LinkedIn has evolved beyond a professional networking tool to become the leading channel for B2B marketing. While it’s still a valuable resource for networking and finding your next role, it has quickly gained traction as a content platform where you can reach a professional audience and build your brand’s credibility, trust, and authority in your industry.
With over 900 million users worldwide, chances are high that your audience is hanging out on the platform. Whether you’re marketing your personal brand or a brand that you manage, the key to winning on this emerging platform is to dedicate a large portion of your LinkedIn marketing strategy to content creation and distribution. We'll call this your LinkedIn content strategy.
Here’s what we’ll cover in this article on LinkedIn content strategy:
- How LinkedIn content plays into your overall marketing strategy
- What to post on LinkedIn
- How to write a LinkedIn post
- LinkedIn posting strategy
- LinkedIn content ideas
Let’s get to it.
How LinkedIn content plays into your overall marketing strategy
Before we dive too deep into LinkedIn content, let’s talk about a modern LinkedIn marketing strategy.
There’s the typical approach: You can run a company page on LinkedIn like you would run a brand on any other social media channel. You can make posts, run polls, share updates, etc. from your brand’s business account.
But your LinkedIn marketing strategy doesn’t have to stop there. There’s a bigger opportunity in leveraging your employees' and executives’ personal accounts as a platform for your brand, especially if these spokespeople have their own personal brand associated with your industry.
Here’s what these three strategies look like:
- You can run a company page on LinkedIn like you would run a brand on any other social media channel. When it comes to brand marketing, the main goal of a company page is to share news and updates and act as a face of the company for job seekers.
- You can invest in personal branding on LinkedIn in order to build credibility around your own name, and as an extension, the brand that you own/run/work for. When done correctly, personal branding helps establish your message, builds your platform, and attracts your audience. When it comes to brand marketing, you can leverage these results by becoming a thought leadership channel for your company.
- You can use employee generated content to encourage employees to post about the company. Similar to personal branding, this increases the company’s reach and helps to build brand goodwill through positive storytelling.
Whether you’re creating a LinkedIn presence to set yourself up as an expert in your field or you’re a CEO leveraging your personal page to boost your brand, LinkedIn is a no-brainer for marketing if your audience includes professionals and business decision-makers.
But bombarding that audience with promotions, ads, and hard sells is not the way to win. On LinkedIn, hard sales are often seen as disingenuous and are likely to be ignored. If you want your brand to be visible, one of the best ways to make LinkedIn work for you is to create genuine relationships with your connections.
Instead of bombarding your connections with sales posts, you should focus on creating meaningful relationships, showing off your dazzling personality, and creating content that provides immediate value for your readers.
LinkedIn content marketing, according to the experts
Sarah Greesonbach, a small business owner and consultant, puts it this way: LinkedIn marketing is about building trust and relationships.
Sarah says, “No matter what your industry or niche, potential clients have a dozen options for who to work with or buy from today. Marketing has always been about letting people know, like, and trust you.”
When you post content to LinkedIn, you’re helping boost your brand’s presence, credibility, and authority in your industry. These are invaluable metrics in a B2B marketing strategy, where buying cycles take longer and sales are built off trust.
Sarah also says, “I found that building a personal brand on LinkedIn has been a very effective and meaningful way to share relevant information about myself and the way I see the world, which allows people to get to know me and, hopefully, like and trust me. So when the time comes that they’re looking for someone like me, I’m the only one who comes to mind.”
That isn’t to say you can’t market your product or service to your connections. You absolutely can — you just need an effective LinkedIn content strategy to play the long game and turn your connections into potential customers.
Developing a LinkedIn content strategy
Think of a LinkedIn content strategy as a hybrid of social media marketing and content marketing. A key element of social media marketing is engagement — posting content that gets likes, comments, and shares. Content marketing is about publishing relevant content that your audience needs. Think blog posts, how-to guides, ebooks, and case studies.
