Blog
LinkedIn Marketing That Works: 5 Pointers To Grow Your Audience
Rebecca McIntyre
Head of Operations
21 Sep 20
™️

LinkedIn is today is Facebook 5 years ago, a platform that is on the verge of a huge growth jump that spells audience build-up opportunities (and massive future conversions). But you have to understand that LinkedIn is a different animal altogether compared to other leading platforms. It does not care too much about being cool or hip, it could care less about awesome graphics, and it’s not necessarily for everybody. It has a well-defined audience base and a very different algorithm than say, Instagram or Twitter.

So how do you build your following here? How can you ride the most important wave in social media marketing today? We have outlined 5 pointers we have learned ourselves from our own LI marketing efforts. We think these first-hand insights might help you out.

It’s not all about you

To make it good on LinkedIn, understand that it is not about you and how great you are in what you do. It is about providing value to your peers and/or your target audience. Content relevance is the key here and the thought leadership factor. Stories and real-life experiences will matter a lot. Insights on industry issues, funny and thoughtful musings of the day’s leading news bites can also be a good choice for your daily LI posts. It is basically valuable content that feeds an industry, a professional group, or even a common interest.

Therefore it is imperative that you understand where you position yourself inside the platform and the message you will be pushing out. This must be ideally aligned with your expertise.

Your journey matters

Many say, “What can I offer to my LI audience if I am just starting my career?” To that we say, it doesn’t matter. Even the most inexperienced real estate agent can talk about his smallest wins and get the attention of the CEO of the country’s biggest real estate company. Your journey matter, the lessons you learn every day is worth posting about, even your commitment to be better is worth sharing in LinkedIn (and you can get a job offer just by doing that!)

LinkedIn is a community of professionals. When you understand what you want to do in LI and you begin to listen to what your audience is interested in, you can have a better idea of what to post.

Consistency is the pixie dust

LinkedIn marketing works if you are customer-centric and a huge part of that concept is providing valuable content consistently. You can’t expect audience growth if you are just posting 1 good post every week. For us, we post 1 carousel and 1 long-form post everyday. We will be adding 2-3 videos every week, 2-3 articles every week, and a weekly podcast come November. But even with just the carousels and the long-form posts, we see content consumption skyrocket (900 profile views in one day) and company page follows go up by dozens every other day. Even the simplest actions when done with consistency can yield results.

Remember, the more you post content, the more your audience will see you. And if your content is valuable, you will gain the attention that you need to build audience overtime.

Content type matters

It is not just about posting something on LinkedIn. Aside from relevant and consistent posts, the type of content matters. And there is no rigid rule when it comes to this. For us, it all boiled down to trial and error. This is because your audience will always be different from other people’s audiences. For us, we know now that long-form posts in LI are consumed better when it does not have any images with it. That long body of text is better for our audience. And so we wrote more of that – minus the photos.

We also found out that LI articles don’t work too well for our audience as well, so we tapered that off and focused on long-form posts. We also found out that short, quote-only video posts don’t work as well as carousels. So we moved away from that and made sure to make carousels every day. We still want to make videos but it would be longer videos based on our expertise and the insights of our COO, Rebecca.

The lesson here is simple. Be very interested in the preferences of your audience. Refine your content, don’t be afraid to experiment, and be quick to make changes on things that don’t work for you.

Quality and quantity

The debate about quality and quantity is strong in LI posts. For us, it has to depend on who you are as a brand and the message you want to send out to your prospective clients on LinkedIn. You have to remember that quality is subjective. An uber nice graphics based on your taste may not be taken the same by your audience. So where do you have to lean on? Value! And how can you determine value? By carefully listening to what your audience has to say.

Quantity is important because it allows you to be on the feed more often than your competitor. But this comes with one caution. It is not just flooding feeds. It is, first and foremost, telling people that you know your thing and the value you are providing them every day, well, there is more from where it came from.

So take your quality and quantity considerations in a more practical, pragmatic manner and see your LI audience grow!

DM all you can in LinkedIn

Audience build-up + marketing results is not just about posting content. It also means direct messaging prospects on the platform. The content will build up your credibility and showcase your expertise but the DMs will proactively seek out people that might be interested in what you have to offer. The quality of your content then makes your offer through the DM a viable option for your prospective clients. Why? Based on your posts, you know your stuff, you provide value. You allow yourself and your business to get one foot in the door.

This here will take a lot of effort, but it will rouse direct, very targeted attention to the very people in your network who might be out shopping for the services that you provide. Get sending messages now!

For us at BoomNow, audience growth and the effect of running focused content on our LI account allowed people to want to know more about what we can do for them. It is basically brand awareness and attention. This allowed us to bag some leads on LinkedIn. This is not a forced lead capture (aside from those who we bag through DM). This is just purely value-driven. Some people like what they read in our profile and so they sent an inquiry. And for us, that’s LinkedIn Marketing success.