Big brands like Apple and Amazon recognize the value of having a social media presence. Social media, when used effectively, is a great platform to reach and engage with your target audience. But, over time, social media has become increasingly crowded with brands vying for consumers’ attention.
So, what’s the solution? A social media marketing strategy.
For businesses looking to stand out from their competition, a social media marketing strategy will give them that competitive edge. It will help them focus on their ideal customer, choose the right social platforms to invest in, and refine their content.
For B2B brands, in particular, LinkedIn is a valuable social platform for generating leads, recruiting (and retaining) employees, building brand awareness, and establishing a brand as an expert in its industry.
To effectively use LinkedIn, your brand needs a LinkedIn social media marketing strategy. Social media marketing needs to be tailored not only for your target audience and your company goals, but for each social platform (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, X). Here’s where a LinkedIn strategy can help.
In this article, we will share a LinkedIn B2B content strategy plus a LinkedIn strategy for B2B lead generation. We’ll also explain how employee advocacy can help strengthen your social media marketing efforts on LinkedIn.
Ready? Let’s start first with how to create and distribute content on LinkedIn.
Content for LinkedIn
A LinkedIn content strategy will help you effectively create and distribute content. Before you start creating content for LinkedIn, you need to determine:
- What Are Your Goals: Will you be generating new leads, increasing engagement, recruiting new employees, building thought leadership, etc.?
- What Is Your Brand Voice: Will your brand voice be educational, friendly, humorous, etc.?
- Who Are You Targeting: Will you be targeting decision-makers in specific roles, industries, and locations?
Next, you want to create your content marketing LinkedIn strategy. Follow these five steps: 
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Research Your Audience. Now that you know who you’re targeting, research your audience and create your ideal persona. This will help you know what kind of content to create that will engage your audience.
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Determine Content Types. Select the types of content that you will create for your target audience. For example, popular forms of LinkedIn content are brief videos, text with image posts, articles, carousels, newsletters, etc.
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Make a LinkedIn Content Calendar. Use your content calendar as a roadmap to plan out and schedule your content. You can break it down by week, month, quarter, and year.
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Create a Content Marketing Workflow. Determine who will create, edit, and post content. Employee advocacy on LinkedIn can help encourage employees and partners to promote and distribute your content. Content marketing on LinkedIn, with employees as the conduit, is a really powerful way to build relationships, generate brand awareness, and increase your overall marketing results.
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Track Your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Measure your LinkedIn engagement to see what’s working and what isn’t, then adjust as needed. Common KPIs for B2B marketing on LinkedIn are impressions, views, clicks, subscribers, and leads captured.
Now you’re ready to create your content!
How To Use LinkedIn for Brand Awareness
Sharing and engaging with content on LinkedIn is a powerful tactic for growing brand awareness. LinkedIn’s platform offers brands several options for content sharing and engagement such as LinkedIn pages, LinkedIn groups, and sponsored content.
- LinkedIn Pages. Your LinkedIn page is the perfect platform to feature content that builds trust and increases brand visibility. Consider sharing whitepapers, e-books, case studies, how-to content, and industry relevant articles.
- LinkedIn Groups. Joining groups relevant to your industry is a great way to engage with others and grow your network. Err on the side of caution when it comes to self-promotion. Keep your content focused on industry-related news and issues.
- Sponsored Content. A brand awareness campaign featuring sponsored content like videos is a great way to capture your target audience’s attention and increase brand awareness. (We’ll dive more into LinkedIn Ads in the next section.)
These are just a few examples of how you can use LinkedIn’s platform to grow brand awareness. Now let’s explore how to use LinkedIn for B2B lead generation.
How To Use LinkedIn for B2B Lead Generation
LinkedIn B2B lead generation is the process of using LinkedIn to identify, engage with, and nurture potential customers. For B2B marketers, LinkedIn is the ideal social platform for finding people and targeting ads by location, demographics, job title, groups, and interests, just to name a few. It can help your brand connect with the right prospects and convert them into sales.
In fact, a robust LinkedIn social media strategy can positively impact your brand’s lead generation.
Let’s explore how to use LinkedIn for B2B lead generation.
