The CMO’s Guide to LinkedIn Marketing Strategy
- 17 min read
Who Is This Guide For
LinkedIn is one of the most powerful marketing platforms available, but success depends on a blend of knowledge, strategy, and consistency.
Since many Chief Marketing Officers misunderstand LinkedIn and miss out on many of its benefits, we decided to create this guide to help CMOs make the most of it.
We aim to help you understand and overcome some of the main challenges marketers grapple with on LinkedIn — like how to grow your brand effectively, set meaningful goals, use content correctly, build a strong network, and keep up with emerging trends.
Being a CMO is a high-pressure job with a lot at stake, and making a strategic mistake can land squarely on your shoulders. We want to help you avoid that by giving you the skills and knowledge to score consistent wins on LinkedIn.
But why should you trust us?
At Llama Lead Gen, we’re not just another marketing agency.
We're a team of industry experts and LinkedIn alumni, with a wealth of experience in helping businesses like yours succeed on the platform.
Our track record speaks for itself. We’ve managed $10 million in spending, and generated countless qualified leads for our clients. These are the kind of results we can help you achieve.
This guide will give marketing decision-makers like CMOs everything they need to get fantastic, consistent results on LinkedIn.
Why use LinkedIn for marketing?
Let’s face it, Marketers today are spoiled for choice when it comes to advertising platforms. In the world of social media marketing, LinkedIn can sometimes feel like the unsexy loser in a group of trendy, sparkling alternatives.
However, CMOs should ignore LinkedIn at their peril. For B2B brands especially, LinkedIn is the clear winner in several important categories:
It’s deeply associated with professionalism and credibility and seen by many as the go-to place for B2B networking and brand growth
It comes with a ton of powerful segmentation and analytics features, giving you granular control over marketing strategy
96% of B2B marketers are currently using LinkedIn
40% of B2B marketers say LinkedIn drives high-quality leads for them
77% of B2B marketers say they see the best organic results from LinkedIn — more so than any other nonpaid social media platform
How to use this guide to master LinkedIn marketing strategy
The goal of this guide is to give you everything you need to feel confident regarding LinkedIn marketing strategy.
This guide will equip marketing decision-makers like CMOs with everything they need to achieve fantastic, consistent results on LinkedIn. We’ll cover everything from choosing a starting point and defining goals to building a solid presence, using content to maximum effect, and tracking your progress. By the end, you should feel fully prepared and confident in your LinkedIn marketing strategy.
Find out where you are
The first step to improving your LinkedIn marketing strategy is to determine what you’re currently doing, what’s working, and where you can improve.
The best way to start is by thoroughly assessing your current LinkedIn activities. Here’s how to do that:
Work out the key metrics and key performance indicators to measure. These include engagement rates, return on investment, customer satisfaction scores, traffic, and more. (We’ll cover KPIs in more detail later on).
Establish your main goals. What do you want to achieve with your LinkedIn marketing strategy? Keep your goals simple and relevant, and consider both short—and long-term objectives.
Make an inventory of your content. Is it working well? Do you need to take advantage of opportunities (for example, video content)? Can you repurpose some of your existing content?
Look at what your competitors are doing on LinkedIn, especially the successful ones. Find out how you can emulate their success and where you can stand out from them.
Tap into expert advice from a LinkedIn alum
How can CMOs leverage LinkedIn marketing for brand growth?
Brand growth is one of the areas where LinkedIn truly stands out. It’s packed with features to grow your presence and connect with your audience. It’s the go-to B2B platform, and it’s valuable—research shows that LinkedIn users have twice the buying power of the typical online audience. With the right strategy, your brand can thrive on LinkedIn, and we’re here to guide you every step of the way.
If you follow the principles and recommendations in this guide, you’ll have the right foundations to grow your LinkedIn brand. Here’s a quick outline of some best practices:
Understand your target audience and their needs, desires, and pain points on a deep level
Have a solid content strategy that uses different formats and approaches to address your audience’s key concerns and deliver consistent value
Make sure you’re visible to your audience — through paid advertising, content strategy, networking, and omnichannel marketing
Pay attention to relevant metrics and KPIs so you can course-correct when needed and keep moving towards your goals
How to define your LinkedIn marketing goals for a strategic approach
Defining the right goals is critical for your LinkedIn marketing strategy. You’ll need to do this at the very beginning, and if you get it right, it’ll make everything else much more accessible. Let’s first take a look at why goals are so important.
