Make Content Marketing and LinkedIn Social Selling Part of Your Online Marketing Strategy

Although LinkedIn is known as a professional networking and connection tool, it’s also known as a powerful content marketing, lead generation, and sales tool. And since LinkedIn is favored by Google, sales professionals, marketing pros and businesses alike have an excellent opportunity to use LinkedIn to their advantage to attract new leads and grow sales.

Most of our digital marketing courses here in the Denver area also cover how to use content marketing and the social media platform LinkedIn as part of an integrated digital marketing strategy. If done right, combining the power of content marketing and LinkedIn can become a potent recipe for success in regards to lead generation and boosting sales from your online marketing efforts.

I’ve promoted the use of LinkedIn for years and have written extensively for Social Media Examiner about the potential of this tool. As with other social media platforms, LinkedIn updates, changes and revises many of its features on a regular basis, and I make sure to stay up to date about ways to take advantage of this tool. As mentioned above, Google really seems to like LinkedIn, so I made it a successful habit to use this tool as a proven way to support my content marketing strategy. You’ll learn more about this later in the blog post.

The Power of LinkedIn As a Social Selling Tool

Let’s first talk about how to use this professional networking platform as a social selling tool. Social selling, or the process of using social media platforms to develop business relationships, is part of the online lead generation and sales process. Social selling does take time and persistence, and it does require a good method.

Social selling expert Jean-Marc Saint Laurent of Saint313 Limited teaches and helps sales teams manage the conversations they have with their ideal prospects on LinkedIn. His proven and tested methodology dramatically cuts the time sales professionals spend on LinkedIn to generate warm leads, and ultimately close deals.

An often underutilized part of LinkedIn is a service called Sales Navigator. Jean-Marc is a Sales Navigator pro as he uses it daily for himself and his clients. Jean-Marc and I recorded a 20-minute video that provides an introduction to Sales Navigator, and it highlights some of the useful features. You can view the video here:

I also invite you to read a blog post entitled Up Your Digital Marketing Game With Social Selling for additional information about Sales Navigator.

Take Advantage of LinkedIn As a Content Marketing Tool for Inbound Lead Generation

Let’s talk about how to use LinkedIn as part of your content marketing strategy. When people need to find things, whether it’s to locate the closest pizza place or check the weather, they turn to search engines such as Google to quickly find what they are looking for. Besides a website, Google will frequently display other relevant content such as YouTube videos, directory listings, Google My Business listing, and yes, very often also LinkedIn Company pages and even LinkedIn profiles.

So how do you get your LinkedIn pages to show up in online search? Start by completing all the fields and by creating and adding high-quality content using SEO keywords that your potential customers are using when searching for your services or products. Make sure to regularly post engaging status updates and post high-quality content to your personal LinkedIn long-form publishing platform. When doing so, add a call to action such as a link back to your website or invite people to sign up for your newsletter, etc. Google will process that content as new content, it will also recognize the link back to your website as an official backlink (one of the most critical ranking signals in Google’s algorithm) which ultimately supports the SEO efforts of your company’s website.

By implementing and executing a well planned LinkedIn content marketing strategy, your content on LinkedIn should get Likes, Shares, and Comments and Google pays close attention to these online engagements and social signals.

For example, if you do a search for “SEO agency Boulder,” you’ll see that the Boulder SEO Marketing LinkedIn company page is showing up on page one, even before many of my competitors’ websites. I use this strategy, called off-page SEO, as a way to push my competition down and keep me at the top. Since most of the clicks will go to the first 3-4 organic search results, it’s a tremendous competitive advantage for me. Off-page search engine optimization (SEO) is just one of what I call the 5 pillars of SEO. Learn more about the other pillars in my article entitled What Is Search Engine Optimization?.

Upcoming Online Marketing Classes

My team and I offer a variety of digital marketing classes in the Denver area, including social media marketing, search engine optimization, and search engine marketing (Google Ads and pay-per-click) workshop. The yellow pages have long been replaced by our smartphones and desktop computers, and if you’re not found online, chances are high that your competition will get the lead and have an opportunity to close the deal.

For additional information and to stay in touch, make sure to follow our LinkedIn Company page and sign up for our email list.