How To Generate Leads on LinkedIn
How to get leads from LinkedIn doesn’t need to be complicated. B2B leads can be generated on LinkedIn for free with organic lead generation (e.g., sharing articles, blog posts) and through paid promotion.
Here are a few ways to generate leads via LinkedIn specific products:
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator. This powerful tool helps you to generate leads on LinkedIn by enabling you to build targeted lead lists of prospects and messaging them directly.
- LinkedIn Ads. LinkedIn offers a variety of paid ads including sponsored content, message ads, dynamic ads, text ads, spotlight ads, and more. LinkedIn Ads can be particularly powerful when you leverage retargeting, match audiences from other campaigns (like ABM), or even to help discover new audiences with attributes just like those who are your top-tier clients.
- LinkedIn Lead Generation Ad Form. Gather leads by placing a free lead generation form on your company’s LinkedIn page. To make the process easier, LinkedIn offers a guide to its lead generation form specifications including the number of characters for each field.
- LinkedIn Lead Generation Tools. Take advantage of LinkedIn’s tools housed within its platform. These tools include advanced filters to help you narrow your target audience search, a personalized message feature to send warm messages to potential leads, and InMail to send messages directly to other LinkedIn members.
Example of a LinkedIn Lead Gen Form in a Promoted Post by RevenueBase.
Now let’s take a look at how implementing an employee advocacy strategy can level up your LinkedIn social media strategy.
Employee Advocacy on LinkedIn
Employee advocacy on LinkedIn is when your employees expose their social networks to your brand’s messages. They can do this by either engaging with content published by your brand, or creating their own content that aligns with your employer branding on LinkedIn.
When implemented correctly, employee advocacy can amplify your LinkedIn social media marketing efforts by increasing the distribution and reach of your content. But, that’s not all…
Let’s take a look at some additional benefits of employee advocacy.
Employee Advocacy LinkedIn Benefits
There are benefits to using employee advocacy to supplement your LinkedIn social media strategy. In addition to improved brand awareness, a strong employee advocacy program can:
- Increase LinkedIn Employee Engagement. It isn’t easy getting employee buy-in for employee advocacy. Fortunately, an employee advocacy program (and platform) can streamline the process, making it easier and more time-efficient for employees to participate; thus, increasing employee engagement on LinkedIn.
- Transform Employees Into Subject Matter Experts. As employee engagement increases, your target audience on LinkedIn will view your employees as thought leaders, which builds trust and boosts your credibility as a brand.
- Boost Brand Reach. With every employee post engagement (share, like, comment), you will multiply the organic reach that post receives by the number of employees that engage.
- Attract the LinkedIn Algorithm’s Attention. When the LinkedIn algorithm sees people engaging with posts, it will assume that the content is high quality and increase its reach even further. Plus, people want to hear from people, not brands, and LinkedIn often rewards that sentiment with people having better LinkedIn engagement than brand handles.
Source: LinkedIn
So, how do you reap the rewards of employee advocacy? In addition to a strong employee advocacy strategy, you also need an employee advocacy tool.
Employee Advocacy Tool
As previously mentioned, it isn’t easy getting employee buy-in for employee advocacy. Many employees simply don’t know what to write, or even have the time to create high-quality content. However, using an employee advocacy tool like GaggleAMP can help.
Our employee advocacy program GaggleAMP allows you to assign engagement activities to employees at scale. To ensure consistency and save time, you can use the AI-powered paraphraser to submit unique, pre-written text to your employees. All employees need to do is log in to their ‘Things to Do’ dashboard and engage with the activities already curated for them.
By reducing the time and effort that manual employee advocacy programs typically require, you’ll increase your employee engagement rates, which in turn, will strengthen your LinkedIn social media strategy. Plus, when a tool is easy to use, people are more likely to continue using it, making your employee advocacy efforts with GaggleAMP a win-win.
Ready To Amplify Your LinkedIn Social Media Strategy?
If you’re ready to give your LinkedIn social media strategy a boost, let us help. GaggleAMP makes it easy to transform your employees into brand advocates and engage with content. To see the platform in action, schedule a demo today!
