LinkedIn is a fantastic medium for extending your reach, positioning yourself as a thought leader, and building your personal brand.

However, to get the most out of this platform this coming year, you need to understand the key pillars required to create a winning LinkedIn marketing strategy. And that’s what this article is all about– here are 5 actionable tips you can integrate into your 2023 LinkedIn marketing strategy to make it stronger and more effective.

1. Original Content Over Links

Whether it’s a completely new post or something you’re repurposing from your website, original and fresh information is how to get an engaged audience that keeps coming back.

You want to avoid simply regurgitating links and info that’s posted outside of LinkedIn. For one, most social media platforms want to keep people on their sites. And second, it shows you’re a thought leader in your industry.

If you want to get a feel of how this works, take a look at your favorite brands and personalities on the site to see the type of content they post. Heck, you can even check out my page for examples.

LinkedIn gives you all the tools you need. There are a variety of content types you can post to the platform, including blog posts and articles, video content like live sessions and interviews, case studies, and more.

2. Show Your Personality

Part of my philosophy is humanizing your marketing so you can create authentic relationships that translate to success and growth. LinkedIn was originally conceived as the “social media for professionals,” and, sure, it still is. However, that doesn’t mean you should trap yourself in a box where your content comes off bland and boring.

For your marketing strategy to be effective, it needs a relatable approach so your audience can connect with your brand on a personal level. If you have a funny bone and some wit, show it off!

Of course, you want everything to align with your marketing messaging and your personal brand voice.

3. Leverage LinkedIn Analytics

As mentioned above, LinkedIn gives you plenty of solutions so you can be creative and post content through various mediums– blogs, videos, etc.

But LinkedIn also provides you with the tools to see how that content performs through LinkedIn Analytics. It gives you invaluable data such as how much engagement a post gets, how different times affect the post’s performance, whether or not your content is getting leads, and more.

With this info, you can see how your marketing strategy is working and if it’s time to go full steam ahead or pivot and rethink your approach. And you should be constantly assessing the performance of your content and evolving your campaign so your marketing strategy is as effective as possible.

4. Figure Out Your Optimal Post Frequency

As with any social media platform, post consistency and frequency are key components for growth and success. Plus, the time of day when you post plays an important role in engagement too.

For example, brands that post regularly find that they see the most engagement from users typically during the morning or early afternoon. If you’re representing a large company, you can get away with a few posts a week. And if it’s your personal page, you can post every day if you want.

Regardless, finding the right groove will take time and testing to get right.

5. Engage With Platform

Yes, you’re busy but don’t just post your content and go on about your day. Take some time to be active on the platform. Respond to comments on your posts, participate in discussions, and share info and resources with the rest of the community. When people see you’re an active member, they’re more apt to return the favor or remember you as someone with valuable info to share.

I know these 5 tips will take your 2023 marketing game to the next level on LinkedIn! 

Thanks for reading,

Joshua B. Lee

The post 5 Tips You Can Use to Improve Your LinkedIn Marketing Strategy in 2023 appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

LinkedIn is a B2B business’s ultimate platform.

Instead of creating B2B audiences, like on Facebook—you get to tap into an entire platform of professionals. These are the people with the buying power to hire your agency or bring you on as a fractional CMO (or other marketing position).

And they’re all hanging out on one platform…ready to network.

Creating a LinkedIn content marketing strategy is like getting to speak at industry events, all thanks to your keyboard. With the right strategy, your LinkedIn content can get seen by your customer avatar (like your ideal agency client) and you can start landing contracts, employment, or freelancing work.

And you get to do this while solidifying your personal brand (a brand that can help you find better clients, employment opportunities, and freelancing projects in the future). Launching a LinkedIn content marketing strategy isn’t just a “nice-to-have” for B2B businesses.

It’s a must-have.

How to Create a Converting LinkedIn Content Marketing Strategy

Creating a LinkedIn content marketing strategy goes through the same 5 steps you’d use to create a strategy for a client. You have to know:

1. Who your audience is
2. What they care about
3. Your content pillars
4. Your schedule
5. Your Customer Value Journey

Step 1: Who’s your ideal audience?

Your ideal audience is full of customers. If your LinkedIn audience is full of ecommerce business owners but your agency only works with SaaS brands—you’ve done something wrong. It’s just like marketing your clients’ businesses. You have to start with who before you move on to what.

Who does your business serve?

• Is it ecommerce business owners with less than $100,000 in revenue?
• Is it SaaS businesses with $1 million in MRR?
• Is it online coaches and consultants looking to increase course sales?

Use the Customer Avatar Canvas to write down all the details about who your business serves. We’ll use this in the next step to figure out what your ideal customer cares about so you can create content that interests them on LinkedIn.

Step 2: What do they care about?

