Are you happy with your LinkedIn marketing plan?
To have success with LinkedIn, you’ll need to make a long-term commitment to your plan. A strategy that delivers results requires ongoing management, monitoring, analysis and adjustments. To create a LinkedIn campaign that sells, content marketing is integral in everything we do – from demand generation, brand awareness, customer advocacy, and even offline events.
Here are eight steps that will ensure you have a winning campaign on your hands:
#1. Lay a solid foundation
Start with the end results. Begin the planning process by documenting what you hope to achieve with your content marketing. Capture your goals and map them to the best way of measuring the effectiveness of your content.The key to identifying what content to create is to understand your target audience. Create a profile or persona of your customers — their company types, decision making process, purchase motivators, and where they turn for reliable information – and find out the topics that resonate with them. What’s a top-of-mind topic that you can share lots of expertise on and offer an interesting perspective? Buzzsumo is a great tool to kick off your research.
#2. Managing and producing content
Content needs to be produced regularly to drive leads. In addition, you must use varied types of content to keep audiences engaged. An editorial calendar helps tame the chaos, keeping everyone on track when it comes to what content needs to be produced, by who, and when.
When producing content, have a healthy mix of content and take intelligent content risks. Opportunities can be missed if marketers play it too safe with content. Approach your audience in a way they are not expecting – with a bigger story, braver content and a bolder voice – and couple that with SEO for content amplification. Today’s SEO experts must bring a strategic and content-centred approach to their efforts. And content marketers need to think through the research and planning stages carefully to ensure their content is relevant.
#3. Mapping content throughout the buyer’s journey
The goal of content is to reach, and then nurture prospects, to ultimately drive them to become a customer. Buyers now control the research process. It is critical to market across the buyer’s journey, both in the early and later stages. Creating Top of Funnel and Bottom of Funnel content will help you do this in a way that is relevant to buyers.
Top of Funnel content should be used in the early stage of your relationship with a prospect. You should try to gain mindshare with those who are unfamiliar with your company and not yet ready to purchase. Although many prospects will not convert to customers at the top of the funnel, your efforts here will make it easier to engage them once they reach the later stages.
In the later stage of the buyer’s journey, nurture prospects that have expressed an interest in your company and are ready to consume Bottom of the Funnel content with highly personalised email marketing, display ads, topical newsletters, and case studies. The goal is to educate audiences once they are aware of your brand and influence them to engage with a sales representative.
#4. The Big Rock: Your stepping stone to content marketing success
It’s easy to get overwhelmed at the thought of developing content to keep prospects engaged and interested all along the path to purchase. The Big Rock (coined by LinkedIn) is a single cornerstone piece of content that can power your demand-gen engine for months on end. This is a substantial content asset (15 or more pages)and is your stake in the ground on a theme. Move from thinking like a publisher to actually publishing like one by putting out a “book” on your topic. Fill your Big Rock with all the wisdom you have on a topic in a way that makes it clear you know what you’re talking about. Learn how to write a Big Rock here.
#5. Chisel your big rock into pebbles
The Big Rock is your springboard for more relevant content. Not everyone will download your Big Rock. Fortunately, your Big Rock is perfect for chunking into smaller, derivative content assets. Elements from the Big Rock can be easily chiselled into smaller pieces your audience may prefer such as a short blog post, a colourful infographic or a how-to webinar. Your job is to get content to them in whatever format they prefer, in the channels where they spend time. All ungated ‘pebbles’ will point back to your Big Rock and if your Big Rock is gated, you can collect lead information in exchange for the download.
#6. Get visual
The old cliché of a picture being worth a thousand words continues to hold true in the digital world. Sharp images and evocative photos aren’t limited to Instagram. Even in a business context, we find that articles containing images get 94 per cent more views. Posts with videos attract three times more inbound links and posts with images are liked twice as often as text-only updates.
#7. Expand the reach of your content
If you develop content but no one sees it, what’s the point? Or what if the right people never see it? Don’t post your content and hope prospective buyers will accidentally discover it — promote your content to make sure it’s found.
LinkedIn’s Sponsored Content is native to the browsing experience, appearing directly in the LinkedIn member’s feed without interrupting the stream of content. With it, you can select specific criteria to reach the right people at the right time with the most relevant content. You can also use continuous tracking to monitor impression and engagement metrics, and instantly fine-tune your posts and your strategy. And with the Direct Sponsored Content feature in Sponsored Content, you can personalise and test content in the newsfeed without first creating posts on your LinkedIn Company Page. Another great use is to test and retest a variety of content in real time until you get it right. It allows you to A/B test imagery, headlines and call to action.
#8. Proving the value of your content marketing
Tracking specific metrics such as post engagement and CTA click-throughs will make it simple to measure and prove the value of your content marketing. It may be easier to measure lower funnel results but you need the top of the funnel content to drive future buyers into the lower funnel. When it comes to the Sponsored Content, gain insights into its performance through monitoring brand engagement, measurable ROI and your LinkedIn Content Marketing Score.
While all that information is valuable, it’s useless unless you act on it. You can experiment with new ways to increase your follower base among professionals by targeting a specific function with relevant news and information. Employees should be encouraged to share the content that you want to distribute along and posts should include a call-to-action to increase CTR.
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