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It’s all about Facebook. It’s all about Instagram. It’s all about TikTok. Over the years, marketers and businesses have been told all about these three social media platforms and how they’re the most important part of any strategy. However, very little light gets shone onto LinkedIn, despite the fact that it contributes successfully to many marketing strategies around the world.
With this in mind, we’re finally providing the guide to LinkedIn marketing that the platform deserves. As an agency, you need to be on top of all the best social media platforms, and sometimes LinkedIn offers just as much value as Facebook and Instagram.
If you’re a marketing agency, you’ll want to help clients with LinkedIn as much as possible. Fortunately, we all have a starting point with the Onboarding Guide from the platform itself. Firstly, why should you choose LinkedIn as a part of your clients’ strategy? For one thing, it’s the home to millions of professionals all around the world.
As well as hitting professional individuals, LinkedIn is also the social media platform of choice for many businesses. Therefore, it provides value to B2B services. With a high percentage of professionals on the platform, it has a different mindset and way of operating compared to all the others. Long-form content is powerful, people are happy to read 5,000-word articles, and it provides businesses an opportunity to position themselves as market leaders.
Another reason to choose LinkedIn is that, despite 18 years in the industry, the platform is still growing both in terms of the user base and revenue. Just recently, Microsoft revealed all earnings from Q3 of 2020, and it nearly reached $42 billion for the multinational company. LinkedIn is a big part of this equation as revenue for the platform itself grew by 25%.
In terms of users, it had around 740 million in February, one-third of these users being active every month. Consequently, it’s the biggest single market of professionals on the internet.
LinkedIn also provides the following stats:
Ultimately, LinkedIn is one of the best places (if not the best place!) for clients who need to target professional individuals and businesses.
If you’re to manage campaigns for clients, you have two main options. While some create new ad accounts in the Campaign Manager, others simply request access from their clients. In other words, you’ll access the ad account already created by the client. Whether or not this option is available to you depends on whether the client has a pre-existing account.
Unfortunately, there’s no agency-wide login system on LinkedIn which means that you have to allow access to individual employees. Also, we should note that shared agency profiles are against the terms of service on the platform. Therefore, you should create a new ad account for each client or request access to the account of the client.
As a marketing agency, you can’t expect to have the same team for the next year (let alone the next 10 years!). As a result, ensure that at least two people have access to an account. Furthermore, keep on top of permissions so that ex-employees don’t have access to client accounts.
If you choose the first option, you’ll need to start with a personal LinkedIn account and then find the Work button. After selecting this, you should see Advertise and then Create Ad. You’ll then need to choose an ad type, ad account name, and then currency for billing. The opportunity to link a Showcase Page or Company comes in the next step.
For those planning to run Message Ad or Sponsored Content campaigns, you’ll need to link a company page.
Alternatively, ask the client to head into their campaign manager and click on Settings, which is located in the top right-hand corner. Here, choose Select Manage Access and edit the people with access to the account. Once added, you’ll have permission to perform certain actions within the ad account.
Ultimately, the access you’re granted depends on the nature of your relationship with the client. If you’re to handle all marketing activity, you’ll need full access to prevent running into roadblocks later down the line. If you’re to run Sponsored Content campaigns, the Page Admin will need to permit you to the Company Page.
Sometimes, clients are nervous about allowing people access to their social media accounts. Even after long conversations with you, some clients will need reassurance before granting access.
Once in the Campaign Manager, you’ll have options to launch a new campaign. Again, your relationship with the client is essential and clear communication is often the best route to avoid confusion and disappointment. While some agencies will simply provide advice, others are hired to create campaigns and run the whole advertising account.
If you’re focused on the latter, we recommend taking advantage of the LinkedIn Insight Tag. As a small piece of JavaScript code, this is attached to a website to help you to determine the success of individual campaigns. What percentage of visitors come from LinkedIn? How effective have your campaigns been in sending people to the website?
With the Insight Tag added to the client’s website, campaign reporting is easier than ever. This also allows the client to see exactly what value you’re providing in how these metrics change over time. You can use the reporting to track conversions, learn more about the audience, run remarketing campaigns, and more.
Regardless of your client’s size, LinkedIn sets a minimum spend for all campaigns which is currently at $10 per day. How much should you spend for your client? This is a difficult question, and it all depends on their goals, the importance they place on LinkedIn in the wider marketing strategy, and their audience.
If you don’t have much experience on LinkedIn, we recommend contacting the platform for an Account Executive. Furthermore, pay attention to the resources available from LinkedIn - this includes the onboarding guide. This guide also provides additional information billing, such as choosing between monthly invoicing and an insertion order.
To finish, here are some of the most effective tips for boosting the presence of your clients on LinkedIn.
Firstly, some agencies aren’t even aware of this, but you can actually optimize your client pages for SEO. With this in mind, pay attention to what consumers are searching for and how you can get clients to appear within these searches.
Often, businesses also don’t realize that they can encourage a better presence just by linking their website and various social channels. For example, why not add a LinkedIn follow button to their website? While reading a blog post, consumers will notice that more amazing content is available through LinkedIn and they’ll follow.
Why do all of the work yourself when you can enlist the help of employees? Speak to your client and ask them to get employees involved in your mission. Ask them to share the profile, spread the word to friends, and engage in the LinkedIn profile. The more that employees tag the page and share posts, the easier it becomes to generate growth.
Also, make sure the employees of the client have the company in their work history. Then, whenever somebody follows the employee, LinkedIn will suggest following the company too.
Sometimes, presence means giving opinions and getting involved in debates. As a marketing agency, you may have platforms for this sort of thing already with Quora and Reddit. However, LinkedIn is another strong option because you can follow hashtags and join particular conversations. You expose the brand, show consumers the knowledge of the company, and position the business as a market leader.
Marketing experts have been saying for some time that marketing is all about content, content, content. In 2021, content still reigns which means that you should look to add genuine value to consumers. With at least one post per week, you can actually double engagement on the page of clients. If you’re struggling for ideas, use the Content Suggestions feature on LinkedIn.
Lastly, did you really expect us to omit LinkedIn advertising from our list? Since this has been the focus of much of our guide, you cannot forget to create ads for clients. Choose an objective based on the goals of your clients, select targeting carefully, decide on the right ad format, talk about budgeting and scheduling with the client, and then publish.
If you’re to boost the presence of your clients on LinkedIn, you’ll need to invest lots of time into the measuring and optimization process. Don’t forget, machine learning and artificial intelligence optimization tools exist to make your life easier.
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