As you fill out the Customer Avatar Canvas, what your ideal customer cares about starts to become obvious.

The “Haves” in the Before State tell you exactly what they want to avoid in the future. The “Haves” in the After State are the topics they’re dying to learn about so they can experience the After State. For example, if your ideal customer is an ecommerce business owner in the Before State they probably ‘have’ low customer lifetime value (LTV). In the After State, they have high customer lifetime value.

That means you know they care about increasing their LTV and your content can cover topics like:

Low Customer LTV? Here are 5 Ways to Increase LTV in 3 Months

Knowing what your ideal customer cares about tells you exactly what content interests them. That’s how you build an audience of people who want to hire you.

Step 3: What are your content pillars?

Every brand needs content pillars. These are the topics that you’ll cover on a regular basis. And they’re entirely based on the Customer Avatar Canvas. Using content pillars, you’ll never run out of content ideas because you always know what your audience wants to know about.

Create at least 5 content pillars based on their haves, feelings, average day, status, and the good vs. evil perspective they have in their mind. For example, the marketing agency targeting ecommerce business owners on LinkedIn can create content pillars like:

Have: They have low LTV and they want to have high LTV

→ Content Pillar: LTV

Feelings: They feel like advertising is getting more complicated and expensive and they want to feel like advertising gets them guaranteed ROAS

→ Content Pillar: ROAS

Average Day: They spend their day looking at their sales flop and they want to spend their day focused on the bigger picture for their business

→ Content Pillar: Being a founder/CEO of an ecommerce business

Status: They relate to a newbie entrepreneur and they want to relate to a successful, established entrepreneur

→ Content Pillar: Entrepreneur lifecycles of ecommerce business owners

Good vs. Evil: The best-case scenario is that they figure this out, but the worst-case scenario is they have to shut down their online store 

→ Content Pillar: Ecommerce businesses “must-knows” to avoid shutting down your store

For each of these content pillars, you can create 5+ topics that you can create LinkedIn posts, articles, and videos on. Now, you have 25 topics to fill your calendar!

Step 4: What’s your posting schedule?

When people first consider posting content, they like to go big or go home. They want to post daily, record videos every other day and write 1,000+ articles 3x per week. Let’s start slow and work your way up (unless you have a dedicated team!).

A solid posting schedule to start out with is 3x posts per week. You can follow a Monday, Wednesday, and Friday schedule. Each of your posts covers one of your content pillars (LTV, ROAS, etc.).

Once you and your team get used to posting, you can start to turn some of those posts into videos. Allocate 1-2 hours in your schedule per week to record videos based on your created posts. You can post those videos in your 3x/week cadence or you can add them in on Tuesday and Thursday so you’re posting daily. 

Whichever schedule you choose—make sure to stick to it. If there’s one part of your LinkedIn content marketing strategy that can go array its posting. If you don’t post, people can’t see your content, learn about your expertise, and build a relationship that leads them to hire you. 

Have a team member assigned to content creation and posting to make sure it gets done.

Step 5: Your Customer Value Journey

There is no content marketing strategy without a funnel. To finalize your LinkedIn content marketing strategy, we have to figure out what call to action you’re using in 20% of your posts. The other 80% of your posts will be free content, where you’re not asking for anything in return. 20% will have a direct call to action to download a lead magnet, join your newsletter, hop on to a webinar, etc.

Think about the Customer Value Journey. Your LinkedIn audience goes from Stage 1: Awareness to Stage 2: Engagement when they follow you, like your posts, comment, or watch your videos. Now, we want them to go to Stage 3: Subscribe.

This is the stage where they share their first-party data with you (which we all know is very important these days…ahem, Apple).

With that first-party data, your CVJ moves to Stage 4: Convert! This is when your LinkedIn audience becomes profitable. You’re turning audience members into agency clients or your fractional CMO business has more interest than you can keep up with. 

Better yet—you can continue mapping this journey so you reach Stage 6: Ascend and can take $1,000/month retainer contracts and turn them into $5,000/month retainer contracts.

That’s how you create a LinkedIn content marketing strategy that works.

Your First LinkedIn Content Marketing Strategy

LinkedIn is a playground for businesses. It’s like having a local coffee shop where, somehow, business owners from around the world are able to come and chat together. Through your conversations (a.k.a content), you get to filter out who you network with and build connections with people who’ve been waiting to hire someone just like you.

With the right content marketing strategy, your agency, freelancing, or even full-time employment marketing career can show you the abundance of opportunities available to you right now. The key is knowing how to get those opportunities to pop out of the woodwork and show you they exist.

And that’s why you implement this content marketing strategy.

So more customers, connections, and opportunities come to you.