The importance of setting clear objectives for LinkedIn marketing
Without appropriate goals, your LinkedIn marketing strategy is doomed to failure. This is because goals give you the direction and structure to formulate strategy, decide on the KPIs you’ll focus on, allocate your budget, and set priorities.
Clear, shared LinkedIn marketing objectives help your teams stay aligned and work together more easily with minimal confusion or disagreement. Without the right goals, it’s too easy to spin your wheels, waste time and resources, or progress in the wrong direction.
Common LinkedIn marketing goals
How do you set the right LinkedIn marketing goals? LinkedIn breaks down objectives into three main areas: awareness, consideration, and conversion, which map nicely onto the kinds of real-life outcomes marketers aim for.
Awareness goals
Are about getting more attention and impressions of your brand. It’s all about showing up in your audience’s feed, getting them to view your content, and constantly reminding them of who you are and why they should care.
Consideration goals
Go one step further—the aim is to get your audience to interact and engage with your brand on LinkedIn by watching your videos, messaging you, commenting on your posts, and clicking through to your website and landing pages.
Conversion goals
Are the final stage, intending to get your audience members to take action. This could be downloading a lead magnet, signing up to your email list, or purchasing. This is the stage where actual lead generation happens.
Common LinkedIn marketing goals
You should always maintain that your LinkedIn marketing strategy is just one part of your overall business strategy. Everything you do on LinkedIn should tie into your broader business goals and have a clear purpose.
You should set and maintain your LinkedIn goals with this in mind. For each goal, you should be able to clearly explain why it’s in place and what role it plays within the wider context of your business. Think about the other marketing platforms and channels you use—like email, other social platforms, and ads—and how LinkedIn interacts with those.
Strategic coherence is essential here. LinkedIn should fit neatly into your overall business strategy rather than exist as a separate set of objectives.
How to determine key performance indicators (KPIs) for your LinkedIn marketing strategy
One of the most important parts of setting goals is knowing how to track them. You need to be able to check your progress toward each goal at any point so you can identify areas for improvement and make adjustments.
To do this, you’ll need to identify and monitor the right key performance indicators (KPIs). Let’s examine some of the most useful KPIs for tracking your LinkedIn marketing strategy.
Impressions: the number of times your content is seen by your audience, regardless of whether or not they interact with it
Follower growth rate: the rate at which your followers increase in number. This is a good indicator of how your brand presence is growing.
Engagement rate: the percentage of your followers who interact with your brand, for example, by liking, commenting on, or sharing content.
Revenue growth: a measure of all the revenue you’ve generated that can be attributed to your LinkedIn marketing activity.
Website traffic: the amount of traffic that has arrived at your company website from LinkedIn.
Cost per lead: the average price of acquiring a new lead across your LinkedIn paid advertising campaigns.
Remember that these are just a few examples of LinkedIn KPIs. The ones you choose to focus on will depend on your specific goals, marketing strategies, brand, audience, and more. Focusing on the right KPIs allows you to take a data-driven approach to your LinkedIn marketing and track performance more accurately.
The importance of building a solid brand presence on LinkedIn
What makes one brand stand out from all the others on a platform like LinkedIn? The answer is complicated, but brand presence is one of the most critical factors.
Companies with a strong brand presence get noticed by their target audiences. They come across in exactly the way they intend to, quickly and confidently conveying their strong points, skills, and why they’re worth paying attention to.
Building a strong brand presence involves many factors, including visibility, reputation management, branding consistency, content creation, personal branding for leaders and executives, and more.
Creating impactful company pages and personal profiles
One key element of LinkedIn’s brand presence is your company’s pages and profiles. Typically, this is the first port of call for potential followers when they search your company, click on one of your posts, respond to an ad, or reply to a message.
So, you need to make sure your pages are perfect. They must show who you are, what you do, why anyone should care to trust you, and how people can learn more. And they need to look good. Here’s how to make that happen.
