Nine LinkedIn marketing skills, must-haves for veterans

1. Know your customer profile

Customer portraits are essentially multi-dimensional characteristics of ideal customers. When you know who your ideal customers are, what they look like, their habits, interests, challenges, expectations, and everything else about them, you’ll be more effective when marketing to them. On LinkedIn, you can use your existing customers’ secondary connections, LinkedIn’s advanced search, and LinkedIn groups to help you identify customer profiles.

2. Optimize personal information

Your LinkedIn profile page is the most important showcase of your online professional image. You can use this as a basis to connect with people in your LinkedIn network. The profile includes details about your job qualifications, employment history, education, skills and experience. To get the most out of LinkedIn, it’s important to make your LinkedIn profile as comprehensive and compelling as possible.

3. Grow your network

LinkedIn divides connections into1 degree, 2 degree and 3 degree. 1st degree connections are your direct contacts. 2nd-degree connections are contacts of your 1st-degree connections. You can connect with 2nd-degree connections by sending invitations. 3rd-degree connections are people who are connected to your 2nd-degree connections. If the full name is shown in the 3rd-degree connections, you can send an invitation to establish contact; if the full name is not shown, you can only establish contact with his 1st-degree connections through InMail or first to get closer to him.

When creating an account, you can first invite existing contacts to connect, and you can import existing email contacts into LinkedIn. Filter out contacts who have already added connections, and the rest can be proactively contacted by writing personalized invitations. Additionally, you can filter and add connections through LinkedIn Recommendations, LinkedIn Groups, and advanced search.

The purpose of using LinkedIn is to develop our business, so establishing and screening a high-quality professional network is the key point. Therefore, do not add everyone, but only add professional people, so as to make use of these professional people.1 degree of connections to develop more connections. Keep your account active and interactive, and maintain your network.

4. Implement your content strategy

The first point in building a LinkedIn content strategy structure is to clarify your marketing goals, such as: promoting your products or services to more potential customers, increasing brand awareness, attracting more people to visit the website or sign up for a trial, or establishing a loyal private domain traffic pool, etc. Once you determine your main goals, you can determine the type of content your team should create.

Before publishing content, another thing to consider is who the content is for. You need to consider the composition of your audience, what content they want to see, and tailor your content to your audience. While the goal is marketing, your content strategy should be to avoid making the article look like a sales pitch as much as possible. Content should be as professional and informative as possible to create value for potential customers. In this regard, data-based, illustrated content is more attractive than dry exposition content.

Additionally, you can use hashtags for your contentUse hashtags to help you reach your target audience and people with shared interests. Hashtags can help you attract interested people outside of your network to visit your page.

Thirdly, you can also share external articles on the LinkedIn platform, such as sharing your website articles on LinkedIn, which will help bring traffic to your website and increaseSEO effectiveness. The people who use LinkedIn are relatively professional, and these high-quality visits and clicks will lead to higher conversions.

5. Publish content regularly

As with other social networks, staying active is the key to LinkedIn marketing; maintaining a relatively consistent posting frequency will allow your followers to form a habit in their minds of regularly looking forward to your content, creating user stickiness. Whether you post content updates once a week or several times a week, keep your frequency high. Of course it would be better if you could post every day.
Also, try to choose the best time of the week to post, based on Sprout SocialStatistics show that the best times to post on LinkedIn are during the work week and in the morning. Specifically:

Best time: Tuesday and Thursday mornings9am to 12pm, Wednesday 9am to 2pm

Best days: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday

Worst day: Sunday

fromSprout Social

6. Join LinkedIn groups and create your own LinkedIn groups

LinkedIn Groups (LinkedIn Groups are private communities for professionals to share expertise, seek advice, and make meaningful connections. You can join specialized topic groups based on the nature and scope of your product or service. Generally speaking, the purpose of the group is not to sell products, so avoid sending your sales links initially. Try liking and commenting on some posts, listen to group members' discussions, ask questions, respond appropriately, and seek further discussion. In short, stay professional and contribute your value to the community. This will help build your personal IP and attract more people to pay attention to you, thereby achieving your unexpected marketing goals.

Another situation is that your product or service may be very professional and you cannot find a corresponding discussion group, then you can create a topic group yourself. A group should focus on topics that are naturally related to your brand, rather than directly promoting your brand or company. You must know that the audience joins your group not because they want to buy your products, but because they are interested in the topic and hope to gain knowledge or information related to the topic. By delivering value and information over time and through your content, your audience will develop a natural connection with your brand, which is more valuable than a mere sales pitch.

7. Try LinkedIn Ads

Did you know you can run ads on LinkedIn? rightIn the B2B field, LinkedIn Ads may be a good channel to find traffic and tap customers. 80% of B2B content marketers use LinkedIn advertising. By using LinkedIn Ads, you can ensure that your message reaches the right audience, a group of influential decision-makers. The main forms of LinkedIn advertising are sponsored content, promoted InMail, text ads and dynamic ads. Foreign trade B2B marketers can use LinkedIn's advertising management tool Campaign Manager to create ads, set content, positioning and format, and measure and optimize ads based on ROI.

8. Create a LinkedIn Poll

You can create LinkedIn polls anywhere on the platform (LinkedIn Polls), including personal pages, company pages, product pages, groups, or events. Through public opinion surveys, you can discover the audience's goals, content preferences, composition, and interest in new products, collect consumer feedback on products or services, discover their pain points, and even study industry trend changes based on public opinion surveys. Opinion surveys not only serve for real-time market research, but also for online promotion and lead generation, so they can be used well and become an important part of LinkedIn marketing.

9. LinkedIn Creator Mode

LinkedIn Creator Mode can be turned on or off based on user needs, allowing users to"Activities" and "Selected" share posts, articles and videos; users can set topics (up to 5 topics) for classification. After turning on Creator Mode, the "Connect" button (Connect) will become the "Follow" button (Follow). After foreign trade marketers meet the conditions set by LinkedIn, they can open the creator mode to create columns, carry out content marketing, and attract the attention of potential users, so as to better interact with following users and establish brand thought leadership.

In November 2021, LinkedIn added new features to the creator mode: Live Video, Newsletters and Get Discovered.

·Live video (Live Video): With live video, you can broadcast content directly to your profile, so you can interact with your audience in real time, drive deeper engagement and build your thought leadership.

·Newsletter (Newsletters): As a newsletter author, you can publish regular content about topics you are passionate about. Additionally, make sure your content is seen via automated emails and in-app notifications.

·Discover(Get Discovered): Creator Mode continues to help potential followers find you and your content on LinkedIn. After turning on Creator Mode, you are eligible to become a recommended creator.

Based on the new functions, foreign trade marketers can publish more articles, posts, pictures, and even live videos to support the successful development and results of content marketing.