Why Consumer Brands Must Commit to LinkedIn Marketing, Too

Demystifying the LinkedIn Algorithm for B2C and B2B Brands: Your Guide to Marketing and Advertising on LinkedIn

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Philip Mandelbaum
07/17/2023

A 3D rendering of a light-blue human arm and hand in the thumbs-up position (symbolizing the LinkedIn 'like' icon), over a dark blue background

Everyone knows LinkedIn is the leading social media platform for professional networking and learning, job applications, and B2B marketing, advertising and lead generation. But what about B2C? Can consumer brands leverage the LinkedIn algorithm and LinkedIn Campaign Manager to identify, engage with and convert their target audiences? In short, absolutely. As a result of LinkedIn’s long-standing reputation as a digital mecca for business-to-business communications, the world’s largest professional network represents a massive opportunity specifically for consumer brands: with only 4% of all B2C marketers rating LinkedIn their current go-to site, there's more ROI on the table on LinkedIn than on any other social media platform. LinkedIn leads in lead generation, with a visitor-to-lead conversion rate almost 300% higher than Facebook or Twitter; LinkedIn marketing produces 200% higher conversion rates and 200% higher engagement rates than other social media apps; and LinkedIn advertising delivers a 200% to 300% increase in brand attributions and 33% increase in purchase intent.

A Black social media marketer working remotely from home, sitting on his couch, holding up his iPad, displaying the LinkedIn Sales Navigator landing page

10 LinkedIn Statistics Digital Marketers Can’t Ignore

Nearly six in 10 LinkedIn users are between the ages of 25 and 34, the tech-savvy, decision-making, mid-career demographic most commonly targeted by brands
More than 20% of the world’s nearly two million millennials — the largest generation of avid online shoppers and (future) decision makers — use LinkedIn
80% of LinkedIn users are senior-level influencers, decision makers and C-suiters
LinkedIn users have 200% more buying power than the average online audience
Six in 10 LinkedIn users are actively looking for insights
More than 70% of consumers say they’re more likely to consider a new brand if they hear about it first on LinkedIn
More than nine in 10 C-suite executives rate LinkedIn their favorite app for relevant content
With a LinkedIn ad, you can reach more than one billion people — at a cost 28% lower than advertising on Google
After advertising on LinkedIn, 92% of brands are seen as “more professional,” 74% as “more intelligent,” 59% as “more respectable,” and 50% as “higher quality,” resulting in a 10% to 15% increase in short-term sales performance
By 2024, LinkedIn is projected to capture nearly 50% of all display ad spending and 25% of all digital ad spending

Point blank: Social media is the best place for brands to connect with their target audiences, build brand awareness, boost online engagement and generate leads — and LinkedIn is not only the undisputed king of B2B marketing, it’s also one of the best ROI opportunities for consumer brands and digital advertisers.

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What is LinkedIn and how does it work?

Founded in 2002, launched the following year and now owned by Microsoft, LinkedIn has more than 900 million registered members, including 180 million senior-level influencers, more than 65 million decision makers and more than 10 million C-suiters; 69% of the nearly 140 million US LinkedIn members use the platform every single day, with another 15% using it at least several times a week.

Unlike other social media apps, designed primarily for sharing personal, political and comical posts with friends and family, LinkedIn is designed for professionals. The primary reason people use LinkedIn is to search for jobs, gain exposure to new brands, and network with hiring managers and other professionals. The most popular topics on LinkedIn are remote work, work culture, empathy and leadership, innovation, management, digital marketing, futurism, startups, social media, sustainability, and personal branding. Across age groups, geographies, industries and professions, the income of the average LinkedIn user stands at nearly $50,000 per year, or nearly 300% higher than the global average, with 60% of LinkedIn users earning at least $100,000.

According to a July 16, 2023, Google search generative experience (SGE), LinkedIn is also unique in that the user profile reads similarly to an online resume; LinkedIn members usually only connect with people they know or to whom they’ve been introduced; the LinkedIn profile picture is typically a professional headshot or brand logo; and “there’s little appetite for trivial or personal sharing.” Indeed, unlike on other social media apps where brands must often rely heavily on influencers for promotion, users on LinkedIn are actually looking for industry insights, brand launches and promotions, new products and services, and partnership opportunities.