The post How to Build Your First LinkedIn Content Marketing Strategy appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

Adam Lyons: an accidental business owner. Adam owns 8 different companies, has consulted for over 1,000 different companies, and still makes time to be a coach for the EPIC program and for Scalable.

WHAT IS DIGITALMARKETER:

DigitalMarketer is the premier online community for digital marketing professionals. It’s a place where you can learn how to market like a pro, connect with industry experts, and get the strategies and tools you need to grow and scale your business to new heights.

https://www.digitalmarketer.com/

The post Adam Lyons, Serial Entrepreneur – Scalable Coach Highlight [VIDEO] appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

Ruben Aguirre talks of his success as a business owner, the 8 Signal rebrand, and how he has used Digital Marketer Certified Partner program to stay on top of his game!

Blog Highlight: https://www.digitalmarketer.com/case-studies/case-study-agencies-that-make-it/

WHAT IS DIGITALMARKETER: DigitalMarketer is the premier online community for digital marketing professionals. It’s a place where you can learn how to market like a pro, connect with industry experts, and get the strategies and tools you need to grow and scale your business to new heights.

DigitalMarketer | Marketing Tools & Training

The post Ruben Aguirre, 8 Signal, Certified Partner Highlight [VIDEO] appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

With nearly 750 million users, LinkedIn is no different. 

But the good news is that there are a few really easy steps you can take to instantly stand out on LinkedIn.

And all of those steps happen on your LinkedIn profile.

In this video below, I break down 5 easy tips to instantly improve your LinkedIn profile.

By the way, hardly anyone is executing on these 5 tips, which means even more opportunities for you.

1. Optimize your headline. 

In my opinion, this is the most important part of your entire profile. Why? Because it’s the first thing people see (aside from your headshot) before they click your actual profile.

So if you don’t make it crystal clear in those first few words what you do, then you won’t entice people to click through to your actual profile. 

This is one of the first things I train sales teams on when it comes to optimizing their LinkedIn presence.

Here’s a slide from my Traffic & Conversion Summit presentation that shows you what NOT to do with your headline:

Don’t be like Mr. Smiley. Instead, use my headline to help you craft your own winning headline.

Watch the video above to discover the best way to craft a winning headline and a trick for how you can increase the character space limit so you can leverage more keywords. 

2. Add Your 10-Second Audio via the Name Pronunciation Tool

On LinkedIn mobile, you can add a 10-second audio note that introduces yourself. This was originally created for people to know how to pronounce your name. 

You can leverage it to humanize your profile even further by adding a friendly audio note for new profile visitors. 

3. Add your cover story video. 

Turn on Creator Mode then head to your profile on the LinkedIn mobile app and create your 20-second cover story video. Click on your profile photo where you will see an option to add a cover story video. 

This is a great opportunity to build trust by having people watch and listen to you. You can introduce yourself and your products/services and how you help people. 

Head to my profile and hover over my profile photo to watch mine and then check out the video above to learn more about this. 

4. Make your About section about THEM not a glorified resume about you. 

So many people get this wrong.

People want to know how you can help them. Period.

So don’t make your About section all about you and how fabulous you are. No one cares. Sure, people need to know that you are awesome, but you can accomplish that without talking solely about yourself. 

Instead, describe the value you provide to people and include stats and testimonials to help build your credibility. Then you can weave in why they should listen to you and your accolades to build trust. 

Use bullets and spaces to break up your About section and make it easy for people to read. You can see how I do this in my profile and use mine as a guide when optimizing yours. 

5. Add Featured Media

Adding featured media is one of the easiest ways to make your profile pop. You can include links to your website, case studies, videos, and your most popular LinkedIn posts. 

This is a great way to showcase your products/services and build your authority. Don’t forget to do this in your Experience sections as well.

There you have it – 5 super simple tips to instantly improve your LinkedIn profile.

Of course, there are a lot of other ways to optimize your profile which is exactly why I created the Ultimate LinkedIn Profile Checklist, available for instant download. Check it out and use it to optimize your profile so you can start generating endless sales and brand growth opportunities with LinkedIn. 

You are always free to borrow my profile concepts for your own profile, as long as you put your own unique spin on it. Follow me and pay attention to my profile structure plus my new profile updates. 

Now, go out and start optimizing your profile! 

Once you are finished, send me a message on LinkedIn and I’ll take a look at your beautiful new profile and give you feedback. 

Mandy McEwen

Mandy McEwen is a renowned LinkedIn consultant and Founder of Mod Girl Marketing. Named a top B2B marketer by LinkedIn, Mandy has helped thousands of businesses increase revenues online. She’s a dynamic speaker and mentor with 8 digital marketing courses, an Inc-rated Facebook group, and a LinkedIn Live show. Mandy and her team partner with enterprise sales and marketing teams to harness the power of LinkedIn and humanized marketing.

