Why Your LinkedIn Outreach Is Not Working

No, I didn’t read your Sponsored message. I didn’t read your inMail. I didn’t read your LinkedIn Offer. And that was before LinkedIn added its “new and improved messaging experience for members,” separating “focused” from “other” messages in your inbox. 

In 2022, private conversations increased nearly 20%, making it even more difficult for LinkedIn users to sift through the 21 direct messages sent every second on the world’s leading networking app. Internally, we’ve been talking about LinkedIn inbox clutter for years, and I’m sure I’ve missed some important offers. This is why, in late 2022, after testing with a beta group, LinkedIn rolled out its Focused Inbox — and improved anti-spam measures — to all 875-million members. Henceforth, users can almost completely avoid unwanted or unsolicited messages, including all paid DMs. (Consumers, rejoice!)

Of course, this created new hurdles for the nearly 60-million businesses that use LinkedIn to connect with consumers (and workers and other businesses). The same could be said for in-app traffic growing by more than 1/3 every year, as well as Twitter losing 50 of its top 100 advertisers within the first six months of Elon Musk’s purchase; many of these so-called socially conscious megacorps are bringing their hundreds of millions of ad dollars per year to LinkedIn. 

Now imagine if Coca Cola, General Motors, General Mills, AT&T, CNN and Merck put all their ad dollars into attention-grabbing, strategic marketing content placed all around your organic posts in your followers’ and employees’ feeds and on their homepages. If you don’t represent a Fortune 100 company, this hypothetical is most likely a little disconcerting. But don’t worry, there are only 100 companies that made that list, and the rest are in the same proverbial boat as yours.

A boat that isn’t sinking. As Ingrid Lunden wrote in TechCrunch on December 1, 2022, “It’s a challenge to think of how LinkedIn will use its AI algorithms, formidable as they are, to separate what you really want to see out of all of that, spam or just otherwise unwanted contact.” But there are two reasons not worry:

1. The Focused Inbox is already working (I have proof)
2. DMs are a waste of money — and have been for years

^{A screengrab of my LinkedIn inbox (with names hidden)}

So, why is this a reason not to worry? Because LinkedIn offers many other advertising and content marketing options, designed (as noted above) to pull the consumer’s eyes and mouse toward your paid ads/content. From the LinkedIn Ads Guide, you can see that the LinkedIn “marketing solutions” are similar to what is offered on Facebook; the difference is that Facebook is for throwback family photos while LinkedIn is for serious business.

But before we talk about the LinkedIn ad types, let’s discuss why your LinkedIn marketing strategy must be prioritized for at least the remainder of the 2020s.

Who’s on LinkedIn? And What Does It Mean for Our Social Media, Content and 360-Degree Digital Marketing Strategies?

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. Additionally, 20.4% of the world’s 1.8-million millennials — the largest generation of avid online shoppers and (future) decision makers — use the platform.

Across age groups and geographies, the average income stands at nearly $50,000 per year, or nearly 300% more than the global average, with 60% of LinkedIn users earning at least $100,000. There are more than 180-million senior-level influencers, more than 65-million decision makers, and more than 10-million C-suiters; in fact, four out of five LinkedIn members can make rulings on behalf of their business.

In other words, your audience on LinkedIn comprises professionals with the money and the freedom to deliver unparalleled ROI.

And that’s not all: 

• 6 in 10 LinkedIn users are actively looking for insights
• 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
• LinkedIn leads in lead generation, with a visitor-to-lead conversion rate almost 300% higher than Facebook or Twitter
• With a LinkedIn ad, you can reach more than one-billion people — at a cost 28% lower than advertising on Google
• Brands see a 200% to 300% increase in brand attributions when advertising on LinkedIn
• Brands experience a 33% increase in purchase intent stemming from LinkedIn ad exposure
• There's more ROI on the table on LinkedIn than on any other social media platform, with only 4% of all B2C marketers rating LinkedIn their go-to site

How to Win on LinkedIn

Needless to say, LinkedIn is more than a job site; there are 15 times more content impressions than job postings. The duty of your digital marketing team is to determine how to use LinkedIn to outperform all the other brands also marketing and advertising on the app.

The Top 20 Tips for Optimizing Your LinkedIn Marketing and LinkedIn Advertising

1. Create a brand page, and use it as a hub for all (potential) customers and employees.

2. Post at least three times a week, and no more than twice a day.

(Fewer times per week or more times per day will decrease engagement/conversions.)

3. Don’t schedule posts.

(There’s no reason not to be as timely as possible, when you’re only posting a few times a week.)

4. Do use your social media management software for its advanced real-time and historical analytics.

(Find the best options here.)