Plus, LinkedIn continues to innovate, with LinkedIn Sales Navigator, LinkedIn Newsletters, LinkedIn Events, LinkedIn Live, LinkedIn Learning, LinkedIn Top Voices, LinkedIn Marketing Labs, LinkedIn Marketing Partners, LinkedIn Recruiter, and more.

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What is LinkedIn marketing?

Ninety-six percent of B2B marketers use LinkedIn for organic social media marketing, and 80% use LinkedIn Ads. Only 4% of B2C marketers, on the other hand, go to LinkedIn to promote their consumer brand. In other words, if you’re a B2B marketer, you have tight competition — and a near requirement to compete for those coveted impressions, likes, comments and leads; and if you’re a B2C marketer, you have virtually no competition — and a near requirement to take advantage of this unprecedented opportunity.

LinkedIn marketing incorporates all the organic and paid social media marketing strategies and tactics your brand and key public-facing figures employ specifically on LinkedIn to attract and convert potential customers and business partners.

Marketing on LinkedIn can (and usually should) include:

Brand Profile page, Careers page, Showcase pages (for spotlighting “your unique brands, business units, or initiatives”), and Product pages (for building “product presence” and improving buyer discoverability)
Member Profile pages for your CEO, CMO, CXO, CTO, Chief Diversity Officer and other key public-facing figures
Organic posts, including text-only posts, single-image posts, multi-image posts, native videos, image carousels, video carousels, documents, polls, and celebrations
LinkedIn Publishing, including articles and newsletters
Events, live or recorded, on or off platform
LinkedIn Ads for awareness, consideration and conversion, including Sponsored Content, Sponsored Messaging, Dynamic Ads, and Text Ads
Sales Navigator, to “build trusted relationships that lead to increased sales performance”
Groups, by creating your own branded group and/or joining and posting to applicable industry-specific groups owned by others
Collaborative articles, or real-time topical thought leadership opportunities presented in your feed
LinkedIn Talent Solutions, to optimize your LinkedIn recruitment marketing
Classes and curricula, for thought leadership development and recruitment marketing
Influencer marketing and user-generated content

If you’re wondering how to optimize your marketing and advertising on LinkedIn, follow my top tips.

What is a LinkedIn marketing strategy?

A LinkedIn marketing strategy includes your target audience(s), goals, KPIs, editorial plan, content calendar and content development and distribution processes and procedures, as well as the campaigns you’ll run and the AI and other martech you’ll use to achieve your goals. There are seven steps to developing and optimizing a LinkedIn marketing strategy that works.

7 Steps to Developing Your LinkedIn Marketing Strategy

1. Define Your Audience(s)

Here’s how to find yours:

Use your zero-, first- and third-party data to learn as much as you can about your existing customers, subscribers, website users and LinkedIn followers
Use any feedback your LinkedIn marketing managers and coordinators may have logged to identify gaps and opportunities
Use surveys and focus groups to learn more about what customers, prospects and the general public think of your brand, products/services, and LinkedIn presence
Develop user personas, including personal background, professional background, user environment, preferred content types, preferred devices, preferred communication methods, attitudes, interests, motivations, needs, goals and pain points, buying motivation(s), and buying scenarios
Map out the customer journey, identifying all the different paths a LinkedIn user might take toward making a purchase; the thoughts, feelings and actions of your prospects and customers at each stage of the customer lifecycle; and how you’ve been using LinkedIn to recruit, retain, upsell and/or partner with customers
Use a CDP and/or DXP to organize and manage all your customers and prospects, segment audiences based on your user personas, and improve the empathy and personalization exhibited in your marketing on LinkedIn

2. Establish Your LinkedIn Marketing Goals

To ensure clear direction for your LinkedIn marketing strategy:

Define goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-based (SMART)
Start with your overall business goals, proceed to your long-term strategic marketing goals, move on to your social media marketing goals, and conclude with your LinkedIn- and campaign-specific goals
Identify the social media marketing KPIs against which you’ll measure your LinkedIn campaign performance — found exclusively in the full report, The Ultimate Guide to Social Media Marketing
Outline your expectations for each stage of the customer journey

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3. Conduct a Competitive Analysis

