A guide to LinkedIn content marketing

Think again.

The platform is a great destination for both of those things, no question, but it’s also a smart place to focus at least some of your content marketing efforts.

Why? LinkedIn enjoys a wider audience than you might think, with 66.8 million monthly active users in the U.S. alone, with a total reach of 849.6 million users globally.

That includes professionals, sure, but it also includes 14.6% of all people age 18 and older worldwide. LinkedIn’s largest audience is among 25- to 34-year-olds, who make up nearly 60% of users on the platform.

That means there’s a good chance your audience is using LinkedIn, and you could reach them and nurture them with solid content marketing.

As you’ll recall, content marketing is about planning, creating, and publishing helpful, relevant, valuable content to attract a specific audience and nurture their trust over time.

Eventually, that trust translates to profitable action: think sign-ups, downloads, opt-ins, and sales.

Let’s explore this all further.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to set up your LinkedIn content marketing strategy.

Why do content marketing on LinkedIn? 4 big benefits

I always recommend focusing on your website first for content marketing, but LinkedIn could be a worthwhile side channel of focus.

Here are a few reasons why.

Reach more of your audience

By publishing content on LinkedIn, you have the potential to reach a wider audience.

As we said, LinkedIn has an impressive user base that hovers near 1 billion worldwide users. Tapping into that reach is a good way to extend beyond your main organic traffic drivers (i.e., search engines and major social networks like Facebook or Instagram) to find more people who need you.

Build your network

Besides a wide user base, LinkedIn is also the social home base for professionals in your industry.

65 million decision-makers and 61 million senior-level influencers use the platform – in other words, people who call the shots for a myriad of businesses.

That means posting consistent content here will attract more than your audience.

You could grab the attention of peers and colleagues who might be networking and looking for collaboration opportunities – think guest-posting, speaking gigs, interviews, and more that will further spread your name to new audiences.

Potential partnerships with these people could be mutually beneficial, especially if your audiences overlap.

Drive traffic back to your website

LinkedIn is a great place to share your blog content, which drives traffic back to your website.

Maintaining a consistent, valuable presence on LinkedIn will also nurture your audience and build their trust.

That will make them more likely to click the links you share, interact with your other content, and even convert through email sign-ups or straight-up purchases of your products/services.

Keep up with your competition

Are your competitors using LinkedIn for marketing?

Most likely. 96% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn for content distribution.

If you don’t have a LinkedIn presence, you might be missing out on reaching a valuable slice of your audience – one your competitors will be grabbing instead.

Content marketing for LinkedIn: How to build your strategy

To see results from LinkedIn with content, you need to do more than simply maintain a presence there.

Instead, you need to invest in a LinkedIn content marketing strategy that includes goal-setting, targeting a defined audience, and smart content creation/distribution.

This strategy should directly tie into your website and blog content strategy because they can – and should – work together. (For example, as we mentioned, sharing your blog content on LinkedIn helps drive traffic back to your website.)

For best results, build and document your strategy and stay consistent. Here’s how.

1. Set goals for your LinkedIn content marketing

Every single content marketing strategy guide starts with goals (or should). Here’s why:

• Setting goals gives your marketing activities a purpose and destination.
• Instead of marketing for marketing’s sake with no direction, you’ll be actively working to grow your brand toward specific goalposts.
• Goal-setting keeps you accountable, forcing you to track your progress and review your wins and losses.
• You’ll see where your ROI is coming from and how you can tweak your strategy to improve it.

Your LinkedIn content marketing goals can be relatively simple and relate to your overarching marketing goals.

For example, you might choose a primary goal of building brand awareness or increasing website traffic.

After you set one or two goals, decide how you’ll track and measure them.

For brand awareness, you might look at your website traffic to see if it increases over time as more people become aware of your brand.

Or, you might look at post engagement to see how it grows with your reputation.

2. Research and define your LinkedIn audience

Ultimately, defining your audience is about unearthing the people who need what you sell and will be the most likely to buy.

If your brand is established, you’ve probably done audience research already to find these people. If that’s the case, look at your ideal customers and personas to determine which of them is most likely to be on LinkedIn.

If all of them probably use the platform, that’s a good opportunity to post different types of content to target each persona.

Since LinkedIn is largely a network of professionals, you also should consider your audience’s level of employment.

For example, is your audience mostly made up of independent solopreneurs?

Or are you speaking to managers and heads of companies? Or perhaps you’re targeting mid-level employees who report to one or multiple bosses.

Whoever you target, make sure you know and understand them well so your content can be tailored to their needs and desires.

By the way, LinkedIn offers insights on their users, including behavior and demographics, which could come in handy as you research your audience.

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3. Set topic areas and content types to create

The next part of your LinkedIn content strategy plan needs to include the types of content you’ll create as well as the topic areas you’ll focus on.

To find your best topic areas, you need to hit two goals:

• What your audience wants to read.
• Your brand expertise.

Never guess at what you should write about – always lean on your audience research to figure out exactly what they want to read and what format they’d prefer.

On LinkedIn, you have a bunch of options for content types/formats. Most likely, you’ll probably rotate through a few to keep your audience engaged. Let’s break down the key types.

Text posts (status updates)

Similar to Facebook, LinkedIn gives you the option to post short status updates or “mini-blogs” with just a few paragraphs of text (the word limit is currently 542 words for these types of posts). These posts also may include hashtags and links.

• What to post:
  • Share a life lesson or inspirational moment.
  • Share some tips or a good idea.
  • Write about an experience that changed you.
  • Share a funny or thought-provoking quote.

• What not to post:
  • Lots of pitches for your products/services. If every other post is a pitch, you’ll turn people off.
  • Irrelevant updates.
  • Too many updates (hello, spammer).

Long-form posts (articles)

You can also publish long-form articles on LinkedIn, just like the content you’d publish on your blog.

Generally, LinkedIn recommends 1,500-2,000 words for these pieces. They should be in-depth, relevant, and meaningful, not to mention give your reader lots of value.