How to Build a Powerful LinkedIn Content Strategy

LinkedIn is a massive platform that gives you access to a wealth of opportunities. As such, it can help you establish yourself as an expert in your field, attract customers, and build lasting relationships with peers, industry experts, and customers alike.  

However, simply being on the platform is not enough. To get the benefits that LinkedIn offers, you’ll need to create content that generates awareness about who you are, what you do, and what value you offer. It’s here that an effective LinkedIn content strategy is invaluable. 

In this post, we’ll look at how you can create a LinkedIn content strategy to grow your presence.  

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Why You Can’t Go Random on LinkedIn and Need a Powerful Content Strategy

While many people see LinkedIn as a social media platform, it’s much more than that. In fact, LinkedIn offers several marketing opportunities you won’t find on other social media platforms. An effective content strategy opens your door to these new opportunities:

• Massive exposure. LinkedIn has over 800 million users globally, with about 250 million of them active every month. When you use LinkedIn as a marketing tool, you’ll have exposure to a huge audience which, in turn, allows you to generate more leads or opportunities. 
• More reach. Exposure is only one part of the puzzle, though. You also have to increase your reach to connect with existing and attract new customers. You can’t do it without content. 
• LinkedIn provides access to decision-makers. Because LinkedIn is more of a professional networking rather than a social media site, around 10% of its user base are decision-makers. Good content will convince the people with influence that they should trust you and your offer.
• Networking opportunities. LinkedIn provides a wealth of networking opportunities through people who follow or connect with you on the platform. The content you post influences how many people do this. In turn, this allows you to grow your network and build valuable relationships. 
• Increased traffic to your website. Your content on LinkedIn is also an effective tool to drive traffic to your website. There, your audience can learn more about you and what you do.
• Ability to become a thought leader. Finally, an effective content strategy also allows you to establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry. When you do, you’ll build authority and trust among your audience. 

Ultimately, an effective LinkedIn content strategy allows you to reach your audience, build valuable relationships, and grow your business. 

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The Building Blocks of a LinkedIn Content Strategy that Works

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was a powerful LinkedIn content strategy. With so many specifics related to your audience and the way you want to present yourself (or your business) on LinkedIn, you’ll need to make it your own. However, there are content strategy blocks you can use for guidance.

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Step One: Outline Your Goals

The first step in building your LinkedIn content strategy is to outline your goals; decide what you want to achieve with the strategy.

Your goals will give you something to work towards and keep you focused. Secondly, goals give you metrics to track your progress against. Finally, your goals will, to a large extent, shape the type of content you’ll use to reach your audience. 

With this in mind, your goals can be anything, including:

• Introducing your business to and attracting more customers. 
• Generating brand awareness in front of prospective customers and industry professionals. 
• Building valuable relationships and trust with your audience.
• Generating more leads for your business. 
• Attracting the best talent to your business.

These are just some examples, and there are many others. However, no matter what your goals are, it’s essential that they’re SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Based. 

Using the SMART framework keeps your goals attainable and your progress trackable.

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Step Two: Identify Your Audience

Determine who you want to attract with your content and what topics they’ll be interested in. So, you’ll need to consider your audience’s demographics, their interests, and what content typically resonates with them. Another important component is to understand your audience’s needs and challenges.

Look into what your competitors are doing and how well their content resonates with your shared audience. Learn what to do from the best competitors and learn what not to do from those who don’t see good results.

We always recommend talking to your audience, too. Create a mini focus group and validate your content ideas. 

Always try to be as specific as possible with your topics. While marketers do like content about general marketing strategy, they can get it anywhere else. What is something only you can share?

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Step Three: Decide Your LinkedIn Content Types

This stage helps you build a bridge between your goals and your audience. While you can experiment with different content types, we’ve identified the following content types as the most effective:

• Interactive content that encourages your audience to like, share or comment.

• Sharing information about your employees or business milestones you’ve reached. The startup community has been swearing by the idea of building in public for years, and there is a special appeal to it. Your audience doesn’t just hear what you do - you show them how you do it. It builds trust.

• Video content is increasingly popular across all social media platforms, and LinkedIn is no exception. There’s nothing like seeing an actual person elaborate on their experiences as a way of sharing helpful takeaways. Similarly, video content is easy to consume and doesn’t require intense focus in the era of short attention spans.
• Thought leadership articles that highlight your skills, knowledge, and expertise in a particular business or industry. And people love reading, commenting on, and sharing industry-specific content. 

• When people are looking for a business to partner with, they often have a problem they’d like to solve. As such, you can also create content that helps them solve these problems or that offers advice based on your experiences.

One of the most effective types of LinkedIn content, though, is storytelling. LinkedIn is a professional network, but its users are still people who love stories, from rooting for the underdog to seeing them win at the end of the day. They relate to the experiences shared with them.

At its core, storytelling gives your content a human touch. In other words, it helps your audience understand who you are, what you value (82% of consumers want your brand to share their values), and what you stand for.

When you add that human touch to your content, you’ll give your audience something to care about. And when you do, you’ll create an emotional connection with your customers. 

You’ll be someone whose story they remember, so your story also helps to create a strong brand personality that helps your audience relate to you and makes you stand out in the crowd.

