It’s easy to overlook the ‘content’ part of marketing on LinkedIn since so much emphasis is put on prospecting and personalized outreach.
As a result, we often see companies neglecting a solid posting strategy and pumping out lackluster, bland content hoping it sticks. Some personal professional accounts lack post planning and end up wasting their LinkedIn engagement potential.
But you need to entice your future leads, isn’t it so? Content marketing is the best friend of sales teams. It helps to “roll” things forward.
The truth is if you know how to produce content that generates high engagement, you’ll bring more eyes to your brand, build your credibility and strengthen connections with customers and prospects – fertile soil for business growth. It’s good that content marketing is not a guessing game. Anyone can learn how to do it one step at a time.
There are pillars of effective content strategy
Without a thoughtfully planned content strategy, getting the desired results is impossible – you can’t just upload an unformatted, hard-to-read, and generic LinkedIn post and expect it to garner attention and be the start of a meaningful conversation.
You’ll learn from this article what practices lead to higher engagement, why a thought-out content strategy matters, and how you can use LinkedIn engagement to network, make deeper connections with prospects and drive more sales.
What Does Your LinkedIn Engagement Rate Tell You? Learn to Analyze the Performance of Your Content
How does one measure engagement, exactly? Well, the LinkedIn engagement rate is defined as (Likes + Comments) / Total Impressions (Views) x 100%.
This handy metric lets you visualize what percentage of people that saw your post interacted with it and compare that number with that of a differently structured post or another content type.
With this in mind, it becomes easier to pinpoint how you should structure your post (and what exactly you should post) for maximum engagement.
Good news! You don’t have to toil away on your computer comparing the engagement rate of LinkedIn content types with your own trial and error, because a 2022 study shows that the average engagement rate among all forms of content is 3.16%, and, depending on the size of your LinkedIn account, the same content types yield varying engagement rates.
It’s good to keep in mind that:
– Videos generate the most engagement per impression for smaller accounts (Small number of subscribers);
– Larger accounts reel in more impressions and engagement through images and PDFs;
– PDFs get the most likes compared to other content types.
The commonly used type of content on LinekdIn is a shared document similar to an infographic that the reader has to swipe through like a carousel to view the information in its entirety.
This format lets you visualize your content in a clearer, more pleasing way and intrigue your viewers.
Posting such a document lets you take advantage of a curiosity hook and capture your audience’s attention for longer, allowing them to ‘take in’ the information more easily in a convenient layout. This, in turn, sparks higher post interactions.
On top of utilizing the most effective post type, how you structure your post and how you format your message is no less important – you want your message to be informative, unique, and clear to the reader, not a convoluted block of text with no paragraphs that most users would rather swipe past.
Let’s recall what’s a good structure for your post?
LinkedIn Post Structure: Tips to Make Your Posts Stand Out and Generate Engagement
- Divide your caption into paragraphs
Putting spacing in your text posts every few sentences makes your message heaps easier to read, establishes semantic segmentation, which allows for better comprehension at an initial skim-through, and improves the chances of viewers actually getting to the end of your post.
We can all agree that an article or text post with lots of paragraphs is way more visually pleasing than one that is continuous, so adding more spacing to your message is a must.
- Don’t forget that people engage through visuals
It doesn’t matter whether it’s a B2B environment or B2C – your product will be bought by people. Any purchase is driven by emotions. Visual content that is aligned with your brand identity helps to memorize your brand so the picture of your brand will pop up in their minds later, at the needed moment.
Visual content is processed quicker and gets more chances of being shared. Work on your brand identity and positioning to strengthen your brand and make it memorable for your potential buyers. Always add comprehensive and appealing visuals to your materials.
We suggest you read some classics to get the hang of how positioning helps your brand grow in the long term.
- Be direct
What makes engaging content?
Have you ever wondered why storytelling works? Because it’s something that’s very true to someone.
Do you know how to add personality to your texts?
Be direct.
Say what you think. Share your experience as it was for you. Make sure it will be useful to learn for your potential buyers.