Choose a professional photo for both company and personal pages. This should be a transparent, well-formatted logo or professionally taken personal headshot. Don’t forget the cover photo—it should also be well-designed and provide value.
Use your “about” section to briefly tell your brand’s story, answer common questions or misgivings, communicate what you do, and embody your brand’s personality, values, and voice.
Optimize your profile for SEO by including the keywords your audience typically searches for, using relevant images, and sharing content that speaks to your audience’s pain points. The key ingredient here is research — the better you understand your audience and what they want to hear about, the more effective your SEO will be.
Positioning and brand building through content
When building a strong, recognizable brand on LinkedIn, content is one of the best weapons in your arsenal.
Good content gives your brand a voice. It helps you show up on your audience’s radars with authoritative, knowledgable words that establish you as a trusted expert, someone your followers can rely on and want to see more of. And it gets you impressions, traffic, clicks, and conversions.
To build a more substantial brand presence through content, you’ll need to understand your audience and their interest. Find out what they care about and create a content calendar based on those topics. Use thought leadership pieces of varying lengths and formats to build your authority and position yourself as the go-to expert in your field.
Expanding reach and engagement with audience segmentation
One of the areas where LinkedIn stands out for marketers is its impressive audience segmentation options.
Breaking your audience into segments makes it easier to target specific groups with content and marketing that will resonate with them. Instead of just sending out general messaging that connects with some and does nothing for others, you can create more personalized campaigns that get better engagement.
Common ways to segment your audience include age, gender, job title, income level, lifestyle, habits, personality traits, and past buying habits with your brand. Here are some best practices for audience segmentation on LinkedIn:
Research a lot. The better you understand your audience, the easier it will be to segment them and engage with each segment. It might help to define an ideal customer for each segment, create a detailed profile, and run your marketing with that person in mind.
Find out what your competitors are doing and who they are targeting — this can give you a good starting point for demographics to contact and how to approach messaging
Pay close attention to LinkedIn analytics to learn more about how your audience members in different segments are responding to your content and whether they are the people you want to message. This allows you to monitor progress carefully and make adjustments over time.
Gain insights from an ex-LinkedIn employee
LinkedIn content marketing strategies for engagement and growth
You’ve probably already noticed that content is a huge ingredient for success with LinkedIn marketing strategy.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that content can make or break your brand — it doesn’t matter how much ad spend you burn through or how many sparkly new tools you use if your content falls flat and fails to animate your audience.
So, let’s look at how to create content that LinkedIn users love.
Content types and formats for LinkedIn
What content formats should you use on LinkedIn? There are several options here, each with their strengths and weaknesses. Here are the top-performing content types on LinkedIn and what they’re useful for:
Video content is the best-performing format on LinkedIn and is an excellent choice for short, engaging stories and lessons that work well visually.
Short-form articles and posts are a great way to share critical statistics, brand-specific wins, important industry news, and immediate tips and recommendations.
Case studies and success stories are a way to show off your brand’s wins while also providing educational value to your followers.
Longer-form blog articles are a way to dive into more complex topics and explain new ideas to your audience. This helps present your brand as a thought leader with a high level of knowledge.
How to craft messages that resonate with the B2B audience
Marketing to B2B audiences requires a slightly different touch than consumer-based audiences, although there is some debate around the best practices here.
Since LinkedIn is the leading social platform for B2B lead generation, data shows that 80% of B2B social media leads come from LinkedIn. You need to understand how to master LinkedIn messaging for B2B audiences.
Here are some of the ways to do that:
Consistently demonstrate your knowledge. B2B audiences like proof — they want evidence that you know what you’re talking about and can walk the walk. Your content should knowledgeably address high-level problems, sharing value while making it clear that you know your stuff by weaving in real-life examples.
Keep it professional but not dry. B2B doesn’t mean boring. Your content should be experienced and well-written, but it doesn’t need to be mind-numbingly formal and dull for most audiences. Write like a human, not a robot, and don’t feel the need to stuff your posts full of jargon and buzzwords.
Remember, your reader is a human with emotions. A typical piece of lore is that B2C messaging is based on emotion while B2B is based on facts. There’s a grain of truth to this, but you’re still writing to people. Your B2B content should still focus on human pain points like fear of failure, stress, and a desire to improve.