You won’t be another nameless face in the LinkedIn feed sea.

No matter what you do - put yourself forward by using your personal profile over a company page, share your experiences, and tell your story. It will have a longer-lasting impression on your audience, driving more engagement and revenue.

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Step Four: Deliver Your Content

How will you deliver your content to your audience? You have a few options:

• Posts. Use LinkedIn posts to share short-form content. These posts are ideal for short highlights about your products, services, business or linking to external blog posts on your website. They’re great for sharing daily tidbits and anecdotes. To make sure your posts stand out, you should use ensure that the most important part of your post is in the first paragraph. Adapt your formatting to shorter paragraphs, and don’t forget to tell a story.
• LinkedIn Articles. When you want to create longer-form content and provide more information than you can in a typical post, LinkedIn allows you to publish articles directly on your LinkedIn page. These articles are ideal if you would like to create content that provides advice, gives your audience the information they need to solve a problem, or if you want to share thought leadership content on LinkedIn. For example, you could share a case study with vital takeaways.
• Newsletters. You can also turn your articles into LinkedIn newsletters. When your audience subscribes to your newsletter, they will receive a notification every time you publish new content. They can then also comment or react to it. This helps you to increase engagement on your content, which, in turn, increases your reach. You will definitely need great content to get newsletter subscribers, so apply the best storytelling practices and create a content plan in advance.

• Documents. When creating content on LinkedIn, you also have the ability to share PDF documents that your audience can scroll through or download. This is ideal if you want to share more complex content that highlights or explains the key aspect of a complicated concept or if you want to provide a step-by-step guide. Typically, we use it for whitepapers and reports that summarize proprietary research findings audiences can’t find anywhere else.
• Video. Finally, as mentioned earlier, video content is highly engaging. As such, video might be a good choice when you want to reach a larger audience. Fortunately, LinkedIn allows you to publish videos on the platform natively.

In addition to these content delivery strategies, you should also consider supplementing your own content with curated content created by others. This means you’ll find engaging content on LinkedIn and share it with your audience, along with a brief commentary on why you found this post valuable. Aim to add value whenever possible instead of blankly sharing. 

The benefit of using curated content in your LinkedIn content strategy is that you can keep your audience engaged without necessarily as much time and effort. Sometimes, it provides content when it’s simply not possible for you to produce new content.

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Step Five: Be Consistent

Any successful LinkedIn content strategy requires momentum. In other words, to achieve the best results with your content, you’ll need to be consistent. 

When you are, you’ll create more awareness, have greater exposure, and grow your audience. In addition, by posting content regularly, you’ll build trust with your audience and establish yourself as an expert in your industry.

An effective strategy to ensure consistency is to plan and create content in advance. You can always schedule your LinkedIn content with tools like Inlytics.io to maintain a regular cadence without setting the alarm.

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Step Six: Measure and Improve

Finally, once you’ve worked through all the steps above and you’re publishing content on LinkedIn, it’s crucial that you measure your LinkedIn content’s performance. This gives you a wealth of insights that can help you improve your content strategy even further.

For example, you’ll see what content resonates most with your audience, the demographic of your audience, how engaging your content is, and so much more.

Combined, this shows you what’s working, what’s not, and where you can make improvements. 

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Case Study: How Inlytics Provides Strategic Insights for Your LinkedIn Content Content Strategy

We always say you should measure your content’s performance in order to improve your strategy. The question is: How do you get the right insights? 

You could use native LinkedIn analytics, sure, but you’ll notice that they’re aimed at company pages and not personal profiles.

This is where Inlytics comes in. The platform gives you all the tools you need to track and understand your personal profile and content’s performance. 

According to a wealth and investing coach Julia Menheere, who frequently uses Inlytics, her mission was to understand which posts and content types were doing well, but she couldn’t find any tool that would give her insights into her personal profile. 

But it’s not only about what information Inlytics provides; it’s also about how it does it. 

The platform gives you all the LinkedIn personal profile metrics you need in one single dashboard. This includes everything from post impressions to reactions, comments, top posts, and engagement rate. 

As Julia puts it:

“We had to manually dig through my posts on LinkedIn to see the analytics. Then manually transfer that data into a spreadsheet to make some sense out of it. Plus, we had no idea about when the post was successful, or the exact date it was published. A lot of insights were lost.”

Since using Inlytics, Julia can now filter posts based on specific aspects of performance, and she now knows what works well and what doesn't. All she has to do is apply the insights to her content strategy.

In addition to these, Inlytics also provides profile scoring and in-depth profile recommendations that show you how well your profile is performing and where you can improve. 

If you are interested in supplementing your LinkedIn content strategy with powerful personal profile analytics, get started with Inlytics for free.

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Conclusion: Building a Powerful LinkedIn Content Strategy Is an Art and a Science

There is a science to how you structure your LinkedIn content roadmap. However, there is an art to it, too. In the best examples of LinkedIn content we’ve seen, there is a clear curiosity towards the audience and a willingness to share the honest truth of what happens behind the scenes.

You could write a how-to guide on LinkedIn, but unless it’s backed by your own experiences that your audience can relate to, it won’t perform as well as it could have.

When you’re ready to create your strategy, think about the stories you could tell. Then, go out there and find the best way to tell them.