LinkedIn is the world’s leading professional social media platform, with over a billion users (employees, entrepreneurs, influencers, recruiters, job seekers…). 🤯
So it’s become a must-have network for marketing, but, not only! So, ready to make LinkedIn your favorite professional and marketing playground? 😎
Today, we’re teaching marketers all there is to know about how to use LinkedIn for marketing purposes. ➡️ On the program of this utlimate guide to LinkedIn Marketing :
- What is LinkedIn Marketing?
- Why market on LinkedIn?
- LinkedIn Marketing with LinkedIn Ads.
- Prerequisites for achieving your LinkedIn Marketing.
- 6 free LinkedIn marketing strategies to adopt.
- Marketing tool to automate your LinkedIn marketing.
Full steam ahead! 🏎️
What is LinkedIn marketing?
LinkedIn marketing is your ticket to shine on the world’s biggest pro network 🌟 !
The idea? 💡 Put simply, LinkedIn marketing consists of:
- Creating new authentic relationships (so you’ll have new LinkedIn connections).
- Participating in exchanges in LinkedIn groups.
- Sharing your ideas and topics, through captivating (notably thanks to the power of copywriting) and diverse content, and showing off your area of expertise to gain credibility.
- LinkedIn networking to gain visibility, notoriety and meet professionals in your sector.
- Promote and boost your brand to sell your products and services.
- Get new leads and turn your connections into customers (or even fans ❤️).
- Drive traffic to your website.
- Establish solid partnerships with players in your sector.
- Stand out from your competitors 💥 on the market.
With a well-oiled marketing strategy, LinkedIn becomes your ally in generating value, building customer loyalty, and dominating the scene against the competition 💥.
The secret? Be active, post on LinkedIn regularly to build a LinkedIn presence that slams so you can’t be ignored.
Result: More leads, more traffic, and a reputation that rocks 🚀.
Why market on LinkedIn?
Why use LinkedIn for marketing? 🤔 LinkedIn is one of the few networks where professional purchasing decisions are born directly from relevant (trust-based) exchanges or publications.
Finally, marketing encompasses many actions, but that doesn’t mean it’s difficult to implement on LinkedIn.
People coming to LinkedIn trust LinkedIn (it’s also one of the most trusted marketing platforms in the world). Each profile contains information that is accessible to all (connections, post, personality, expertise…) and represents a real person 👁️ with whom you can directly exchange, enabling rapid decision-making and contact.
And, finally, LinkedIn Marketing offers often underestimated but powerful advantages:
- Qualified audience 📣: LinkedIn brings together millions of active professionals, including decision-makers, partners and potential customers.
- Precise marketing targeting 🎯: With its advanced search tools, LinkedIn lets you filter by sector, position, company size, or location, to target profiles that exactly match your ideal audience.
- Humanization 💗: LinkedIn lets you put a face behind your company, thus strengthening the connection with your audience.
- Varied content format 📲: Articles, videos, carousels or polls… LinkedIn offers a multitude of options to diversify a LinkedIn content strategy and capture prospects’ attention.
- Power of the LinkedIn network 💪🏼: Every interaction (likes, shares, comments) amplifies your visibility by reaching the contacts of your connections, increasing your organic reach. It’s undoubtedly the most effective social network for generating leads.
- Access to valuable insights 📊: Statistics on your publications or campaigns enable you to adjust your LinkedIn strategy in real time to maximize your results.
Finally, on LinkedIn, your chances of generating leads and converting are significantly greater than on other social media marketing platform.
In short, LinkedIn marketing efforts are transforms into concrete connections and results, in a professional and dynamic setting. ✅
LinkedIn Marketing with LinkedIn Ads
Since we’re exploring everything you need to know about effective LinkedIn Marketing…
LinkedIn Marketing Solutions tools include LinkedIn Ads, for advertising campaigns ⚙️ :
- ✍🏼 Text Ads or simple LinkedIn ads (in various sizes and shapes), paid per click (CPC) or per impression (CPM), perfect for effective call to action (CTA).
- 📩 Sponsored messages to engage your prospects and redirect them to forms or your site to generate traffic.
