LinkedIn strategy for company profiles
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LinkedIn – the social media platform is the world’s largest business network with 660 million members. Everyone knows it and everyone wants it in corporate communications and marketing/sales. A few years ago, this applied more to large, mainly international companies, but since Covid-19 at the latest, LinkedIn has also attracted the DACH region, and not only large companies, but also small and medium-sized enterprises. Our guest author and Performance Marketing Manager Titus Münch advises our clients on LinkedIn. In this article, he reveals the points you should consider in your LinkedIn strategy, including Goals and target groups, company profile, content, resources and community management.
Content
- Goals & target groups
- Resources
- Profile (Company & Employees)
- Content
- Community Management
- Analysis
- AddOn: Advertising
- Conclusion
Relevant content, engagement and the big topic of lead generation – that’s exactly why many companies say: “We need LinkedIn and then we’ll start with the lead gen!” Just create a profile and off you go, right? Well, not quite, because as with all marketing measures, strategy comes before implementation. You probably don’t go on vacation without knowing where you want to go. We show you the best way to approach your LinkedIn strategy.
Before we start together:
What many people forget when planning or in the course of using LinkedIn in a corporate context: LinkedIn is a social media platform. The social aspect should therefore never be ignored, even in the business sector. Because you don’t get reach with recurring product contributions. This bores your followers and they turn away. You get reach with commitment. And you get this with varied, high-quality and professional content that is fun. What we are trying to say: Don’t use LinkedIn as a product showcase – rather, use LinkedIn to give your followers an insight into your corporate culture and actively involve your employees.
Goals & target groups
The goals you want to pursue with LinkedIn for your company are best defined in an overarching marketing strategy and applied to LinkedIn. Some classic destinations are:
- Brand awareness & reach
- Employer Branding
- Recruiting
- Lead generation
- Sales
Our recommendation: Looking ahead to 2024 and the continuing trends, engagement and direct communication with your target group should be at the top of your list of goals.
We would also like to encourage you to define the key performance indicators (KPIs) according to your objectives. Otherwise, it will be difficult to assess whether your strategy is really successful. LinkedIn makes your life easier, because thanks to LinkedIn Analytics you can easily evaluate goals and KPIs.
In addition to your goals, you should also know who you want to reach, i.e. who your target group is. At best, you have already checked whether they actively use LinkedIn. Is your target group to be found there? Perfect. Describe them as well as possible, for example in the form of personas, in order to create relevant content later on
Our tip: Use the LinkedIn campaign manager to check the size of your potential target group.
Resources
Available resources are a decisive factor in planning. The days when social media was done on the side are over for most companies today. Is there a person or even a team in the company who has enough time to look after the LinkedIn channel and develop it further later? Are there enough sources and, of course, budget and time for content creation? If you cannot answer yes to this question, make sure you have the necessary resources – either internally or through external service providers.
Profile
Company & employees
Once the strategy has been established, the next step follows: the company profile. Company profiles are free, can be created quickly and form the center of LinkedIn corporate communications. This also gives you the option of setting up the campaign manager for your ads. You can also expand your profile by adding the “Corporate culture” tab for a fee. It is important to ensure that the company profile is complete. So don’t forget to upload the logo and cover image in line with your branding.
Even if the company profile is the center of your communication, it is important that the entire strategy should never be completely centralized on the company profile. What we mean by this: LinkedIn is a social media platform for digital networking and digital exchange between people. This is noticeable in the LinkedIn algorithm. Personal profiles of employees generally have a greater reach and higher engagement than company profiles. We have often seen this in the past.
We therefore advise our customers to actively involve employees (important: only volunteers!) in the LinkedIn strategy and position them as experts. This automatically makes them the best voice for your company, ensuring even greater reach and awareness.
Content
Here we go at last!
Now it’s finally happening! Once your company profile is complete, it’s time to publish content. Regular content is the basis for your LinkedIn success. Of course, the content itself is crucial: When planning, you should definitely refrain from only writing about products and services – LinkedIn is and remains first and foremost a social media platform and is not a product showcase.
Our experience has shown: Promotional content generally receives little to no engagement – which means that company profiles have even less reach than they already do. Instead, show the culture in your company, focus on employees or share contributions with added value, such as expert knowledge. This will help you generate as much engagement as possible. LinkedIn offers various organic posting formats for publishing content. The key to success: test, test, test. Try it out and be brave.
Our tip: Use document post (PDF slider) and high-quality info graphics. These often achieve a high level of engagement, allowing you to increase your reach.
Good to know:
- LinkedIn offers company pages organic content targeting.
- Via the company profile, you can use the practical function to recommend content to your employees that can be shared directly via the company page.
AI in content creation
You can no longer avoid AI. However, be aware that older people in particular are less likely to trust AI-generated posts and are therefore less likely to interact with them if they recognize that it is AI-generated content. The situation is quite different for the younger target groups*.
Our recommendation: AI tools such as ChatGTP are helpful for expanding content, but should never be adopted 1:1. Content must be authentic to generate engagement.
*Source: Hootsuite Trend Report 2024
Community Management
Community management is at least as important as publishing posts. A very clear, ongoing trend for the future is not just active, but proactive community management. Don’t make the mistake of actively asking users to interact and then not responding – unfortunately, we see this very often. LinkedIn offers companies more and more opportunities to interact with their target group through their company profiles. The best example is a new feature: the news button for company pages. Respond to mentions of your company and get involved as a company with comments. It’s worth it – the LinkedIn algorithm responds with a higher reach and visibility.
Analysis
In the administrative area under “Analytics”, LinkedIn offers various evaluations of the content and the development of the page over the last 365 days (or 500 posts). Here you have the opportunity to gain a deeper insight into content performance and evaluate the success of your strategy. You can use performance indicators for the individual postings to analyze and draw conclusions about which topics and formats are performing well or less well. The data can also be exported and thus easily integrated into comprehensive reports. Recommended content shared by employees can also be evaluated in this area. In addition to content, you can also read demographic data from visitors and followers and monitor the competition on LinkedIn.
The LinkedIn analysis area is a must in order to be able to meaningfully evaluate and continuously optimize your own LinkedIn strategy.
AddOn: Advertising
The LinkedIn campaign manager is integrated as an additional tool for company pages and offers comprehensive options for running paid campaigns on LinkedIn. In direct comparison to other campaign managers such as Meta or XING, the LinkedIn campaign manager offers comprehensive and precise business targeting. This means that not only sectors or areas of activity can be targeted, but also specific job descriptions, interests and much more. Thanks to the LinkedIn Insight tag, website conversions can also be tracked in campaigns and retargeting target groups can be created. For a comprehensive LinkedIn strategy, the campaign manager should definitely be considered and strategically planned.
We cover the topic of “Paid campaigns and LinkedIn campaign managers” in a separate blog article.
Conclusion
LinkedIn offers companies a lot of potential. A holistic strategy is essential to take advantage of this. Operating the channel “on the side” will not lead to success. Use your LinkedIn company page as a starting point for corporate communication and actively involve employees in the strategy and implementation.
Are you looking for a reliable partner for strategy development and implementation? Our experts will be happy to assist you.
