LinkedIn was built for people who want to connect with a professional network.
Unlike other social platforms, you open LinkedIn with a completely different mindset where you market your own services. You may market your expertise as an agency owner, business, or a marketer but for that you need a solid marketing strategy.
People who are on LinkedIn are only there to grow their network & learn from experts as to how they can reach their business goals.
Are you one of them?
Well, then you’re at the right place.
In this blog, I’ll talk you through 8 steps that can help you achieve your goals.
Let’s start designing your LinkedIn marketing Strategy 2022:
Step 1: Know Your Customer Avatar
While designing & publishing your LinkedIn post, what is the first thing that comes to your mind?
Who is your potential audience?
Correct? Perfect.
It is extremely crucial to know & understand your ideal viewer & then design your posts accordingly. If you don’t understand that, you might end up spending thousands of pounds on marketing & still getting zero response.
So, how can you identify the audience you are marketing to?
There is a Customer Avatar Worksheet that we use to figure out the goals, values, morals, pain points, challenges & more of their customer avatars.
This worksheet is very helpful when you have any doubts in your mind as to what should you be posting into “Clearly I need to post this”.
This converts your viewers into subscribers & conversions making a huge difference in your overall funnel.
Step 2: Optimize Your Profile to Answer these Questions
When anyone visits your LinkedIn profile, he/she is looking to answer some question for themselves that will help them decide whether you’re going to be the right person for the right job on not.
These questions include:
- Will this person be any useful for me?
- In this person credible?
- Will an interaction with this person be any fruitful?
Keeping these questions in mind, you need to design & optimize your profile to make sure that you’re answering the queries that your visitors may have.
This will make your visitors to follow you & engage with you.
Step 3: Grow Your Network Strategically
LinkedIn is all about professional networking so you need to be very careful when building your network on LinkedIn.
It doesn’t matter if you’re receiving countless requests. You should be very particular about choosing which ones to accept.
Remember that your goal is to build a network strategically & here I’ll break that strategy down into types of readers:
1. Thought Leaders
Thought leaders are your direct & Indirect Competitors. It is very important to stay updated with what your competitors are doing so you can always stay a few steps ahead.
2. Clients
You’re only investing your time on LinkedIn because expecting an ROI from that. The goal is to get people talking about you & your business and eventually getting your prospects to engage with you.
Step 4: Implement a Content Strategy
You must have experienced that growing on LinkedIn is hard but it isn’t impossible.
There was a time when organic content had far more reach than it is now so you just have to be sure with what you’re doing & come in with a strategy that doesn’t keep your fingers crossed.
How do you do that?
First of all, you need to find the topic that your audience is interested in & then develop your content on that basis. Here are a few content-pillar suggestions that you can use after choosing your topic.
A freelance e-commerce marketer’s content pillars will be:
1. The future of e-commerce marketing based on technology & trends.
2. Strategies for e-commerce marketing (as proven with social proof)
3. Your marketing tool stack
With this, you lay the foundation of branding your business. It helps your audience understand what is it going to be like working with you.
Step 5: Create Value in Your Cold Messages
It is always good to use a buyer-first selling approach.
This means that when anyone sends you a message, you reply them with personalized messages instead of templatized, unimpressive messages.
This gives your reader a feeling that you didn’t just blast out hundreds of messages. Instead, you took your time to make sure your message adds a great value to your lead before asking what the job is.
This is the best way to connect with your prospects.
Step 6: Lean into Your FREE Sales People
Have you ever realized who your best salesperson is?
Yes? Great!
No? Okay here’s a hint.
They have probably never taken a sales course, haven’t ever spent time on sales calls & haven’t even touched a CRM.
Yes! Your existing customers.
They are the ones who have experienced your work & are spreading the word like wild fire.
You can easily reach out to them & ask if they know anyone who needs your services.
If they do, you can give them a commission on that & they’d bring in more customers next time.
Step 7: Use a CRM Right Away
Are you single handedly keeping a track of all your outbound & inbound leads?
Yes? That’s cool.
But, how long can you keep up with that?
Most of the marketers learnt it the hard way that you really need a CRM to keep a track of all your conversions or you’ll lose track of them at a later stage.
I highly recommend that you set up a CRM system right away because you’ll need it in step 8 which is the most important step of this strategy.
Step 8: Split Test & Optimize your Inbound & Outbound Messages
A/B Testing is a marketer’s favorite activity.
It is essentially an experiment where two or more variants of a page are shown to users & statistical analysis is used to determine which variation performs better for your conversion goal.
Thus, it is the foundation of any scalable marketing strategy which is why you need to set up your CRM system.
Once your CRM is set, you’ll be able to split test & optimize the messages you’re sending. You can then check how people are reacting to your different posts.
This is exactly what the marketers do. They test different ways of marketing to conclude which one works best for your business.
Linked Marketing with POW
As discussed earlier in this blog, LinkedIn has a completely different audience than other social platforms.
Everyone is there to build a professional network, find opportunities & meet people who could change their business.
This is why your LinkedIn content can prove to be the highest converting part of your social media marketing, if done correctly!
Here’s a quick summary of all the 8 simple steps of LinkedIn Marketing Strategy 2022:
1. Know Your Customer Avatar
2. Optimize Your Profile to Answer These Questions
3. Grow Your Network Strategically
4. Choose Your Content Pillars
5. Create Value in Your Cold Messages
6. Lean Into Your *Free* Sales People
7. Use a CRM Right Away
8. Split test and optimize your inbound and outbound messages