• Link
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Link

The post 5 Easy Tips to Instantly Improve Your LinkedIn Profile [VIDEO] appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

If you’re spending more time aimlessly scrolling your Facebook and Instagram feeds while neglecting LinkedIn, you’re leaving a ton of money on the table. 

LinkedIn was already a booming platform before 2020, but with the surge in the work-from-home environment we all found ourselves in due to the pandemic, LinkedIn usage has exploded.

What does this mean for you?

There has never been a better opportunity than right NOW to leverage the LinkedIn gold rush. But like anything, there will be a time where that gold will become scarce and hard to find. So don’t wait for that time. Start leveraging the power of this incredible platform right now. 

If you’re still not convinced that LinkedIn deserves more of your attention than Facebook or Instagram, here are 5 reasons to persuade you:

LinkedIn is 277% MORE Effective at Generating Leads than Facebook and Twitter

With 80% of all social media leads generated from LinkedIn, it’s no wonder that it’s been named the #1 preferred social media channel by 92% of marketers.

(Source: Hubspot)

LinkedIn has 61 Million Senior-Level Professionals, Otherwise Known as Decision-Makers. 

You won’t find any other platform with this many active decision-makers. And you certainly won’t find C-suite decision-makers using Instagram and Facebook as often as they use LinkedIn.  

Executives and business owners leverage LinkedIn to stay on top of the latest industry trends, network with industry peers, and increase their business opportunities. 

With that many decision-makers in one place, investing just 30 minutes a day can yield FAR greater results than spending 30 minutes on Facebook or Instagram.

(Source: Hootsuite)

LinkedIn is the Most Trusted Social Media Network in the U.S. 

73% of social media users at least somewhat agree that LinkedIn protects their privacy and data. Compare that to just 53% for Facebook.

You’re not going to find loads of toxic comments and politically heated conversations on LinkedIn. Sure, you’ll come across some of that, but it’s in very small doses, and it’s really easy to get rid of that type of content on your feed. Simply unfollow the person and/or hashtag. 

LinkedIn is full of positive uplifting people who inspire and encourage you. What you won’t find are the Facebook and Twitter trolls who love picking fights and spreading negativity. 

I don’t know about you, but I like to surround myself with genuine, smart, positive people. And that’s why I love LinkedIn. It’s FULL of incredible people who genuinely care about helping others and making a positive impact. 

I’ve met so many amazing people that I now call close friends. Plus, I’ve landed loads of business opportunities from LinkedIn. It’s the #1 most trusted social media channel in the U.S. for a reason. 

(Source: Hootsuite)

LinkedIn is the BEST Platform to Build Your Personal Brand. 

With only 1% of LinkedIn users actively posting on a weekly basis, the opportunity has never been bigger.

Here’s the deal, LinkedIn usage is exploding, but…

…Hardly anyone is posting consistently!

This means there is a MASSIVE opportunity for you to build your personal brand and become a thought leader on this platform. People crave valuable content. They want it, but few are giving it to them. So give the people what they want!

Your LinkedIn profile is the home of your personal brand. Your content, engagement, and relationship building activities  attract people to your profile. Then, your beautifully optimized profile does the heavy lifting. 

For a quick and efficient way to optimize your LinkedIn profile, leverage my LinkedIn profile checklist. 

(Source: Kinsta)

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a Laser-Targeted Sales Prospecting Tool. 

You won’t find anything like Sales Navigator on Facebook or Instagram. 

That’s because those networks were never designed for business professionals FIRST.

LinkedIn, with its business-first model, has an incredibly efficient sales prospecting tool, Sales Navigator. In my opinion, this is one of LinkedIn’s best assets. I love it so much that I now train sales teams on how to maximize everything it has to offer. 

Affiliate Disclaimer: I am an affiliate of Sales Navigator and have a special 60-day free trial link. If you invest in Sales Navigator after the 60-day trial, I will get a small commission. 

If you’re targeting B2B companies you MUST leverage Sales Navigator. This is the best platform to find and build relationships with your dream prospects and Sales Navigator helps you find those targeted connections you are looking for. 

Have I convinced you yet? 

One can only hope… But, either way, I want to challenge you: 

Take those 5 minutes today that you spend on Instagram and instead click on that dusty LinkedIn icon. Peruse the content and leave at least 2 meaningful comments on posts you like.

Then, if you really want to see the power of LinkedIn, leave 5 comments on posts every day for 1 week straight. 

These are just a few of the many ways you can maximize the power of LinkedIn. I’ll be sharing even more tips and tricks soon, so stay tuned!

In the meantime, follow me on LinkedIn to get my newest LinkedIn tips. 

The post 5 Reasons LinkedIn Deserves Your Attention Over Facebook or Instagram appeared first on DigitalMarketer.