The Ultimate LinkedIn Marketing Guidelines & Best Practices

What is LinkedIn Marketing?

LinkedIn marketing is the process of using LinkedIn to connect with potential customers and grow your business. LinkedIn provides a number of tools and features that can be used to reach your target audience, generate leads, and close deals.

Here are the main tools and features that you can use to improve your LinkedIn Lead Generation :

• LinkedIn Profile
• LinkedIn Posts
• LinkedIn Messaging
• LinkedIn Business Page
• LinkedIn Premium
• LinkedIn Ads
• Etc…

Whether you’re using one or several tools from this list, a good LinkedIn Marketer should consider using them together to get the most out of it. We’ll talk about LinkedIn Strategies later in this post.

What is the purpose of LinkedIn marketing?

Basically, the main purpose of a LinkedIn marketing strategy is to build relationships with potential customers to help you grow your business. As we mentioned in the previous paragraph, LinkedIn provides a number of tools that can be used to reach your target audience, generate leads, and close deals.

Some of the main goals that you can achieve with LinkedIn marketing include:

• Generating leads ;
• Building brand awareness ;
• Converting leads into customers ;
• Developing thought leadership ;
• Nurturing relationships ;
• etc…

By nature, LinkedIn is specific to B2B businesses and should be used by this target as the main sales vector.

This should be part of your B2B marketing strategy on LinkedIn.

As you’ll see later in this post, there are many ways to get B2B leads and generate new customers with only a few hacks and money investments, and that’s what we’re doing at LaGrowthMachine.

How to do LinkedIn Marketing Properly?

Now that we’ve answered the questions of what and why, let’s take a look at how you can use this platform to achieve your marketing goals.

For the most part, if you wish to launch some marketing efforts on LinkedIn’s platform, you’ll need to focus on several points.

That’s what we’re describing in the list below :

1) Optimize your LinkedIn profile

2) Create your LinkedIn Company Page

3) Set up a Posting Strategy

4) Connect with your community

5) Use LinkedIn ads

6) Try LinkedIn Premium

You can choose to ignore some of these recommendations, but at LaGrowthMachine, we strongly advise you to follow them all and by priority, from the most basic to the most specific.

If you’re a small business or a startup, let us reassure you: the main part of these recommendations can be applied without spending any money but human time. If you’re specialized in a B2B topic, you should definitely consider them!

Let’s go through these LinkedIn Marketing Strategies one by one explaining their advantages and how to do it the way we think is the most efficient.

Step 1: Optimize your LinkedIn profile

This is the very first and basic thing you want to deal with before doing anything else on the platform.

You can have the best content in the world, but if your LinkedIn profile is not up to par, you’re not going to get the results you want!

Here’s a checklist of a few things you need to do to optimize your profile:

• Use a professional headshot as your profile picture: at LaGrowthMachine, we’re observing that the profile that performs the best in their LinkedIn sales campaigns are the ones with smiling, sympathetic but pro, and confident faces.
• Use a professional LinkedIn Banner: a nice banner is a great way to communicate about something. For example, at LaGrowthMachine, we’ve been creating brand LinkedIn banners so people can identify and make the link between the profile of one of our teammates and LaGrowthMachine.

• Write a catchy headline that accurately describes what you do: focus on one clear and catchy sentence as people on LinkedIn can have an idea of your profile in one second.
• Use keywords throughout your profile so you show up in LinkedIn search results: just like you, people are now using automation tools to target you. If you want to be well-targeted and be in contact with the people you want to, you should definitely take care of the keywords in your profile!
• Make sure your contact information is up to date and complete: this is the best way to show people what you are doing, but also that you’re serious enough to keep things up to date.
• Add a call-to-action to your profile: something like a phrase to engage in conversation, a link to your company page if you want people to discover your business, etc…
• Use rich media to make your profile more engaging: videos, images, reports, … you can link to your profile all the resources you want to to make it more attractive! Here’s a source if you want to know more about LinkedIn Rich Media.

Step 2: Create your Linkedin Company Page

If you’re running a B2B business, you should definitely start to create a LinkedIn company page by following our guide step by step.

A LinkedIn company page will give you many advantages such as :

• The ability to share interesting content with a large audience ;
• Company pages give you the option to target LinkedIn users with your content through LinkedIn ads ;
• A platform to showcase your company’s products or services ;
• A place to post job openings and attract top talent ;
• The ability to get more data about your followers (LinkedIn Analytics), the attractiveness of your posts, etc… ;
• And much more!

Creating a company page on Linkedin is totally free. At LaGrowthMachine, we’re currently getting more than 2000+ followers (=prospects) working in B2B. Each time we’re making a post, we’re getting reach, engagement, and new B2B leads, without spending a penny. Best ROI ever.

Step 3: Set up a Posting Strategy

Now that you set up the basics, you should start thinking about how you’re going to get more and more people in contact with your product or service. The best way to handle it is by setting up a great posting strategy.

As you may know, the LinkedIn algorithm is working like that: the more people interact with your posts or LinkedIn articles, the more you’ll be able to reach more people in your next posts. To embrace it, the most well-known LinkedIn strategy is to make content marketing to get more and more website visitors and achieve your marketing goals.

How does this work? Let’s find out now!

If you’re not a good writer, this is not necessarily a problem as you can hire someone to write for you! If not, well… save some time during the week and practice!