5. Do use your CDP to ensure all LinkedIn user/lead data is properly collected, standardized and validated.

(Find the best options here.)

6. Create a newsletter, and publish one value-add (non-promotional) article per week.

(Articles are posted in the feed and are also emailed to subscribers.)

7. Run regular polls to increase engagement, demonstrate your brand values, and collect valuable user information.

8. Celebrate occasions — recognizing employees, welcoming new team members, and announcing new product launches and brand initiatives — to enhance and showcase your employee experience, increase brand awareness, and generate more leads.

9. Post images and videos.

(Posts with images generate 200% more engagement; users are 2,000% more likely to share a post with a video.) 

10. Post long-form content (e.g., your weekly article).

(Posts with 1,900 or more words perform best.)

^{A screengrab of a long-form LinkedIn article}

11. Capitalize on trending topics to stay up to date on developing stories, access diverse perspectives, and join the conversation, demonstrating your expertise.

12. Host events to further demonstrate your expertise, increase engagement, generate leads, and deepen your relationships;

• When scheduling your event, select the “with registration” option to generate leads from the form signups
• Promote the event with the optional free and paid tools (a basic LinkedIn event post is designed to stand out from the rest of the user feed)
• Post on the event page with increasing frequency — incorporating gamification elements (or at least surveys or questions) whenever possible — to increase anticipation and buzz leading up to the event
• Use the post-event polling option to deliver and demonstrate customer centricity and gather valuable user/lead data

13. Go live to create excitement, announcing new products and special deals, and promote the exclusivity of these (rare) occurrences.

14. Assign a social media marketing manager from your digital marketing team to:

• Develop your LinkedIn marketing strategy
• Coordinate with a digital advertising specialist to develop your LinkedIn advertising strategy
• Create and manage the LinkedIn editorial calendar for production and publication
• Coordinate with your content creators to produce custom content for LinkedIn ads, organic posts, event banners, etc. 
• Coordinate with your events marketing manager to develop and implement event concepts
• Coordinate with your marketing data analyst to collect, analyze and report on LinkedIn performance

15. Assign a social media coordinator to: 

• Publish brand content
• Create and manage event listings
• Engage with competitors and other brands 
• Communicate trending topics to the content team

16. Assign a community manager to: 

• Respond to comments
• Answer tech and support questions
• Escalate problems and opportunities as necessary
• Coordinate with the customer support team to manage customer relationships

17. Share on other social networks your newsletter articles, polls, events and any other exclusive content to grow your total social media audience and improve the customer experience. 

(According to Google, 98% of Americans switch between platforms and devices in the same day, and 90% of all consumers expect cohesiveness in their interactions no matter where they are.)

18. Leverage your personal LinkedIn profile to amplify the reach of brand content and improve B2B networking, by:

• Sharing brand content via post and in groups (a fashion brand CEO might join the LUXURY, FASHION & LIFESTYLE EXECUTIVES group, for instance)
• Writing and distributing op-eds as articles (if necessary, task your best writer to ghostwrite for your most public figure)
• Publishing daily image-based inspirational posts (people love this, for some reason)
• Messaging potential partners to brainstorm cross-promotional campaigns 

19. Gamify LinkedIn across your organization by offering incentives to employees for reposting brand content and, perhaps even more importantly, sharing their work experiences and glowing reviews of your brand and products, in turn engaging more and more of your staff, exponentially amplifying the reach of your content and enhancing your reputation among the platform’s top talent.

20. Commit to LinkedIn advertising:

• Dedicating between $2,000 and $5,000 to your first ad campaigns (determine your max monthly spend based on your total digital ad budget and how your LinkedIn advertising performance compares to your performance advertising on other apps and/or via Google, Taboola and AdRoll)
• Using the LinkedIn Audience Network to calculate your potential reach and determine who from your target audience is on the app
• Split testing the same content across the various ad types and objectives
• Continuing to run, monitor, analyze, iterate and optimize your ads to achieve your specific objectives, split testing different variations on your written and visual content and then iterating and optimizing to maximize ad performance

Need Help Creating for LinkedIn?

At Customer Engagement Insider, we specialize in event planning and hosting, as well as content creation, for the world’s most distinguished digital brands and online advertisers. 

Download our media kit today!

Image Credits (in order of appearance)

1. Photo by Simran Sood on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/px_9UMmYeUU
2. Photo by Krisztian Matyas on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/5kS-6zE1KYQ
3. Photo by Tamarcus Brown on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/29pFbI_D1Sc
4. Photo by Alice Dietrich on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/FwF_fKj5tBo