- 🌟 Sponsored content (in the LinkedIn feed), they reach quality targeted audiences thanks to LinkedIn data.
- 📣 Dynamic ads customized with profile data to quickly launch campaigns with ads on LinkedIn to maximize awareness and traffic.
LinkedIn Ads works on a bidding system 💰. When you’ve finally chosen the LinkedIn advertising format that suits you best, you’ll need to find out and then choose your bidding type, to optimize your strategy and costs.
Then, you adjust your advertising budget as well as your spending according to the competition and/or your objectives: cost per thousand to develop awareness or cost per click to generate leads. 🧠
And if your budget is limited? No problem, LinkedIn is full of free alternatives to boost your marketing. We’ll introduce you to the best ones later in the article 😉
Achieving your LinkedIn Marketing objectives
To run a successful strategy and your LinkedIn marketing campaigns, you need to focus on the customer 👤 :
- Do research to define your target (persona).
- Find your target audience.
- Create your customer network.
- Highlight your value proposition.
- Make ❤️ customers loyal.
- Maintain customer relations.
So it’s vitally important to first define your buyer persona (a portrait of your ideal customers) to analyze consumer needs 📈.
From there, you’ll be able to build a well-honed strategy for achieving your marketing LinkedIn Marketing objectives. 🚀
In short, you need to personalize your target and know everything about your buyer persona and ICP sales (Ideal Customer Profile) so you know exactly who you’re going to sell to ✨ :
- Last name, first name, age.
- Job function, level of responsibility, position in the company and level of decision-making.
- What he likes to do.
- His objectives.
- His preferred means of communication.
- Needs, problems and frustrations.
- His bottlenecks in the path to buying a product or service.
- And anything else you feel is relevant to targeting them.
Once you’ve pinpointed that perfect person, you’ll put together a set of means and actions to influence the various behaviors of your buyers. 🧲
💎 Depending on the results, you’ll then adapt your offer, with the aim of constantly creating value in your customers’ eyes.
LinkedIn marketing strategies to adopt (free)
LinkedIn offers you its paid LinkedIn marketing solutions, but in reality you don’t have to pay. 💁🏻♀️ And now these alternatives are being handed to you on a golden platter!
You’ll finally know in concrete terms what free marketing strategies and actions to implement on LinkedIn to increase your visibility and build a relevant audience. 🤑
👇🏼 Before getting started, and to recap, an effective LinkedIn Marketing strategy is :
- A good buyer persona.
- Defining clear objectives (for example, getting more visibility with customers, generating more leads, building a community, increasing brand awareness…).
- Choose the themes you’ll write about and the type of content you’ll share (text, photos, videos, articles…) and be regular.
- Take the right actions to develop your network, find clients, and forge solid partnerships.
This time, we’re good to go! 🔥
#1. Optimize your LinkedIn profile or LinkedIn business page
Your goal with LinkedIn Marketing is certainly to sell a product or service, from a LinkedIn company page or from a personal LinkedIn account.
But, whatever the case, there’s no secret… 🚨 It’s your shop window, it’s the first thing a visitor will see, and it’s the first impression they’ll make of you.
So to succeed, you’ll need to optimize certain elements of your LinkedIn profile or LinkedIn company page.