- Don’t be dry in your writing
If you want your viewers to be engaged, drop the excessively formal approach and opt for a looser style, with attention-grabbing lines, appropriate emphasis, and easy-to-follow speech.
Your posts will provoke more curiosity and interest if written in a conversational, lively tone.
Give your title and first few lines some room for suspense, possibly a cliffhanger, and expand on it in your post for greater viewer interest!
- Experiment with different content types
Sticking to just one type of content is limiting your diversity and draining your audience’s interest in your posts.
Content speaks to users more when it contains something they can relate to and feels like a conversation rather than an impersonal text post by a company page with no real identity to assign to it (we’ll get into establishing an effective business page LinkedIn presence in a minute).
So, it’s beneficial to branch out to videos, images, infographics, GIFs, and LinkedIn polls, posing questions directly in your posts to shape the feeling of two-way interaction. Don’t dread abandoning the formal text post content style and let your B2B brand adopt a personal touch your audience feels more closely connected with!
You should also test our various content forms for the sake of finding what works best for you and what resonates with your viewers the most.
- Give video content a chance!
Be sure that it’s better to try than not to. It can definitely be related to video content.
There is a common opinion that video content costs a lot to create. That’s really far from the truth.
You only need studio light that you can buy really cheap from websites like AliExpress. You can start filming on your iPhone or Android. There also should be a silent place with appropriate background – a wall in your apartment will work. And you also need a microphone that’s also not a big investment. What matters is what you share, how useful the information is, and how entertaining is the format.
- Consider implementing the “Content Pyramid” approach
“Content Pyramid” is actually a very simple concept. You create the first piece of content, the pillar one, and then create a few micro pieces of content out of the big one.
It helps to save time while filling all your social media with content.
We also tried it in Closely – we came up with a general topic, created a pillar PDF, and then produced micro content out of it – scripts for videos, and posts for LinkedIn and Facebook.
Continue Generating Engagement on Your Published Post
The LinkedIn engagement journey doesn’t end once you’ve uploaded your post. In fact, you can help your metrics thrive by replying to everyone who commented on your post and engaging with their content!
Continuing the discussion and interacting with commenters encourages them to return the favor again (maybe even on future posts) and forges personal connections between your B2B brand and your prospects.
Share your content with your connections and network to get your content seen by more people – join groups with like-minded professionals and become part of LinkedIn promotion pods.
Your Message Stood Out to Your Target Audience – Now What?
The next place a curious viewer goes to after looking through your post is your LinkedIn profile. The goal is to attract leads with an informative and dynamic profile, not to lose them in the most important step and let that content-induced impulse go to waste.
Optimizing your profile directly leads to a higher conversion rate and maximizes your LinkedIn growth potential, since a complete profile looks more credible and inviting to prospects.
Make sure you cover these points:
– Your job title,
– What you do,
– What your company stands for,
– Who are your products or services meant for,
– Your company’s values,
Separate your profile from others in your industry with:
– An attention-grabbing headline (it could be your catchy company motto!),
– An informative summary that’s straight to the point but lets new viewers get to know you,
– A professional profile picture,
– A custom banner,
– Your company logo (for your business page).
How to write a sparky headline
Generally, if both your business account and personal LinkedIn page are optimized, your personal profile will get more engagement – people just relate to content more if there’s a feeling of there being another person behind the screen rather than a corporate entity.
But keeping up an active posting schedule on your business page is far from pointless, as an effective LinkedIn content strategy creates the image of a successful company – activity on social media boosts the likelihood of prospects opting for your solution and gravitating more towards your brand.
An organization’s LinkedIn presence can prove very powerful when part of a social selling strategy. This is why it’s important to have a complete profile and leverage every opportunity you get to increase your LinkedIn engagement – your growing business will thank you for it.
Conclusion
In this article we focused on why LinkedIn engagement matters for connecting with B2B prospects and expanding your business, highlighted the practices you can employ to get your content to reach a wider audience, and how you can drive buying incentives from content interactions with an optimized professional profile.
The importance of an active LinkedIn posting schedule with dynamic writing and varied content types is often ignored for business pages.
This shouldn’t be the case, and we explained how you can use a thought-out strategy to benefit your company.
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