For any B2B business, LinkedIn is now a very powerful content marketing tool. It is a platform upon which you can share expertise, develop thought leadership, connect with your existing audience, and even target a new one. However, a scattergun approach to LinkedIn content creation can have a negative effect, or at least there may be occasions where the content you post doesn’t have the impact you wanted. Your business therefore needs to formulate a strategic approach to content creation in order to make content compelling and engaging and to maximise its impact.

Here we have listed the eight factors you need to consider when planning and executing content for LinkedIn, helping you to reach the right people, land the right message, and generate the right outcome.

• Know your Audience: Fundamentally, you need to understand who you are creating content for and what their expectations are. Content should be tailored to suit the demographics of your audience and to meet their needs. To this end, you also need to analyse your market and understand what is happening in the audience sector and what their needs or ‘pain points’ are. In other words, what content can you create that helps them?
• Value: This is an extension of the above. Essentially, you need to ensure your content has value and gives the intended audience something they didn’t already have. Your content needs to be unique, relevant and insightful. If your audience are learning from your content, it has value to them.
• Visual: Content that is visual will immediately catch the attention of your audience and enhance the impact of the message you are communicating. Content in the form of videos, images and infographics can be more digestible than a 1000-word article and can carry your message just as well.
• Variation: It’s important to mix-up the format of your posts so that it doesn’t become predictable. Eventually, people lose interest if they know what to expect. Posting content in different formats, as above, means you can still write that 1000-word article, just not every week. Posting frequently and in different formats builds anticipation and means your audience will be looking forward to what you produce next.
• Repurpose: Don’t be afraid to revisit content you have previously posted and maximise its value by reposting it. Previous content may become relevant again due to new trends in the sector, new legislation or something in the news. You can tweak an old post to make it fresh and engaging and repost it, and search engines will pick-up on the fact that it is relevant again. This is a time-efficient way to post fresh content and improve your identity as a reactive and topical thought leader.
• SEO: It’s not always the most exciting element of creating new content, but SEO is necessary and very useful. So, think about and research hashtags, and use the right keywords and article titles. Analyse the habits of your audience so you post at the optimal time to ensure your content will achieve maximum reach. SEO also means you should make your content shareable and engaging to encourage your audience to like, comment and share.
• Connectivity: Readers like it when they can connect with a content creator; it makes the creator human and approachable. Consider encouraging comments with an engaging call to action and respond to them in a timely, professional way. By starting conversations and responding to feedback, you will develop your authority in your sector. You should also join relevant groups on LinkedIn to help you share your content and engage in more relevant conversations.
• Analysis: It is important that you always monitor how your content is performing and tweak what you are doing, even if posts are performing well. Never become complacent, and always follow the above tips to make content fresh and exciting. You should also monitor content from other creators in your industry sector. What is gaining traction? What trends are occurring? Can you take inspiration from a rival post that performed well, but create something better?

Contact our team at Bee Social Marketing for professional LinkedIn training

Your LinkedIn content can reach the right audience and actively engage them if you build a strategy based on our training tips as outlined above. If you want to learn more about LinkedIn Lead Generation or are interested in bespoke LinkedIn Training that addresses the specific needs of your business, contact our team at Bee Social Marketing today.