Content strategies for LinkedIn lead generation
Your LinkedIn content can be a fantastic lead-generation tool, but many brands must capitalize on this opportunity. Follow these steps to turn your LinkedIn content strategy into a lead-generation machine.
Create and share relevant, valuable content regularly. Use different formats, and always focus on directly addressing your audience’s pain points and areas of interest.
Give your reader something to do. By including an email sign-up form, landing page link, or lead magnet in your content, your readers can easily identify themselves as leads.
Build strong landing pages and a killer website. When your readers follow your content's calls to action, ensure they’re impressed by where they end up. This will make or break their next decision and boost your lead generation efforts.
How to measure LinkedIn content performance
How do you know your LinkedIn content is working as intended? The good news is that LinkedIn comes with some elegant analytics features to help you monitor your content’s performance across multiple key metrics.
To access this feature, click the “Me” section at the top of your homepage, navigate to “Manage” and then go to “Posts and Activity”.
🦙 Llama Tip: This will show you a breakdown of your posts and articles and the ability to view information like impressions, views, reactions, comments, and reposts. You can also see a breakdown of the people interacting with your content and filter them according to their job title, industry, company size, and location.
Integrating LinkedIn marketing into your broader marketing and sales strategy
For most brands, LinkedIn is just one piece of their overall marketing puzzle. For best results, you need to ensure that your LinkedIn marketing strategy works alongside all your other channels.
This kind of omnichannel marketing integration helps you take a more holistic approach to marketing and build successful cross-platform content strategies. Instead of seeing marketing as many separate efforts across different channels, you can approach it as one single process with multiple integrated campaigns all working together.
LinkedIn advertising strategies every CMO needs to know
Paid advertising is yet another area where LinkedIn shines. There’s no right way to use LinkedIn for advertising — you can take multiple approaches, and everything can be highly successful if done correctly.
In this section, we’ll look at some common approaches to LinkedIn ad campaigns, different advertising objectives on LinkedIn, ad analytics and optimization, and ad targeting strategies.
1
The full-funnel LinkedIn marketing approach
On LinkedIn, full-funnel marketing involves using different techniques and strategies to target leads at various stages of their buying journey. Here’s how it works:
For leads at the top of the funnel who are still primarily unfamiliar with your brand, you’ll want to rely on broad yet valuable content to show your readers who you are, build trust and authority, and lay the foundations for a relationship.
Your focus should be on nurturing middle-funnel leads. Use more niche-specific content to give them regular value and gradually warm them up as they approach becoming customers.
At the bottom of the funnel, you can use more persuasive, sales-aligned content to give your readers that final nudge to make a buying decision
A full-funnel marketing strategy works best when you understand the typical customer journey for your leads. Remember that everyone is at a different point on the customer journey, from awareness to conversion on LinkedIn, so you should know where your leads are and what approach to take with each one.
2
Most effective LinkedIn ad formats depending on your campaign goals
There are many different ad formats you can use on LinkedIn, depending on your campaign goals. Here are some of the best ad formats for different objectives.
Some of the most common goals with LinkedIn advertising are building brand awareness, increasing your website visits, driving more engagement, getting more conversions, lead generation, and growing your revenue.
Common ad types are:
- Single image ads: ads based around a single image and caption.
- Carousel image ads: a series of images with a caption.
- Video ads: an ad built around a piece of video content.
- Sponsored message ads: an ad that looks like a personal message in the target’s inbox.
🦙 Llama Tip: Most of these ad formats will work with most of the above goals. Specific goals — like increasing your video views — will require a more specific approach involving many video ads.
3
Budget allocation strategies for LinkedIn marketing campaigns
You’ll need to think about budget allocation strategies to get the most out of your LinkedIn ad campaigns.
Budget planning allows you to stretch your resources further, using budget optimization techniques to do more cost-effective marketing and connect with more of your audience members without breaking the bank.
LinkedIn has several built-in features to make budget allocation easier, such as:
Schedule selection You can set a recurring daily budget or set fixed start and end dates. The minimum daily spend is $10, and the minimum lifetime budget is $100.
Lifetime pacing this feature predicts the activity on LinkedIn over a week and distributes your spend accordingly to optimize your budget.
