8 Tips to Help You Grow Your Business on LinkedIn

These days, "business as usual" can feel like an oxymoron. Whatever "usual" used to be has gone out the window, and we're all collectively finding our footing in a landscape that has been (and continues to be) drastically reshaped.

At LinkedIn, we're committed to helping marketers and organizations adapt and thrive in this new era of business.

With nearly 800 million members in over 200 countries, B2B marketers today recognize LinkedIn for what it is: a trusted, credible platform where business professionals go to network and find solutions to the challenges they face day in and day out. Case in point: Did you know that nearly three professionals sign up to join LinkedIn every second?

As B2B marketing continues to evolve in the digital space, it's increasingly critical to meet audiences where they're at, sparking meaningful connections and building fruitful relationships. It's no longer a question of if you should be on LinkedIn — 96 percent of B2B marketers now use the platform to distribute content, according to CMI — but how you can stand out and gain an edge.

These eight tips will help your brand do just that by taking advantage of key tools and techniques.

1. Help your LinkedIn Page work harder.

You already know that the audience you want to reach is on LinkedIn. So do 55+ million other companies (give or take). Here are some methods to help your organization's LinkedIn Page differentiate and drive growth:

• Complete your Page: We've found that pages with complete information get 30 percent more weekly views. Be sure to add your logo, lead with an overview of key terms and phrases that LinkedIn members can easily find in search, and add a call to action button to encourage next steps.
• Boost your Page: Amplify your best content getting the most reactions with a boost to extend your reach. Boosting can help connect you with people who are not following you (yet) but might be interested.
• Invite people to follow: Prompt your first-degree connections to check out and follow your Page by selecting "Invite connections" within the Page admin tools.
• Spark the conversation: Companies that post weekly see double the engagement with their content. Bring people into your conversations, and join others on LinkedIn. Highlight your brand by re-sharing posts where your business is @mentioned. And expose your brand to a wider audience with 3-5 hashtags when it's relevant.
• Activate your employees: Add pictures, videos, and give your employees a voice with the new "My Company" Tab to help expand your brand's reach in a credible, authentic way.
• Schedule a Live Event: In 2020, 6.3 million members attended virtual events on LinkedIn. You can bring your professional community together via a public and discoverable Live Event, too. LinkedIn Live Events allows you to build deeper connections with your community with, on average, 7x more reactions and 24x more comments than native video.

For a much deeper dive on tips and to see how other organizations are leveraging LinkedIn Pages, find a complete list of best practices here.

2. Enhance your efforts with LinkedIn Marketing Partners.

A little added support, consultation, and integration can go a long way. One hundred percent of top brands grow their marketing with LinkedIn partners, and 58 percent of leads are automated by a partner solution.

Leverage LinkedIn Marketing Partners to support:

• Strategy planning: Ideate and create better content, use data to build ad audiences, and leverage audience insights to become more targeted in your efforts.
• Execution: Learn how to grow your organic following with enhanced functionality, manage your campaigns to scale, and automatically route leads to the platform of your choice to foster the all-important conversion.
• Measuring your marketing impact: Know that you're on the right track with reporting and ROI, and track your leads through the entire funnel.

Connecting with partners can be the quickest way to tailor the solutions that best fit your business, helping drive focused and consistent growth on LinkedIn.

3. Activate thought leadership on LinkedIn.

Thought leadership content is not just fluff to fill social channels — it has evolved into an essential cornerstone of a content marketing strategy. Moreover, it's a way to establish a consistent voice, vision, and most importantly, trust with your audience.

On LinkedIn, professionals have the platform to reach a wider audience seeking leadership insights and narratives to achieve their organizational goals.

But what tangible outcomes can be achieved? Setting goals and expectations for thought leadership — and measuring them through the lens of audience growth, content views, and profile views — can translate to concrete business results, such as:

• Brand and Reputation
• Market Consideration
• Demand Generation
• Talent Attraction
• Employee Engagement

To spark new thinking for your thought leadership efforts to engage and influence executives and top decision makers, we recommend checking out Edelman's B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report.

