The Easy 7 Step LinkedIn Content Strategy

The LinkedIn profile is about leadership, positioning you as an authority in your niche and becoming a thought leader. While the LinkedIn page is positioning your business as a brand leader.

LinkedIn users are starting to understand the value in this kind of positioning, attracting the right audience which result in generating inbound leads and sales opportunities.

Unfortunately, however, the minute they start to focus on content, they jump straight back their products or services, creating salesy, spammy kind of post updates. What they don’t realize is that they undo all the hard work in optimizing and preparing their profiles and pages, for ‘ready-to-buy’ leads.

A well-prepared LinkedIn content strategy will solve this!

People buy from people, people they know, like and trust. Your content should position yourself as a thought leader. To achieve this introducing yourself and your business as a brand. Tell your target audience who you and your brand are and what is your value statement.

An effective LinkedIn content strategy includes a detailed layout of how you are you going to achieve this. Here are six foundational elements to you should include in your LinkedIn content strategy:

Goals

Define clearly what you aim to achieve. You can't measure that which you can't manage, and you can't manage that which you can't measure. An example could be to focus on attracting your ideal client and creating earned leads that you will convert into owned leads. Your main purpose for content creation and publishing on LinkedIn should be to earn a lead that you can invite to an offline conversation. To achieve this your content should focus on three steps awareness, consideration and decision. Other goals options could include brand awareness, social engagement, traffic to your profile and page, gain email subscribers, a positive ROI, etc

Audience

The content you write and publish is not for your benefit but rather for that of your LinkedIn audience. Using the ‘right words’ is key. If I walk into a food market, I expect to hear words like tomato and potato. Therefore, use the words in your content that your audience are familiar with and would expect to. This includes words specific to the industries you are targeting. The size of the companies also needs consideration as for larger companies you need to publish for specific roles. Include in your planning when addressing the audience, you write for their specific problems or solution they will want to see, as well as their location. Analysing their behaviour such as who do they follow, what posts do they like, share and comment could be a huge time saver.

Competitors

Do a deep dive and also analyse the content of your competitors. Go and have a look and see what it is that they do. What you want to focus on is what is the content types that they do? Do they more do more video, or more text posts? What are the topics that they focus on? What media choices do they use? You want to see what they are not doing also. Look at their frequency of their posts, and the topics that they cover. Analyse their results especially the posts views and engagement. List the areas your field they did not cover but should have?

LinkedIn Funnel vs the Buyers' Journey

Plan how you will move your connections through the LinkedIn funnel (profile, page and group) while considering each step of the buyers’ journey (awareness, consideration and decision). Consider the ‘decision step’ in the buyers’ journey as an example, when you receive a comment on a post to which you respond and a conversation starts to form where your connections ask questions, you can know that they are in the decision phase. If they are still a connection and have not yet followed you page best action will be an invitation for an offline conversation, However, when a connection does not engage with your posts the awareness phase and best action will be to engage via messaging and introduce them to your posts that could be most relevant to them. You still need to build that relationship if they if they start liking things like your offers. Considering the LinkedIn funnel in relation to the buyers’ journey is very helpful so that you can measure the performance of your content for each step in the LinkedIn funnel and implement improvements.

Content Categories

Hashtags are used on the Internet to categorize content for purposes of finding the most relevant quickly. Categorizing your content is more than the allocations of hashtags. These are categories you need to design in such a way that you can measure and see what categories create the most interest, the most engagement and yield the best results for you. Consider including categories like entertainment, inspiration, education, conversation, connection and promotion.

Metrics, Analyse and Report

How you are going to measure and report on the progress and success of your content strategy. As a guidance you need to measure the results in relations to the goals including the categories, as follow:

a.     Brand Awareness: new sessions, session length, social shares, social engagement, social media brand mentions, and brand sentiment

b.     Revenue Generation: conversion rates, sales qualified leads, organic search traffic, return visitor rate, and content requests

c.     Customer Loyalty: growth in return visitors, email subscribers, social following, and average pieces of content read per each visitor

Use a Content Strategy Planner

Defining your content strategy is a lot easier when you map your entire content strategy in a content strategy planner. In this way you can include all the steps discussed in this article plus write your content months ahead of time also considering the other areas of your business strategy such budget, marketing focus, events and so on.