Defaults this is where LinkedIn will suggest some default spending options to help you get the best results from your budget.
What metrics should CMOs focus on to measure the success of LinkedIn ads?
How do you know your ads are performing well? As usual, LinkedIn has some excellent analytics features to help you track the performance of your advertising campaigns, identify issues, and make adjustments to improve.
Let’s take a look at some of the most crucial ad success metrics:
Ad clicks: a measure of how many people are clicking your ads.
Click-through-rate (CTR): the percentage of people clicking through your ads to learn more.
The number of likes, comments, and shares on your ads
Cost-per-acquisition: the amount you’re spending, on average, to acquire a new lead through your LinkedIn ad campaign.
Campaign engagement measures how many people interact with your campaign's ads. It can be calculated as the total number or percentage of those who saw the ad.
Can LinkedIn advertising be integrated into a broader omnichannel strategy?
LinkedIn advertising works best as part of a broader omnichannel marketing strategy. By integrating LinkedIn with your other marketing channels, you can expand your reach, share data and insights with other channels through cross-channel analytics, build more cohesive brand messaging, and give your audience members a more unified customer experience.
Tap into expert advice from a LinkedIn alum
Building and nurturing LinkedIn communities for long-term success
LinkedIn is, at its core, a social networking platform. This makes it perfect for building communities and nurturing them over long periods to forge solid and lasting relationships with your audience.
Techniques for customer retention and loyalty via LinkedIn
Building a community on LinkedIn is all about loyalty. You want to cultivate a devoted army of followers, hanging on your every word, who will eagerly wait for your next post and share your thoughts with their entire network.
Here are some of the best ways to achieve that:
Post regularly, keep your content relevant to your audience, and encourage engagement and interaction in your comments. Reply to your commenters and start conversations.
Build communities like LinkedIn groups focused on helping your audience and encouraging discussion, and stay active and engaged in them
Host regular events, for example, live Q&A sessions via LinkedIn Live
Reward loyal and engaged customers with exclusive content and perks such as discounts
Using LinkedIn communities for brand loyalty and advocacy
LinkedIn communities and groups can be fantastic places to build your audience and benefit from word-of-mouth marketing and community-driven branding.
The best route to success here is to constantly encourage and reward participation. Create active groups, start discussions, respond to other members, and start advocacy programs that reward your audience for promoting your brand.
If you can gradually build a group of enthusiastic brand advocates, they will provide you with highly credible, free marketing for a long time.
Current trends and the future of LinkedIn marketing
If you want your LinkedIn marketing strategy to succeed long-term, you must pay attention to current and emerging trends.
New marketing tools and technological advancements appear every day, and brands that can quickly identify these opportunities and take advantage of them will be rewarded. You should always make an effort to keep your finger on the pulse of LinkedIn marketing so you can quickly recognize and adopt new trends as they burst onto the scene.
Incorporating AI and machine learning into your LinkedIn marketing strategy
It’s hard to think of a more famous and significant marketing trend than AI. While some of the hype is just that, much of the excitement around AI and machine learning is entirely justified. These tools can be enormously valuable for LinkedIn marketers.
Here are just some of the ways you can use AI and machine learning in your LinkedIn marketing strategy:
AI-driven predictive analytics to forecast trends and plan future campaigns and activities
AI-driven predictive analytics to forecast trends and plan future campaigns and activities
AI-driven content personalization to recommend specific content to your audience members based on their interests and demographics
Machine learning analytics to identify patterns and segment your audience more precisely
Next steps & resources
So, what’s next? LinkedIn has a ton of potential for marketers, especially those in the B2B space. If you made it this far, you now have a solid foundation of knowledge about LinkedIn marketing strategy, and it’s time to put what you’ve learned into practice and get to work!
If you can, we recommend working with a team of LinkedIn experts to gain clear direction and get your LinkedIn strategy moving. To book a call with our leader, former LinkedIn member Adam, click here.
If you want to explore LinkedIn marketing strategy even further, check out our Ultimate Guide to LinkedIn Marketing and a case study of how we used LinkedIn to run a COVID-19 education campaign.
Adam Yaeger
Adam Yaeger
