Contributing content to external publications is a valuable and effective tactic in any content marketing strategy, and while you’re working on building the relationships with publication editors to get your content onto their sites, there are two places your team’s content is guaranteed to be published. You’re already familiar with your company blog; the other, you may still be trying to understand — LinkedIn.
You’re not alone. Confusion regarding how LinkedIn works as a publishing platform is not uncommon for marketers who first engaged with it as a professional network. But we at Influence & Co. believe that beyond hiring and networking, LinkedIn is the foremost place for content marketers to publish in 2016.
When LinkedIn Publishing was first launched, only select influencers were allowed access to the platform. Since then, the platform has been opened up to any and all members of the network. The result? Your content can now be seen by potential leads in your network — and thousands of others, too. This video explains more:
And so you don’t have to take notes, we’ve summed up the takeaways here:
- Link Back and Restate: Posting to LinkedIn is done with the goal of generating leads. If you don’t link back to your blog, or state that this article was previously published there, you’re nullifying the platform’s main utility. Think of LinkedIn as the tip-top of your sales funnel — your company blog is where you want to entice readers to visit next.
- Tracking URLs: Everything has an ROI, including your LinkedIn posts, and to increase that ROI, you have to measure your content. Without utilizing a tracking URL when linking back to your company blog or website, you risk losing important data on what posts are directing readers to your site. But with a tracking URL you can easily identify what articles and topics resonate most with your readers, as objectively shown by the metrics.
- Call to Action: If your LinkedIn posts represent the tip-top of your sales funnel, you need to include opportunities for readers to make their way through the next steps, and you can do this with calls to action. CTAs are the guiding lights to gated content, the true aggregators of qualified leads. Include CTAs that can provide value to your readers, and entice them to continue engaging with you. Be careful not to get overly promotional in your offers, though. This makes your content seem like an advertisement, which is definitely not the goal of your content marketing efforts.
For more details, check out these three in-depth articles on LinkedIn publishing:
What I’ve Learned From LinkedIn Publishing, Part I: Don’t Yell at the Reader
What I've Learned From LinkedIn Publishing, Part 2: What I Learned From My Best-Performing Articles
What I’ve Learned From LinkedIn Publishing, Part 3: Readers Love Numbers