With LinkedIn marketing, you need to pull from both of these functions to create high-value, expertise-driven content that entertains and engages a smart, professional audience.
Like any content strategy, you can follow these steps:
- Find your spokespeople (which employees want to build their personal brands on top of your brand strategy)
- Define your audience (who you want to attract for each page)
- Define your value pillars (how you’ll provide value to your audience)
- Define your content pillars (what topics you’ll post about on each channel)
Find your spokespeople
LinkedIn likes content from brands, but it LOVES content from people. That’s why a great LinkedIn content strategy needs to plan for more than just your company page — you need to determine who your LinkedIn spokespeople will be. These spokespeople will create personal content that attracts an audience that your brand can leverage.
Zach Busekrus, CEO and co-founder of Sponstayneous, says one of the best ways to gain attention for your company is to post from your personal page. “You need a [company] page just so folks can learn about your company at a high level. But if you want to build authority and respect on this platform, you’ve got to leverage your own personal brand.”
While an established company LinkedIn page is essential, it’s not always where your audience learns about your business. Instead, your audience wants to interact with people — the face(s) that make up your company. The more demonstratable expertise and original ideas your employees can share, the more audiences will associate these qualities with your brand.
Zach says, “I’ve acquired countless customers, users, and advocates from this platform just by sharing my perspective or hot take on a niche industry topic two to three times a week. The quality of inbound LinkedIn DMs is ten times the quality of DMs on any other social network.”
The first step to building a leadership and employee advocacy strategy is finding willing participants. More often than not, your company leaders, like the founder, CEO, and other executives/VPs, will be game to build their personal brand on LinkedIn as a brand marketing tactic. But it’s also fantastic to include roles from across your company in your posting strategy. This spectrum of voices expands your topical authority, adds human authenticity to your brand, and maximizes your reach.
Ultimately when you look for brand spokespeople, look for employees who can speak with authority on a topic related to your brand and are interested in posting at least once a week.
Once you’ve found your spokespeople, you have a sense of what your LinkedIn “channels” are. Here’s a quick breakdown of what they’ll look like:
- Company page: Post company news, updates, product changes, surveys, and major content initiatives. You’ll also run LinkedIn ads from this account.
- Executives and company leaders: Leaders build personal platforms around thought leadership. They can use these platforms to subtly promote the brand.
- Employees: Employees across departments who post about the company. Some might be willing to integrate with your content strategy, while others may want to post separately. Either way, positive stories about your company will help you get the word out about your brand.
Define Your Audience
We’ve covered the various channels you can use on LinkedIn — now, each channel comes with a niche audience. For example, the connections that follow your company page might want to learn how to use your product or service effectively. Or, they could be following your page to watch for job opportunities.
On the other hand, your CEO’s and employee’s connections might appreciate the stories they tell, the information they share, and the way they think about the industry. These connections might want to read funny stories from the office, see behind-the-scenes strategizing, or gain tips and insights about the industry from the people doing the work. Understanding your various audiences will help you better understand the kinds of content they need and actually want to read.
Define Your Value Pillars
The key to branded content is that it should provide value to the reader. Does your brand:
- Educate and inspire?
- Spark an interest in your product or service?
- Relate to the audience?
- Solve a pain point?
- Make someone laugh?
How you deliver value to your audience is important and reflects your overall brand. If your brand is known for being helpful, consider creating educational LinkedIn content. Or, if your brand is more lighthearted and fun, consider creating and sharing humorous content.
Because your LinkedIn strategy can involve more than one person, you, the marketer, don’t have to be the sole person responsible for getting your brand in front of your audience.
For example, if you have a member of your team who’s a natural comedian, consider recruiting them to post entertaining content related to your brand. Or, if someone on your team is a great communicator and educator, they’d be the perfect person to post educational content surrounding the brand.
With multiple people participating in your brand’s LinkedIn content strategy, you can provide value in several formats. If you’re a solopreneur, test which type of content lands best with your audience, and once you find a value pillar that works, stick with it.