To understand what your competitors are doing well or poorly on LinkedIn, and identify successful tactics you can incorporate into your social media strategy:

Use your SEO tool, apps like Glassdoor and the various social media platforms to identify your key competitors
Confirm the social media platforms used by your key competitors
Search your competitors’ names, account handles and relevant hashtags on LinkedIn to determine what they’re sharing and how their audience and the public are responding (social listening)
Track your competitors’ LinkedIn performance, using your predefined KPIs
Track characteristics of your competitors’ behaviors on LinkedIn, including what, when and how often they post
Focus on your top five competitors, and audit their most popular and most engaged followers, as well as any influencers or users who generate content for their brand
Benchmark your LinkedIn marketing performance against the competition
Perform a SWOT analysis, determining your LinkedIn strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats
Identify gaps in your existing LinkedIn strategy
Strategize methods for addressing any gaps, weaknesses, threats or opportunities

4. Audit Your LinkedIn Account, Content and Campaigns

Once you’ve clarified who you’re targeting and what you hope to achieve with your marketing on LinkedIn, look back at what you’ve already created — and how it performed — to identify trends and determine what can and should be repurposed.

Start by asking yourself:

Which types of LinkedIn content have and have not worked?
Which types of LinkedIn campaigns have and have not worked?
Which of our user personas have been most and least engaged?
Which of our user personas have been most likely and least likely to convert to customers?
Who are our most and least valuable business and influencer partners? (Learn more about influencer marketing.)
How does our LinkedIn presence compare to that of our competitors?

Then, perform a Keep, Kill, Refresh on your LinkedIn content marketing and paid and organic campaigns, as follows:

Content

Delete any off-brand, inaccurate, stale or erroneous content (Kill)
Properly name, file and store any content that can be reused as is (Keep)
Optimize any content that could provide added value if updated and enhanced (Refresh)

Campaigns

Replicate any campaigns that performed particularly well (Keep)
Optimize any campaigns that could perform even better with behaviorally informed edits and enhancements (Refresh)
Archive any past campaigns that underperformed (Kill)

5. Outline Your LinkedIn Content Development and Distribution Responsibilities, Processes and Procedures

Before you begin planning and then creating custom content for LinkedIn, you need to secure buy-in from all parties on how your content will be produced and disseminated. Specifically:

Who are our LinkedIn content marketing strategists?
Who are our LinkedIn content creators? Writers? Graphic designers? Video editors?
Who are our partner content creators, including LinkedIn influencers, other brands and customers who provide user-generated content?
Who are our LinkedIn content reviewers?
Who are our LinkedIn marketing managers?
Who are our LinkedIn marketing coordinators?
Who are our LinkedIn data and performance analysts?
How are the content themes and subjects determined?
What types of content are being created? And what unique step(s) does each type require?
How are deadlines determined?
At what cadence is the content released?
How is content posted? Do we use a social media marketing platform or other third-party AI-powered social media app? (I list my preferred social media martech solutions in The Ultimate Guide to Social Media Marketing.)
What type of project management style are we adopting (e.g., agile)?
What project management software are we using (e.g., JIRA, for agile)?

6. Develop Your LinkedIn Editorial Plan and Content Calendar

Finally, you can flesh out your LinkedIn marketing ideas, based on your findings from each of the preceding steps.

Be sure to supplement what the customer data and platform and web analytics tell you by:

Interviewing internal stakeholders on trends, topics and techniques they think most appeal to your LinkedIn audience
Asking your LinkedIn followers — and, in particular, your most engaged followers — what inspired them to follow you and engage with or share your content
Asking your customers what, if anything, you’ve done on LinkedIn that has contributed to them making a decision to purchase your product or service
Asking your partner LinkedIn influencers what it is about your brand, products/services, values or LinkedIn presence that inspired them to work with you
Asking past LinkedIn followers and customers what it is about your brand, products/services, values or social media presence that inspired them to unfollow you or stop spending

Once you’ve finalized your editorial plan, you can create your LinkedIn content calendar.

Use the project management software you selected earlier to build out a master calendar, as well as the timeline for each campaign, project and assignment, assigning all roles from development to approval and from distribution to monitoring, analysis, iteration and optimization.