Here’s a table that can serve as a checklist to maximize the impact of both types of LinkedIn marketing presence and gain visibility (of course if you’re active on LinkedIn)! 👀
| Item to take care of | Personal Profile | Company Page |
|---|---|---|
| Profile photo | Professional photo, face clearly visible, neutral background. | Clear, high-resolution, recognizable company logo. |
| LinkedIn Marketing banner A major asset and marketing lever, this must be: punchy, attention-grabbing and make your value proposition clear at a glance. | Visuals that reflect your area of expertise or values. | Visuals with name and/or logo, slogan, key services or an image that reflects the mission. |
| Title | Clear, attractive summary of your expertise or mission. | Catchphrase about the mission or added value of the company. |
| LinkedIn Business sector | Make sure your sector is accurate and well specified in your profile. | Select the most relevant sector for the company to appear in the right searches. |
| Summary / About (use storytelling) | Concise presentation of your background, expertise and objectives (personal tone). | Description of the company, its products/services and its vision (professional tone). |
| Experiences / Offers | List of relevant experiences with measurable results. | Presentation of current services, products and offerings. |
| SEO keywords | Integration of keywords aligned with your field to appear in searches. | Keywords related to your industry, services or specialty to get listed. |
| Custom URL | Easy-to-read LinkedIn URL, including your name. | Finde & custom URL with company name. |
| Publications | Engaging LinkedIn posts, sharing your expertise, personal storytelling. | Engaging content: news, case studies, articles, and testimonials. |
| Activities | Interact with other profiles, comment, share valuable content. | Encourage employees to share publications to increase reach. |
| Recommendations | Request and post professional recommendations. | Publish customer testimonials or case studies. |
| Skills / Hashtags | Add skills relevant to your field. | Add LinkedIn hashtags specific to your industry or campaign. |
| Groups | Join relevant groups to establish your expertise. | Follow and participate in groups related to your industry. |
| CTA (Call to Action) | Highlight a link or action message in your summary. | Customize CTA buttons (Contact, Register, Buy). And fill in the “website” field with a link to a company website. |
If you want to carry out marketing actions with a personal account, it’s advisable to dedicate it entirely to this and empty it of your colleagues, your friends to keep only the people who correspond to your targets.
Here’s an example of a very well optimized LinkedIn profile 🤩 :
When you’re impressed with the beauty of your profile or page yourself, don’t forget to share it with your network. 🌐
The next step is to share relevant content, to generate opportunities and stay in touch with your prospects. 📲
And yes, for a good, successful LinkedIn marketing strategy, you need to keep nurturing your relationships. The platform is first and foremost designed to create a quality professional network.
#2. Regularly publish LinkedIn Marketing content
As you’ve seen, publishing relevant LinkedIn Marketing content is essential to building your visibility, engaging your audience, demonstrating your expertise and convincing others.
And, you already know the key: regularity is the guarantee of sustainable growth and an ever-active network (growth marketing). 🚀
🗓️ A well-thought-out content plan helps you plan and balance different types and formats of publications:
- Practical advice, case studies, industry news, or customer testimonials.
- Articles, videos, carousels, surveys, e-books, etc.
🥰 This mix keeps your network interested, increases your reach and promotes engagement. Also remember to use targeted LinkedIn hashtags and clear call-to-actions to maximize your results.
Finally, interacting with comments allows you to maintain the link and better understand, then meet, your audience’s expectations. ✅
You can also capitalize on “personal branding”. But it doesn’t just happen. To convert, you need to post regularly, but above all choose carefully the themes on which you want to express yourself.
#3. Attract your prospects with Inbound LinkedIn Marketing
🧱 To build your content marketing strategy and define the themes you need to address to convert your prospects, use the famous marketing funnel (or conversion funnel) :
- TOFU (Top of Funnel): Generalist content that speaks to everyone, for example, well-being at work, social issues or telecommuting.
- MOFU (Middle of Funnel): Content aimed at a narrower target audience, just beginning to qualify, for example, copywriting or SEO.
- BOFU (Bottom of the funnel): Highly specialized content 🤓 and specific topics such as what you learn in your line of work.
🌟 This is an Inbound marketing technique that allows you (with various types of content and tools):
- Attract strangers to become prospects,
- Then convert them into leads,
- Then close when they become customers,
- And finally, to retain these customers.
#4. Join and participate in LinkedIn marketing groups
LinkedIn groups offer an opportunity (other than commenting) to exchange, learn and expand your professional network by connecting with like-minded experts, marketing professionals and prospects with similar interests. 🤝
By joining active, well-moderated and relevant groups, you can:
- Share your ideas and expertise 💎: Publish useful content, answer questions and participate in discussions, bringing value to expand your influence and spread the word about your products/services (to potentially sell them).
- Discover key insights 🔑 : Stay abreast of marketing trends, tools and best practices thanks to exchanges within the group.
- Seize opportunities 🤑: Identify LinkedIn members interested in your services or products and engage in conversations with these qualified prospects.
- Build strategic relationships 🤝 : Identify and start building relationships with potential partners.