Define Your Content Pillars
Like a content marketing strategy, your LinkedIn content strategy needs defined content pillars.
Content pillars, or overarching topics that define your brand, help ensure that the content you post on your LinkedIn pages supports the overall brand and LinkedIn strategy.
For example, it wouldn’t make sense to post about personal news on a company page, even if you are a solopreneur. Instead, keep your content on the company page focused on your business’s goals and content themes. Consider creating posts on:
- Industry news
- Corporate events
- How-to guides
- Product features
Your audience will expect these kinds of posts from your company page.
Employee pages, though, have a little more leniency when it comes to what to post on LinkedIn. Employee pages are more personal, so you can share more personalized posts about industry news, like behind-the-scenes of a conference your team attended or what it’s like to work in your office or how your team arrived at a certain solution for your product.
How to write a LinkedIn post
If you’ve spent any time on LinkedIn, you’ve probably noticed there’s a certain pattern to the most engaging posts. While there’s no exact formula to a viral LinkedIn post, a few elements will help you get noticed:
- The hook
- Flow (like telling a story)
- A few emojis for sparkle
Hook
The hook is the first sentence of your LinkedIn post. Most people scroll quickly through their home feed, so if the first sentence of your post isn’t compelling, they’ll scroll on without stopping to read your content.
Use hooks like:
- What’s the best piece of advice you’ve received? Here’s mine.
- Can you believe the audacity!? This is what happened.
- I just witnessed the most bizarre interaction. Here’s what I saw.
- I doubled my follower growth in a month. Here’s what I did.
Do you see the pattern? The hook starts with a claim and then invites the reader to learn more. Sure, some of these hooks might sound outrageous, and they’ll sound even more silly if the rest of your content doesn’t match or back up the claim. So, be sure to choose a hook that makes sense compared to the rest of your content.
Speaking of content, let’s look at the flow of your post.
Flow
Have you ever scrolled through social media and tried to read a post that was nothing but a giant wall of text? No spaces. No paragraphs. Just one block of text.
We’ll be the first to admit it: we skip right over those posts and move on to the next one.
Why? Because walls of texts are hard to read. They’re hard to skim and lack a natural pause in the story.
Instead, think about the flow of your post. Include frequent paragraph breaks to help readers digest content. Use transitions to guide readers through the content. Ask questions. Posts that flow feel like reading a story. When users read this kind of post, they’re able to immerse themselves in the content and experience the emotions and thrills as they read it.
Does that mean you need to write every post like a New York Times Best-Seller? No. But you should take some time to craft engaging content that your audience will actually read. Inject a little of your amazing personality, use emojis to help convey your message, and break up your text for easy skimming.
Your audience will love you for it!
LinkedIn post length
Let’s talk about LinkedIn text post length. The character limit for a LinkedIn post is 3,000 characters. That’s actually quite a lot of space to use to engage with your audience.
Although you can write a long post, a typical LinkedIn post with high engagement is usually between 1,300 and 2,000 characters.
No worries if you’re like us and not great at eyeballing character counts. Draft your content in Loomly (and schedule it for later!) and use the character counter to determine the number of characters in your post.
LinkedIn posting strategy
Posting every day on LinkedIn is a great way to get on the good side of the LinkedIn algorithm. Using tools like Loomly can help you create a LinkedIn content calendar and schedule your posts ahead of time — that way, you’re not spending hours each day creating a new piece of content.
You might be asking, “But, how do you know the best time to post on LinkedIn?” Since LinkedIn is a professional networking platform that many people use for work and their business, it might be best to post on LinkedIn during your audience’s working hours. Think between the hours of 9 am and 3 pm. You can apply simple logic like this to figure out your social media posting schedule across all channels.
Polly Clover, an SEO writer and consultant, likes to post early in the morning. Polly says, “I schedule my posts for every day at 8 AM. When I first started posting on LinkedIn, I didn't schedule. I just posted whenever I got to it each morning. I've never played with other times. I also just don't think timing really matters. I think that's a myth, but maybe I'm wrong. I think it's the consistency that is helpful.”
