build an outreach campaign, adding a source of your audience (either LinkedIn search result, LinkedIn group/event, or a CSV file with your prospects’ LinkedIn URLs.
- Hit Run and drop by after a while to check on your campaign.
Here is a visual version of this guide in case you’re not into reading.
Ping your colleagues
Your colleagues will be happy to assist you in:
- liking and sharing your publications;
- adding your company name in their job position field.
Get Acquainted With The Way LinkedIn Algorithms Work
LinkedIn has its own way of sorting out and ordering content. Read a few ranked articles that can explain the ropes for you.
Post Only Niche Content
Once you’ve embarked on the road of promoting your brand on LinkedIn, there is no room for personal publications or anything distracting (except for memes — those things always fit the agenda, as it seems to me).
But primarily, your content should be all about your brand, niche, and not about your personal life. Personal publications can take up to 10% of all content.
Tag Niche Influencers/Opinion Leaders
One of the ways to lift your content to the top of search results is by tagging top influencers. Decide who might be those lucky devils and tag them, asking for their opinion.
They may remove your tag — but who knows, — what if your post will be that insightful that even some top influencers will engage?
Use hashtags
Hashtags are paramount to use, and here is a quick guide to how to employ them in the best way possible.
Post planning
With no plan for posting, it’s hard to track productivity and stay consistent.
Actually, it can bring your whole workflow to the point when it’s turned into a mess.
Our SEO expert at Closely tells that it’s better to plan for 1 month in advance. Publish 1 or max 2 posts a day to avoid overwhelming your prospects with content.
Take into consideration your audience’s timezone
If you’re on the opposite side of a globe, it’s worth taking this into consideration. Otherwise, your publication will be seen by whoever but not your target audience.
On LinkedIn, you can schedule your publication to be posted on the date and at time that you like.
Shine in your outreach
We won’t elaborate much here on what might be the best LinkedIn outreach strategy — our blog is brimmed with pieces of advice on this.
However, grab these top-3 tips to avoid too much wording.
- Use Closely to automate your LinkedIn outreach activities.
- Personalize your messages.
- If you use InMails — stick to some plain but critical rules.
Conclusion
If you’re up to building your social media marketing strategy, and specifically the one on LinkedIn, focus should be placed on:
- Working on brand identity
- Designing profile and tuning it according to best practices
- Growing network — the faster the better (use automation tools for it)
- Reaching out to target audiences with personalized message sequences
- Having thorough analytics at your fingertips
- Tweaking your strategies
- Having a habit of reading fresh content about how LinkedIn algorithms work
- Posting content timely and consistently
Once you’ve arranged these all that we listed, you can say for sure that you
Have questions? Our sales experts can help you sell faster than uncorking a bottle of champagne.
Just book a 10-min demo here.
Spark in your outreach and stay cheered up 🙂