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The Top 20 LinkedIn Tips for Marketers

LinkedIn is a business- and employment-focused social media platform, so ensure professionalism, consistency and authenticity across all brand and employee actions across the site
Create a brand account and, to optimize, “establish presence” (by including industry, company size, description, logo, commitments, and work email domain); “increase reach” (by including website URL and location, inviting your network to follow, and following relevant pages); and “drive engagement” (by including a custom CTA button and relevant hashtags, as well as posting and automatically sharing open roles)
To enhance your brand profile, add a careers page, product pages and showcase pages to spotlight your work culture, unique offerings, and key business lines
Create a branded group for your staff and executives, business partners, industry thought leaders, brand ambassadors (influencers), loyalists (customers), prospects and the media for sharing thought leadership (not for self promotion)
Optimize the personal professional profile account of the face(s) of your organization, whether that’s your CEO, CIO, CMO and/or PR head, by selecting Creator Mode and adding the topics (hashtags) they most talk about; ensuring to include a professional headshot for their profile picture, a branded and visually stunning header image, an attention-grabbing headline (not merely their latest job title), a summary that tells their professional story with SEO keywords, their social media handles and professional contact information, their skills, certifications and educational background, their nonprofit and board experience, their publications and, of course, their professional background, including all their responsibilities and the skills they leverage for your organization; and, finally, soliciting recommendations about their work with your organization to enhance the brand’s and their personal profiles
Develop how-to and best-practice guides for your C-suite to develop and publish thought leadership content, and encourage regular posting
Establish internal processes for the internal distribution of all brand content, and use gamification to facilitate the sharing of and engagement with brand content
Establish internal brand guidelines for how all employee accounts should refer to your organization on their profile pages and in their posts, public comments and private messages
Establish processes for employees to use a shared app (like Jira, Trello, Asana, Notion, or even Slack or Microsoft Teams) to add their LinkedIn articles and posts, and using gamification to facilitate the sharing of co-worker content
Use the LinkedIn Publisher tool, create a Newsletter, and split test publishing weekly, bi-weekly and monthly
Split test posting often (once or twice a day) versus regularly (once a week), as debate continues regarding the optimal frequency/cadence
Post a variety of content, including video (brand and product introductory videos, case studies, behind the scenes shorts, interviews with employees and executives, thematic video series, etc.), carousel posts, articles (posts with 1,900 or more words perform best), LinkedIn Live appearances, event promotion, polls, thought leadership posts, infographics, brand-aligned memes, product launches and feature enhancements, company wins and milestones, employee and executive spotlights, lead-generation posts featuring downloadable ebooks, third-party content from business partners and friends, original research, and influencer marketing and user-generated content
In posts, use a killer first line, break up text with spacing or symbols, use emojis, use hashtags (no more than three), tag relevant brands and individuals, and conclude with a question or call to action
In posts, consider using a graphic or video upload (instead of an external link), referring to the external link at the bottom of the post, and then posting the actual link in the comments section (preferential to LinkedIn algorithm); posts with images generate 200% more engagement; users are 2,000% more likely to share a post with a video
Repost the best content from your thought leaders, staff, influencers and customers
Always engage in the comments section of your posts and articles — and try to drum up comments in the first 60 minutes following publication — to boost your reach
Share your content in Groups, and encourage your employees to do the same
Monitor and engage in public conversation on trending hashtags and topics, and encourage your internal thought leaders (the faces of your organization) to do the same
Use LinkedIn Marketing Solutions to run ads, using LinkedIn’s “objective” option to guide you, and take advantage of LinkedIn’s advanced analytics to test, iterate and optimize
Consider developing LinkedIn Learning content in your areas of expertise, to expand your reputation as thought leaders and demonstrate your employee advancement opportunities

7. Monitor, Analyze, Report, Iterate, and Optimize

Based on the KPIs you’ve identified as being most appropriate for your organic and paid efforts, your analysts should be constantly monitoring your LinkedIn campaign performance and providing reporting to your LinkedIn marketing strategists, managers and coordinators to inform ongoing iterations and optimizations.

The truth is: You can always split-test something else. And you can always optimize further.

Before you get started, be sure you’re set up to measure performance against the most important metrics — available now, if you download the full report, The Ultimate Guide to Social Media Marketing.