Rachel Metlzer, a freelance writer and business coach, has another tip when it comes to posting on LinkedIn. Rachel says, “I try to be on LinkedIn right after my post is scheduled. I typically go on around 9:30 or 10 am for about 30-60 mins. So I schedule all my posts for 9:30 am.”
Polly and Rachel have the right idea. The timing of your posts is less important. It’s better to focus on consistency and interaction rather than timing, which makes tools like Loomly even more beneficial to your LinkedIn content strategy.
LinkedIn content ideas
Ready to start creating content for LinkedIn, but you’re stuck on the types of content you can create? No worries. Check out these LinkedIn content ideas.
LinkedIn Carousels
LinkedIn carousels are perfect for sharing high-value content with your audience. Although LinkedIn officially removed the carousel post feature, you can still create similar posts by sharing PDF document files.
You can create a PDF file using a presentation design tool like Canva or PowerPoint. It is best to use a presentation tool so that you can easily design each page of your LinkedIn carousel.
Here’s an example of a carousel post on the Loomly company page:
Source: Loomly’s LinkedIn
These kinds of posts provide value by offering downloadable content and are easily shareable— making them a great addition to your LinkedIn content marketing strategy.
Videos
Videos perform extremely well on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is also testing a short-form video feature.
You can record a video from an insider event and share it with your followers. Or, take on creating video content like TikTokers and YouTubers. Just don’t forget to add a caption so the LinkedIn algorithm can determine the themes of your video.
Look at this example from Léo Blanc, the SEO Team Lead at Submagic.
Source: Leo Blanc’s LinkedIn
Although Léo's profile is his individual personal account, he is a customer-facing employee. And since he is a recognizable part of the brand, it makes him a perfect component of Submagic’s LinkedIn strategy.
Image Posts
Images are a fantastic way to catch your audience’s attention. And it’s true: a picture really does tell a thousand words.
Add relevant images to your posts to boost your engagement rates and help convey your message. Look how Zach Busekrus, CEO and co-founder of Sponstayneous, uses images to help entice his audience to book a stay with his company.
Image source: Zach Busekrus's LinkedIn
And, if you can’t find a relevant image, you can pay the pet tax. (AKA, share a photo of your furry friend!)
Personal Stories
Sharing personal stories with your audience is a great way to build personal connections. If you’re a solopreneur or an employee sharing content on behalf of your company, personal stories can help set you up as an expert in your field.
Your stories can be serious, silly, light-hearted, or inspirational. Look at this post from Korina Dove, a content consultant. As you read it, you’ll notice that Korina uses her birthday experience to relate to marketing messaging.
Image Source: Korina Dove’s LinkedIn
Polls
Want to know what your audience is thinking? Ask them! LinkedIn allows users to create polls, which are a great way to gather insight and understand how your audience feels about a certain topic. You can schedule a weekly LinkedIn poll using Loomly, and use the insights you collect to ideate new content and build data-driven stories around.
Source: Loomly's LinkedIn
Tip Posts
Sharing tips is a great way to build connections and foster trust with your audience. It not only brings value to the reader but also establishes you as an authority in your industry.
Look at how Emma Loker, a content writer and child psychotherapist counselor, shares tips about finding your customer avatar in her post to educate her audience. And check out her use of emojis, too!
Source: Emma Loker’s LinkedIn
Create Your LinkedIn Strategy with Loomly
Creating a LinkedIn marketing strategy doesn’t have to be challenging. It just takes a little knowledge of how social media works (like how to keep the algorithm happy) and how to launch a content marketing strategy that your audience cares about. When you combine the two, you create an effective LinkedIn content strategy.
Want to know the secret to running a successful LinkedIn strategy? Scheduling your posts with Loomly. That way, you can spend less time creating and more time interacting with your audience. Sign up for a free trial today
