Content Strategies optimize the number of followers on LinkedIn

How Content Strategies Optimize the Followers on LinkedIn

Prologue

As was told by Lee Bolman, lecturer on education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education: “A vision without a strategy remains an illusion.”

Once the B2B brands have been done with their LinkedIn pages, the next big challenge for them is to establish their brand equity through LinkedIn & attract an increased number of followers, for promoting brand visibility.

Moreover, according to a blog by the Hootsuite, 80% of the B2B leads generated on all the Social Media channels, come exclusively through LinkedIn.

Therefore, the content marketers need to have high-quality & well-synchronized content strategies in place to attract, engage & convert an increased number of audiences on the platform.

The process of building up a healthy number of followers can be a real challenge for small-scale businesses. As there’s often the little or no awareness about the smaller brands in the market, the marketers have to often start looking for a well-orchestrated & multichannel content strategies that can help increase their number of followers on LinkedIn as well as can help in boosting their return on marketing investment (ROMI) from various other social media platforms.

Optimizing the Total Number of Followers on LinkedIn

The B2B marketers need to have a comprehensive B2B marketing strategy particularly when it comes to content. An effective content strategy revolves around pieces of content that are highly beneficial as well as relevant to the taste of the end-users. LinkedIn happens to be the world’s largest social website for professionals to network & is used by approximately 600 million active users who use the platform for networking, publishing & sharing pieces of content & for active learning.

As Craig Davis, author of multiple publications & anti-corruption specialist had explained, the importance of content marketing is reflected in the following quotation:

“We have to stop interrupting what people are interested in & be what people are interested in.”

A well synchronized, intelligent & multichannel content strategy is not only the absolute pre-requisite & integral component of the social media optimization, but also aids to the purpose of social media optimization by acting a catalyst to attract, engage & convert a large number of audiences on the diverse social platforms, including LinkedIn.

Owing to the absolute imperativeness of LinkedIn, the B2B marketing strategies need to prioritize the content strategies for their LinkedIn pages – to consolidate & strengthen their brand equities & to ensure the ongoing growth of their LinkedIn pages.

The following are some ways to optimize the total number of followers on LinkedIn by articulating the content strategies:

1. Target the Right Persona:

Way before designing the pieces of content for their ideal potential buyers, the B2B marketers need to introspect if they have appropriately defined the personas for targeting. Normally, marketers need to segment & re-segment their markets into several clusters or niches. Likewise, based on demographics, firmographics, technographics, psychography, “fit-data” as well as the past browsing histories & the research methodologies employed by the prospects, the buyer-persona is also divided & subdivided into several clusters.

According to a blog by Alexa, targeting is one of the most tasks allocated to modern marketing endeavors – especially after the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) & machine learning (ML).

The marketers need to be specific to their niches & more often than not, need to speak to their cluster-specific audiences in a language that resonates with & appeals to their diverse areas of interests.

Naturally, if the marketers fail to prioritize their niche & will speak to the prospects that don’t associate with a particular niche, they will end up inaccurately or even incorrectly addressing their diverse areas of interests which would not ignite enough conversions.

The marketers can test-run if the language of the pieces of content, imagery & the look & feel of their LinkedIn pages properly encapsulate & reflect on the brand equity, as well as the value proposition of the products or services at disposal for the prospects.

2. Make the most of LinkedIn’s deep Targeting Functionalities:

Once the LinkedIn page of a brand reaches at least 300  followers, the marketers can target organic updates to specific industries, functions, seniorities, locations as well as the languages.

3. Publish & Promote the Right Pieces of Content:

The marketers need to introspect whether they have been publishing the right pieces of content on their LinkedIn pages which resonate with the diverse areas of interests of their potential buyers.

4. Employ Influencer Marketing:

Much like the other social media platforms, influencer marketing is very beneficial for promoting the niche-specific pieces of content on LinkedIn. Inviting the industry-specific influencers to write special guest blog posts on LinkedIn (that may show the value proposition of products or services) or to invite them to post videos to show a brands’ ideologies & ideas of innovation can do wonders for accelerating the total number of followers on LinkedIn.

Both micro, as well as macro influencer marketing strategies, can be employed to boost the content strategies on LinkedIn.

5. Promote the Right Pieces of Content:

The marketers need to promote the right pieces of content with the following functionalities:

  • Purpose-driven Content:

The pieces of content need to aptly articulate a particular purpose.  For example, topics selected for content creation should be of high-value to the customers, prospects & community. There should be a conversational flow of language to intertwine the attention of the users.

  • Insightful Lessons:

The content should be insightful & should focus on all the minute details that the competitors might be missing upon

LinkedIn posts should have images. According to LinkedIn, the posts on LinkedIn with sharp, interesting & distinct images can drive twice as much traffic, as compared to the posts without images. Having images in the post increases the social visibility of the posts, whereas the posts bereft of images signify a lack of traction altogether.

  • Be Original:

The pieces of content shouldn’t always link to the third-party website or even, as a matter of fact, with pieces of content on the primary domains of brands only. After the recent algorithmic tweaks, LinkedIn rewards endemic pieces of content much more than the pieces of content that get redirected on the other websites.

