Today, over 90% of all organizations market with content. Among them, over 91% of all B2B marketers and 86% of all B2C marketers use content marketing. But what makes it so valuable for businesses today? Besides generating leads and increasing sales and revenue, content marketing can also help you establish trust, build authority, improve traffic and help understand your audience better.
Now, let’s understand why and how platforms like LinkedIn can help you generate quality leads through content marketing.
Benefits of LinkedIn Content Marketing for Lead Generation
LinkedIn is the strongest social networking platform to market to business professionals and achieve organic results. Over 93% of content marketers use LinkedIn for their social marketing strategies. It houses many C-suite executives, decision-makers, and senior-level professionals.
That makes the platform the go-to channel for marketers to access this otherwise hard-to-reach audience segment. Here are some reasons why content marketing on LinkedIn is effective for lead generation:
Wide Reach
This platform has over 830 million members in 200 countries and regions worldwide. This means that by posting an ad on LinkedIn, you can reach over 14.6% of the world’s population and cater to a specifically business-focused market segment and their first-degree connections!
Hence, with almost no additional marketing, you can open your content to an entirely new audience and expand your potential customer base. Moreover, LinkedIn is available in over 25 languages. Thus, you can localize your content in these languages and cater to a more diverse audience.
Professional Channel
For marketers, it is challenging to reach the right people and reach them in the right context. For instance, people don’t seek professional content while scrolling through their personal social media feeds. But on LinkedIn, the prominent reason why people log in is to discover professional content.
This makes the platform superior for reaching decision-makers and buyers in a relevant manner. No wonder over 80% of B2B marketing leads that come from social media come through this platform.
Versatile Content
LinkedIn allows you to incorporate various content styles for your marketing. You can include material like text, images, video, infographics, and much more. As per statistics, LinkedIn posts with images get twice higher engagement.
Businesses get seven times more reactions and 24 times more comments on their LinkedIn live streams than regular video posts. It shows the platform’s impressively high interaction and engagement levels on the content.
Shreya Prakash, the CEO & founder of flexibees, opines:
We use LinkedIn as the main social media platform for generating demand for our company. As a B2B company, it gives us the best reach and tools both for branding and generating leads. We have a well-oiled content calendar running, that we optimize for LinkedIn to ensure we are playing to the platform’s strengths. We also monitor analytics to input into formats, for example when LinkedIn shows to favor a particular format over others, we add a mix of that format into our content.
LinkedIn Advertising
If you are looking to drive lead gen and pay for it, then what could be a better place than LinkedIn, the largest community of professionals. There are a variety of LinkedIn ad types and formats to add to your arsenal. Some of them are sponsored content, text ads, sponsored InMail, display ads, and dynamic ads.
LinkedIn ad costs are not fixed and depend on your bids and budget. LinkedIn, however, expects a minimum spend per campaign and the exact cost depends on your target audience.
Playbook for Effective Lead Generation: Best Practices
Producing bulk content is not the ideal mantra for LinkedIn success. You need a plan and need to execute it efficiently to reach a wider audience, boost conversions and improve ROI. It can help you improve your search ratings. A good content strategy helps define what you are trying to achieve and then measure the success of your efforts and determine what worked and what can be improved.
So, let’s look at a few best practices and tips for LinkedIn content marketing that works-
Well-defined goal
First things first. To reach a goal, you need a goal. Determine what exactly you are trying to achieve? It could be improving brand awareness, nurturing leads, building trust, or more.
Purpose-driven marketing is the first step to identifying the “what,” “why,” and “how” for your brand. This purpose will give the required direction to your content strategy.
Relevant
This begins with understanding your target audience and creating buyer personas. Identity what format, style, and tone of content they engage with. Is it a visual post or a poll that works for your audience?
Zero down on the keywords with the good search volume, less competition, and the right intent. Use tools like Google Analytics to determine finer details like audience demographics. Only then will you be able to create relevant, value-driven content.
Actionable
If your content targets the customer’s pain point, earns their trust, gives them a reason to engage, and provides valuable takeaways, they are more likely to take the intended action. But make sure to keep the action clear and straightforward.
Adding a CTA will come easily once you’ve set your goals clearly. For instance, if your goal is to reach a wider audience, your content should nudge them to share the content.
Cadence
Keep your audience’s attention by producing content consistently. Create a publishing calendar to meet your goals. The motive is to share the right content at the right time and map it to the right stage of their buyer’s journey.
You need to work to refine and up your content strategy continuously. Engaging your audience and replying regularly is important to create a loyal and wide audience.
Metrics
To understand how well your content is performing, you need to measure it. Depending on your business goals, you can define the metrics you want to analyze. Measure traffic, shares, and engagement to start. But don’t run after vanity metrics like the number of followers. Instead, you should be looking for the quality of those followers and likes to be able to determine the true success of your content marketing efforts.
Customer Journey Mapping
It is important to understand your customer’s journey and map content for each stage of your marketing funnel. For instance, to create content for your audience at the awareness stage, explain WHO you are, WHY they should engage with your content, and build trust and recognition with it. Leverage organic and paid channels and create content for newsfeed, video ads, articles, and more.
Check out this Airtable LinkedIn ad to drive awareness. It shares product USP well while giving away something for free.
Bonus: Free Download
There are four most effective ways to help you create quality content on LinkedIn that effectively generates leads and strengthens your online presence. Click on the link below and download the eBook to understand how to create engaging content for LinkedIn marketing.
To find out more about the importance of content marketing and its effective strategies, contact the best sales consulting company in Bangalore.
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