Note, by the way, that if someone isn’t connected to you, but belongs to a group in common with you, you’ll still be able to send them a message and access their profile.
Avoid spam or overly direct promotional messages, at the risk of being banned from a group. Instead, opt for an authentic approach to have a better chance of being recommended.
#5. Recommend and be recommended
🍀 The more people trust you, the more impact your LinkedIn marketing will have. And, for that, there’s nothing like LinkedIn recommendations.
In fact, it’s possible to recommend someone or be recommended (by someone who has worked with you or by a client), as well as highlighting these recommendations on your LinkedIn profile or LinkedIn page. 🤩
Of course, for you to receive recommendations, you also need to play the game of giving them. You also need to know how to give before you receive.
If recommendations (general or skills) are present, this is social proof that lends credibility and shows that people in your network recognize your skills publicly and trust you.
This helps to reassure visitors and potential prospects, and may encourage them to do the same. 💁🏻♀️
If you’d like a recommendation, here’s what you need to do:
1️⃣ Ask for a recommendation :
- First define who you’d like to be recommended by and/or what skills you’d like to be recommended for.
- Once you’ve done that, browse the profiles you’re interested in and click on the “More” tab, then on “Request a recommendation” and fill in the required fields.
2️⃣ Wait for the recommendations to come to you naturally (that’s when you start to have a little influence in the “LinkedIn Game”).
#6. Find and build LinkedIn marketing partnerships
Finding and forging marketing partnerships on LinkedIn is a powerful lever for increasing your visibility and reaching your goals faster. 🚀
This allows you to pool resources, expand your LinkedIn audience and create effective campaigns through strategic collaborations with complementary players in your sector.
We give you, the method to achieve this. 👇🏼
Identify LinkedIn Marketing partners
You can find partnerships by participating in LinkedIn Groups, but also and above all via an advanced search on LinkedIn. 🔍
Start by defining your criteria: business sector, company size, location or position (e.g. marketing director, partnership manager). Then, to make a LinkedIn standard search 👇🏼 :
1️⃣ Go to LinkedIn and click on “Import from a search” via the Waalaxy extension, to directly access the people search without typing the keyword in the search bar.
2️⃣ Access LinkedIn filters and insert the job title you’re looking for or a keyword to search for in the profile title, enclosing it in quotation marks.
This method is far more effective than a query/keyword search typed directly into the search bar, and even more so if you use Booleans. You can also use it on LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
3️⃣ Use other filters to refine your search with predefined criteria: companies, location, etc.
Next, you can import your prospects and set up your campaign, then all you have to do is write your approach message to propose a possible partnership. ✅
👽 We’ll explain how to launch an automated campaign with Waalaxy later in this article.
Contact strategies
Successful contact is based on a well-thought-out, personalized approach. 🎨 The aim is to capture attention and quickly demonstrate the value of collaboration.
1️⃣ Structure a powerful message 💥 :
- Personalization: Mention something specific on their profile or a recent publication.
- Clarity: Be direct about why you’re contacting them.
2️⃣ Offer clear value 💎 from the first exchange and immediately bring a valid reason to collaborate, such as co-created content (e-book, webinar, series of posts, newsletter on LinkedIn…) or an exchange of visibility with your respective audiences.
3️⃣ Add a simple, engaging Call-to-Action 🕹️ : Keep your proposal concise and leave room for a quick response.
Example: “Hello [First name], I read with great interest your post on [topic]. Your ideas on [topic] align perfectly with our company values. We feel that a partnership around a webinar on [topic] could bring considerable value to our respective communities. Would you be available for a 15-minute call this week to discuss this opportunity?”
If the person accepts your request, all that’s left is for you to set up a mutually beneficial content co-creation project together! ✅
Content co-creation with an influential partner
Content co-creation is a win-win collaborative strategy that combines your strengths and those of your partner to produce high added-value content. 💪🏼
Example: a LinkedIn influencer collaborates with the CEO of a start-up to create an E-book on Cold Emailing“.
👉🏼 The company contributes data and case studies.
👉🏼 The influencer shares his expertise and promotes the content to his community.
🏆 Here are the steps to successful co-creation of marketing content on LinkedIn:
- Define clear objectives. For example: lead generation, increase visibility, or establish your authority in a field?