This being said, if you want to do it yourself, here are some tips on how to do it :

• The first sentence is the most important part: make it short (preferably between 6 and 12 words), catchy and accurate. People need to be teased!
• Use an image or a video to illustrate your post(or along with you’re article if you’re using Linkedin Pulse) as people are more likely to stop and watch them ;
• Define what’s in it for your reader: every single post should offer something of value to the reader, so make sure you’re clear about it whether it’s a tip, news, or something that occurred in your very specific sector, …
• Make it easy to read and navigate: use single sentences, go back to the line very often, integrate bullet points, emojis, and short paragraphs ;
• Proofread your article before posting it!

Once you’ve written your article, it’s time to post it on LinkedIn. Here are some tips on how to get the most out of your post :

• Schedule your posts at the best time: depending on your target audience, find when they’re the most active on LinkedIn and schedule your post for that time. There are several tools you can use for that such as Hootsuite.
• Use hashtags: this will help you reach a larger audience as people will be able to find your post more easily ;
• Tag other users or companies in your post: if you mention someone or a company in your post, tag them! They’ll be notified and might share your post with their followers if they find it relevant. This is a great way to develop your engagement (therefore, your reach).

Step 4: Connect with your community

Besides setting up a nice posting strategy, they are many ways to develop and connect with your community on the social network… which is an effective technique to get more leads!

The 3 most common are :

• Joining groups related to your sector: participating in discussions is a great way to reach new people. You can also share your content with the group (as long as it’s relevant, of course), but make sure you’re not spamming or you’ll get kicked out quickly! You can also create your own LinkedIn group to enrich your network.
• Connecting with LinkedIn influencers in your sector: if you can collaborate with some of them, that would be amazing. But even if you can’t, try to engage with their content by liking, commenting, or sharing it. You never know, they might do the same with yours!
• Going live on LinkedIn: this is a relatively new feature and not a lot of people are using it yet… which makes it a great opportunity to improve your LinkedIn presence! In fact, LinkedIn live is a great way to connect with your community, answer their questions, and show them that there’s a real person behind your company!

Step 5: Use paid ads on LinkedIn

This is the moment people starting up their activities or ROI lovers will freak out… whereas there’s no point to.

Paid ads are, of course, not free… But they can be really effective in terms of ROI if you’re targeting the right audience.

There are different types of ads you can use on LinkedIn :

• Sponsored content: this is basically a post that you’re paying to make sure more people see it. You can target people based on their job title, sector, location, …
• Text ads: these are the classic ads you see on most websites. They usually appear in the right-hand column of LinkedIn and can be a great way to drive traffic to your website or landing pages.
• Video ads: as we’ve seen before, videos are a great way to capture people’s attention. LinkedIn video ads are no exception! You can use them to promote your brand, your products, or your services in a creative and engaging way.
• And more…

If you don’t know how to deal with LinkedIn Ads, we strongly advise you to hire a consultant that will help you with that, as ads on LinkedIn may get very expensive and not so effective, if you’re setting up things badly!

If you really want to invest in LinkedIn Outbound, at LaGrowthMachine, we prefer a much better way to do it, and that’s what we’re going to see right now.

Step 6: Try LinkedIn Premium

There are several LinkedIn plans: LinkedIn Recruiter, LinkedIn Business, …

But if you want to do great B2B prospecting and really improve your lead generation, the LinkedIn Premium pack that will interest you the most is Linkedin Sales Navigator.

In fact, at LaGrowthMachine, we always advise our clients to get it before anything else. Why is that?

Let’s see its main advantages :

1) More accurate lead research: with Sales Navigator, you have access to a lot more data that can help you target your prospects more accurately. For example, you can filter people by their job title, seniority, location, etc. with much more criteria than the free version of LinkedIn. Like… really much more.

This means you’re less likely to waste your time contacting people who are not interested in what you’re selling!

2) Lead recommendations: every day, Sales Navigator gives you a list of leads that match your criteria. This is a great way to make sure you’re always focusing on the most relevant prospects.

3) InMail credits: InMail is a direct messaging feature on LinkedIn that allows you to contact anyone, even if you’re not connected with them. With Sales Navigator, you get 20 InMail credits per month, which is a great way to reach out to your target audience.

4) Export feature: this is the very feature that we wanted to talk to you about in this article. If you’re doing B2B prospecting, you’re going to love it.

LinkedIn Marketing Best Workflow with LaGrowthMachine

The fact that you can create lists of very specific leads with the massive database of LinkedIn is already mad.

But the best workflow is to couple it with an automation tool such as LaGrowthMachine: with the export feature, you can get an excel file with several data about your leads.

The next part, now, will be to import your file into LaGrowthMachine. To do so, no need to export the file from Sales Navigator as you can just import your leads directly from Linkedin.

Our tool will automatically enrich your data: this means that you go from about 5 – 7 to up to 28 columns, on each one of your leads. Of course, this additional data will be a great help for your pitches & client relationship, but that’s not the main point.

With the data we collected, you’ll be able to set up a multichannel B2B sales prospecting campaign with very natural and specific messages, using our variables system.

That way, you just have to click a few times to send thousands of messages to very qualified leads, on many channels (Email, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc…). And save a ton of time, and money, by getting more leads than ever.

Conclusion

In this article, we’ve seen that LinkedIn is a powerful tool to improve your lead generation, but you need to know how to use it.

As for outbound prospecting on social media, the best way to use LinkedIn for B2B prospecting is to couple it with a tool such as LaGrowthMachine.

With our tool, you can get very targeted leads and reach out to them on multiple channels, using our advanced variables system that allows you to send very natural messages.

I hope this article was helpful for you. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out.

And if you want to try our tool, feel free to sign up for a free trial! We would be more than happy to show you how LaGrowthMachine could help your business grow!