The marketers should try & create original thoughts, memes, videos & short stories for self-branding as well as to promote the right pieces of content for showing the value proposition of products or services which ultimately aid the purpose of brand equity.

6. Getting Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Correct:

Much like other social media platforms, the visibility of the pieces of content on LinkedIn is impacted by SEO strategies. Doing the SEO correct ensures that the search engines crawl & establish the pieces of content as high-value, which ultimately leads to a higher rank for the pieces of content.

To improve SEO on the LinkedIn platform, marketers can benefit from the following tactics:

  • Be thoughtful:

After its algorithmic update, LinkedIn doesn’t reward the users for the sharing pieces of content.

The pieces of content shouldn’t just be confined to articles. The marketers should opt for an all-inclusive & blended content approach to attract, engage & convert the prospects.

The content needs to be of high-value & can be in the form of innate videos being posted on LinkedIn as well as the unique images being shared.

7. Choose the right Social Key Performance Indicators (KPIs):

Oftentimes, for the marketers on LinkedIn their “Follower Count” is a primary metric of importance. The marketers can scrutinize the increase in the number of their followers over a while. LinkedIn itself suggests that a 5% increase in the follower count on the platform is healthy.

When running paid campaigns on LinkedIn, the marketers need to measure metrics such as Pay per Click (PPC), Cost per Click (CPC) & Cost per Million (CPM).

The marketers can also try & track the metrics that support their main objectives such as reach, engagement, etc.

8. A/B Testing or Split-Testing:

The marketers should always opt for open-ended or close-ended test-running of their campaigns on LinkedIn, whereby; they create at least two different versions of the same post or an ad with more than one variation & then compare the results to figure out which one is better.

The B2B marketers should also try boosting their Call to Action (CTA) buttons, especially when it is about the paid campaigns. Marketers can try different phrases on the CTA buttons to see which one performs better.

Boosting the Call to Action (CTA) buttons is a tactic that is beneficial for both the organic as well as the paid advertisements on LinkedIn. However, boosting through amplification provides a better result.

9. Leverage LinkedIn Analytics to Monitor & Improve the Engagement of Prospects:

LinkedIn Analytics is the ultimate resource for collecting all the insights & data.

Deep-delving into Page Analytics helps marketers actualize how diverse pieces of content are performing on social media, besides demarcating how followers are engaging with specific posts & ads.

These insights help in deducing how several brand pages are growing on LinkedIn. The optimization of content strategies on LinkedIn also includes reviewing analytics. When the data quantitatively fetched form the analytical tools is coalesced with the results of several split-tests &  is compared with the data form the trend analysis after a while, insightful results for the data-driven decision-making processes can be gathered.

These insights help in deducing how to create relevant pieces of content around the existing follower list to maintain the number of followers, as well as to increase the total number of followers on the platform. Analyzing beyond the follower analytics & gazing at the Page Visitors helps reveal the ratio of the total number of people visiting, to that of those converting to the followers.

Content Suggestions tool provides a pipeline of topics & articles that the people in certain audience pool find intriguing or those that are of relevance to a brand-specific audience (or to people similar to them).

10. Imbibing the Insights from the Communities Hashtags Panel:

This strategy provides an insight into the members who aren’t interested in following a brand’s page but are interested in the topics that brands publish. This might be an excellent hint for the marketers to fill up the loopholes in their content strategies. Leveraging the widget, page admins may explore conversations happening around hashtags that are important to their brands & interact with the members from the perspective of their organizations.

This form of engagement can also be used to re-share the pieces of content that the followers of a certain brand might find insightful enough to engage with.

11. Focus on the Right Content & the Right Audiences:

Investing in paid search makes a lot of sense, particularly when the initial follower count becomes stagnant way before a minimum number is attained.

Using the paid search functionality, the marketers can target a wide array of audiences & can leverage a broader persona, to begin with, before they can do the time-series analysis & trend-mapping in real-time, to deduce which audience groups engage the most with their pieces of content.

Wrapping It Up

When it comes to the optimization of content strategies on LinkedIn, there are no steadfast rules; LinkedIn keeps on tweaking its algorithms to keep abreast with the latest research methodologies being opted-in by the prospects, as well as with the underlying adjustments being made in the ways the search engines reflect the results on the basis of algorithms. Growing a brand’s following on LinkedIn does well for increasing the reach of the brands on an organic level. At the same time, the Page Analytics functionality also allows marketers to analyze & understand the audience groups that are better interested in their brands.

Sticking to the above steps may help in architecting the content strategies resonating with the necessities & priorities of the audiences after the analysis of various factors gathered from the analytics platforms are split-tested.

We, at Valasys Media, help our B2B clients with a wide array of B2B services including lead generation, account-based marketing, lead nurturing, event promotion services, list building services & content syndication services, which have been custom-made to help them achieve their core bottom-line endeavors such as revenue optimization, optimized customers’ experiences & optimized sales revenue. For architecting the discerning pathways to perennially healthy sales pipeline or for any help with your B2B marketing endeavors, get in touch with our team of experts.

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