- Develop a detailed content strategy (or content plan): With the chosen format (lead magnet, webinar, article) and detailed responsibilities (who writes and who promotes).
- Communicate effectively: Hold regular meetings to make sure everyone is aligned. Share resources via collaborative tools (Google Docs, Notion).
- Launch joint promotions: Publish content simultaneously on your respective profiles and explicitly mention your partner to maximize reach.
- Analyze results and iterate: Take the time to debrief with your partner to consider future collaborations.
Then, to maintain and develop the relationship 🫶🏼 :
- Continue to interact with their content on LinkedIn.
- Plan regular collaborations (guest posts, joint campaigns).
- Propose innovative ideas to broaden the impact of your partnership.
That’s it, we’ve detailed every free LinkedIn marketing strategy you can use! To take things to the next level, you can also automate these actions with a suitable tool. 🤖
Get your first customers this week
Take advantage of the power of Waalaxy to generate leads every day. Start prospecting for free, today.
Automate your LinkedIn Marketing with Waalaxy
Using software to automate your LinkedIn Marketing, saves you time and greatly increases your chances of getting results from your actions on LinkedIn. 🔥
👇🏼 We show you how to use Waalaxy to :
- Search and import relevant profiles, with re-filtering and sorting of your prospect lists.
- Launch LinkedIn marketing campaigns.
- Continue your LinkedIn marketing campaign, with a multichannel campaign to contact or re-contact profiles by email.
- Measure and adapt LinkedIn and email marketing campaigns.
Search, import and sort your prospect lists
When the search results on LinkedIn are ready (to find partners or prospects), indicate in the Waalaxy extension the number of prospects to import and create a list. 📋
But, you can also retrieve profiles to contact on LinkedIn in another way, thanks to Waalaxy auto-import (or scraping) to retrieve profiles anywhere on LinkedIn (without needing to do a search)! 😉
- Import all your contacts.
- Leverage reactions to posts, LinkedIn webinar participants or group members.
- Automatically import profiles that have commented on your post, sent an invitation or visited your profile.
Then go to Waalaxy to find your prospect list and re-sort it with Waalaxy filters, before launching your campaign. 🚀
If it’s not comprehensive enough, you can also use the AI prospect finder feature, which automatically finds prospects similar to those in your lists! 🤩
Launch LinkedIn Marketing campaigns
To launch a LinkedIn marketing campaign with Waalaxy, simply choose the sequence that matches your needs from the 📚 sequence library (after preparing your list).
They allow you to easily automate the following actions ✅ :
- Automatically visit and follow LinkedIn profiles.
- Send invitations with or without personalized notes.
- Send automatic LinkedIn messages and e-mails, highly personalized and adapted to your target.
- Define the delay between your actions.
- Track messages and performance in real time.
- Manage your LinkedIn messages replies and follow-ups with Waalaxy Inbox.
In short, Waalaxy works for you. 👇🏼
It’s card-free and it’s free. Once you’ve had a chance to test it out, you’re more than welcome to switch subscriptions to fully exploit the tool’s power.
Transform LinkedIn marketing into B2B multichannel marketing
📣 Multi-channel marketing involves using several communication channels to contact your prospects (defined upstream), in order to maximize your chances of conversion.
This contact strategy adapts to the varied behaviors of LinkedIn users, multiplying the possibilities of response and conversion. 📩 Here, we’ll focus on email, which you can use, for example to :
- Initiate a first contact by email, then reinforce it on LinkedIn to create a more complete and effective approach.
- Or conversely, initiate a first contact on LinkedIn, then try to approach them by email if they don’t respond despite your reminders.
If you contact your prospects solely on LinkedIn, you lose the opportunity to catch future customers by email. And, conversely, if you prospect only by email, you miss out on chances to convert on LinkedIn. Multichannel is therefore an effective, efficient and personalized prospecting strategy in an ultra-competitive environment.
Multichannel prospecting with Waalaxy is basic: just use the Email Finder (to find the email addresses of the prospects on your list) and choose the appropriate sequence for your campaign.