4. Evolve customer engagement strategies.

B2B customers today need more than a sales pitch: they need to know you know them. Understand their journey better with a buyer first approach, and how your product or services can help solve their challenges.

In a blog post from earlier this year, we cover 5 New Customer Engagement Strategies to Activate on LinkedIn with helpful tips, insights, and activation ideas to:

• Position for the long-term
• Know your customer's customers
• Revolve around the customer journey
• Strengthen your sales and marketing collaboration
• Earn trust through thought leadership

Another simple place to start? Hear what your customers need directly from them, in a setting that centers on them instead of your brand. Consider hosting a LinkedIn Live Event where you can bring your customers together, safely and in real-time, to glean insights straight from the source.

5. Get a hand with campaign planning.

Campaign Manager offers a wide variety of tools, features, and options. To help you understand which are best for which situations, and stay tightly aligned with what you're trying to achieve, we've developed this easy-to-use campaign planning template that can assist in creating and launching campaigns that contribute to a full-funnel marketing strategy.

With this template you can input your own variables, and follow the guide for best practices and tips to tailor your LinkedIn campaign depending on the ad type you intend to use, from Single Image Ads, Carousel, Video, Message Ads, Text Ads, or Lead Gen Forms.

6. Invest in creativity to differentiate.

Let's face it: B2B marketing has been stuck in a funk for years, caught in a monotonous loop of the rational sales-pitch first content. Just the facts. But as research indicates, 75 percent of B2B creative is ineffective. Buyers today demand more.

One way to reverse that trend — without overspending — is to embrace the creative renaissance now taking place. Many B2B marketers are taking a page from the B2C marketing playbook, aiming to connect with buyers on an emotional level where the majority of decisions are made. And with the massive shift to digital that the pandemic accelerated, there's never been a greater need to cut through the online clutter.

In short, to get noticed it's time to become a "thumb stopper." Aim to be disruptive, interactive, and inspiring. As an example, use LinkedIn Carousel Ads and Conversation Ads to create more interactive and engaging user experiences, taking advantage of visual storytelling and self-selected dialogue paths.

Rethinking creativity doesn't mean throwing out all the previous content you've created. If there are still valuable messages to share, consider ways to give them new life, like turning them into videos or infographics that catch the eye of a scrolling member. And be prepared to embrace evergreen content that has the power to stay visible and reach new audiences without being specifically time-bound.

7. Use LinkedIn Measurement to track and improve results.

Data doesn't lie — yet only 37 percent of marketers feel "very confident" in their ROI metrics.

Knowing the effectiveness of a campaign — or where it's falling short — will inform the next steps you take. Marketers who are able to harness the full breadth of reporting and analytics capabilities at their fingertips are more nimble, ready to press forward or pivot, and are swiftly moving ahead of the pack.

For instance, set up the LinkedIn Insight Tag to leverage Conversion Tracking that enables you to see how your ads are driving valuable actions, both on and off the platform.

To this end, we've created a six-point checklist for measuring LinkedIn campaigns to ensure you're aligning with key metrics, properly setting up Lead Gen Forms, and reviewing progress at the appropriate times to unlock additional areas for optimization.

8. Align LinkedIn Ads with your objectives.

Over the years, the LinkedIn platform has experienced exponential growth, making an ideal environment to grow awareness, build communities, and drive action. Today, LinkedIn advertising makes up the largest share of US B2B display ad spending. Eighty percent of B2B marketers put paid behind their content on LinkedIn.

But the benefits go beyond the numbers. B2B marketers who incorporate advertising on LinkedIn as part of a cohesive marketing strategy are finding they get more than just clicks. They're using LinkedIn's objective-based advertising to drive a full-funnel strategy leveraging the three key components of awareness, consideration, and conversion.

Advertising on LinkedIn can help you achieve a wide range of business objectives while also serving to boost brand perception more broadly.

The work ahead of us as B2B marketers is only beginning. The good news is that, as the change in our marketplaces continues to evolve, the LinkedIn platform is evolving with it to provide more opportunities for growth and sustained success than ever before.

Make the most of your opportunity to take advantage of the new business landscape. For more ideas and insights, Subscribe to the LinkedIn Marketing Blog today.