If the email has been found, you can send an email, followed by follow-ups (sending several emails to the same person will therefore increase the probability of opening). 💪🏼
Analyze your LinkedIn Marketing campaigns
To measure and optimize your LinkedIn marketing campaigns, you need to use indicators that give you a clear view of the impact of your actions. 📊
You can already use the LinkedIn Analytics tools and dashboard to track the overall performance of your business and LinkedIn Marketing campaigns. You’ll be able to track key KPIs like 👇🏼 :
- Number of profile views and number of connections made.
- Impressions to analyze post reach.
- Engagement rates (likes, shares, comments),
- Click-through rate (CTR) and cost per lead (CPL) for sponsored campaigns.
- Insights into the characteristics of your audience.
👽 Then, combine this data with the Waalaxy dashboard, which offers precise tracking of your prospecting actions, with performance indicators such as:
- The number of messages or e-mails sent and answered,
- Number of leads generated,
- Number of downloads,
- Response rate,
- Acceptance rate
- Conversion rate.
👀 Together, these tools provide a 360° view of your efforts, allowing you to analyze results to identify the most effective strategies and adjust your campaigns in real time.
Finally, integrate A/B testing sessions to test different approaches (visuals, texts, call-to-actions) and improve the performance of your LinkedIn Marketing campaigns with Waalaxy. 🧪
Conclusion – LinkedIn Marketing
To recap, you now know what LinkedIn marketing is and why it’s essential for :
- 🌟 Increase your visibility and audience on different acquisition channels quickly.
- 📲 Generate leads on LinkedIn thanks to your content.
- 🤝 Find new partnerships for your brand.
- 📊 Measure the impact of your LinkedIn marketing campaigns.
Of course, to get there, you’ll need to focus on the prerequisites for achieving your LinkedIn Marketing marketing goals.
Then, we’ve seen that LinkedIn Marketing can be paid with LinkedIn Ads and free thanks to our 6 LinkedIn marketing strategies and actions to implement. 🤑
🤖 Finally, we recommend automating these actions and launching Waalaxy campaigns (the simplest tool on the market) on LinkedIn and Email, to get even more results.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
🏁 To conclude, here are the answers to the most frequently asked questions on this topic. 👇🏼
How much does a LinkedIn marketing campaign cost?
Launching campaigns and boosting your LinkedIn marketing publications can considerably increase their reach and impact. 💥 It’s an excellent-paid strategy for reaching a targeted audience, increasing your visibility and generating qualified leads.
However, it all depends on your objectives: do you want to boost your company reputation or maximize interactions? One of the advantages of this strategy is its flexible budget. 🤸🏼♂️
📣 With LinkedIn Ads, you can analyze the performance of your campaigns. In terms of cost, promoting a publication on LinkedIn varies according to your budget and bids.
- On average, the cost per lead is between $8 and $95, but it can be higher in highly competitive industries such as technology or financial services.
- At auction, cost-per-click (CPC) ranges from $5 to $12, while cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM) can start at $6.
- If you opt for sponsored messages, the cost can be around $0.80 to $1 per mailing.
To maximize your budget, LinkedIn recommends a minimum of $10 per day for a campaign. However, an effective campaign generally requires an advertising on LinkedIn budget of $5,000 to $10,000 to generate significant results. 😬
For best results, adjust your budget according to your audience and objectives (leads, awareness, engagement) to get a good return on investment. 💰
Is it possible to do B2C LinkedIn marketing?
Yes, it is possible, although the platform is primarily focused on B2B marketing. 💼
B2C opportunities do exist, particularly for sectors such as recruitment, training, coaching, high-end products/services aimed at professionals…
🏆 To be successful, you need to focus on precise marketing segmentation and organic campaigns, notably through the actions mentioned in the article. For example:
- Use advanced search filters to identify profiles by position, sector or location (to match your persona and/or KPI).
- Relying on engaging content and relevant storytelling can also attract a B2C audience.
- Launch campaigns to reach your target and prepare a budget to promote your offers and content.
In short, with the right strategy, LinkedIn can indeed become an effective B2C channel.
That’s it, you know it all, and you’re ready to launch your own LinkedIn marketing strategies! See you soon! 👽
