Definitive Guide on How PR Agencies Can Use LinkedIn Marketing

Did you know that LinkedIn offers businesses such as PR agencies a connection to over 546 million users? Every month, LinkedIn, the largest professional network gets over 100 million visitors in over 200 countries worldwide. Out of these users, over 3 million share content via LinkedIn. This accounts for over 100,000 articles that are published on LinkedIn Weekly. Therefore, LinkedIn stands out as one of the most popular professional social networks. So how can PR agencies achieve successful LinkedIn Marketing?

This is an important question to address because based on the above statistics, it is clear that several professionals will also share articles via LinkedIn. Therefore, LinkedIn marketing is not a new concept at all. What PR agencies should, therefore, focus on is how they can run successful LinkedIn marketing. This will enable them to reach millions of potential businesses that they can transform into buying clients.

In this article, we elaborate on some of the steps that PR agencies can use to take on LinkedIn Marketing. Through these steps, the PR agencies will get more blog reads and attract higher traffic to their website. This includes ranking higher on search engines as a result of gained online popularity. Eventually, the PR agency will establish itself as an authority in their area of specialization, which will have an overall advantage of getting more signups for the agency’s services. Lets rock and roll!

Step One: Start by Signing up For a Personal LinkedIn Profile

You might be wondering why we mentioned a “personal Linked Profile” while at the same time we are referring to marketing a PR agency. Well, we have not deviated from our original intent! The reason as to why your personal profile will count is because people do business with other people. Therefore, this is the ultimate reason why you and your marketing staff need to have great LinkedIn profiles.

The reality is that when you start marketing your company, the people you are talking to will want to do business with you based on your personality. Consider that the more people know about you, the more they will be willing to do business with you. Further, by knowing the people you are buying from, you end up having more trust and a higher likelihood of placing an order. We can comfortably argue that personal profiles are where first impressions will be formed.

Based on this, it is important that you first come up with an exciting personal profile. This is most important for the marketing team and also the top executives in your PR agency. So what exactly do you need when creating a professional LinkedIn profile? According to themuse.com, you need to include the following:

• A great profile picture
• A professional headline that rocks
• To get personal by injecting some personality in the tone used
• Add your skills and achievements
• Include your current job title at the PR agency you intend to market
• Add your past experiences
• Include successful projects you participated in
• Ensure the profile is updated always

Check out the image below: it gives you a sneak preview of what a great personal LinkedIn profile page should look like.

 

Step 2: Create an Effective LinkedIn Company Page

You can choose to create the LinkedIn company page before creating your personal profile. The order doesn’t really matter, though we listed this as step number two. The most important thing is ensuring that you have got the two to start LinkedIn Marketing. So what do you need to consider when creating a LinkedIn Page for your PR Agency? You will need to bear the following in mind.

• Ensure Company Profile is Complete

To begin with, your LinkedIn company page is actually your business’s Linked profile. Therefore, based on the fact that you want to use this page to drive more sales (LinkedIn Marketing) make sure the page offers opportunities for the viewers to subscribe to your services. How so? The answer is that you should include all the information that is relevant to the customer.

Having an unfinished company profile will detract from your LinkedIn marketing campaigns. Note that your clients will make purchase decisions based on the visual information! Therefore, make sure that your company profile is 100% complete. This will help in ensuring that your company comes across as professional and put-together.

• The Optics Matter; Be Visually Appealing

Your agency logo should appear on the LinkedIn Company Profile. In addition, your brands cover banner is also an important visual element. These two make your LinkedIn Company profile a great tool when you get started with LinkedIn Marketing.

• Add a link to your website on the LinkedIn Company Profile page.

Apart from adding your agency’s logo, all the relevant information about your company and taking advantage of the banner section, you also need to add a link to your company website. Maybe you can link to the “About Us” webpage or the “products” webpage. Remember that one of the objectives of LinkedIn Marketing is creating brand awareness. Therefore, adding the relevant links that help in achieving this objective will be a plus.

Here is the #1 Company Page according to LinkedIn, among the “LinkedIn’s Top 10 Company Pages of 2018” :

Step 3: Define the LinkedIn Marketing Objectives

Now that you have a LinkedIn presence, you want to get started with LinkedIn Marketing campaigns. However, just like other marketing campaigns, you will need to have defined goals. What is the bigger picture? Or, why do you want to run LinkedIn Marketing campaigns? There are different objectives for marketing campaigns. They include:

• Brand Awareness
• Drive more Subscriptions / Increase Sales
• Generating Leads
• A combination of the above objectives

Depending on the bigger picture at hand, you will then start coming up with relevant posts. A campaign that aims at creating brand awareness will be crafted differently from that which aims at driving more sales. For this reason, it is important that you define the main objective of the LinkedIn Marketing campaigns that you want to run.

Step 4. Determine your Target Audience

You already have the LinkedIn marketing objectives and therefore you want to define who you will target. With LinkedIn, you are targeting a quality audience but in a professional context. You need to carefully define the right audience to maximize the impact of the message. This is also another requirement when it comes to designing the content of your campaign. There are different methods that PR agencies can use to segment the audience of their LinkedIn marketing campaigns. For example, PR agencies can use LinkedIn to target based on:

• Job titles
• Seniority Level
• The company name
• Company size
• Education level
• Industry
• Experience
• Skills
• Preferences
• Groups

Based on this we can clearly see that LinkedIn offers you differentiated data. This is considering the fact that the members of LinkedIn are motivated to keep their profiles as accurate as possible. Therefore, from the data used on personal profiles, you are able to tell who it is that reads your content more. This then can inform your decisions in the future LinkedIn Marketing campaigns.

In addition, you have the option of using the LinkedIn Audience Network, which allows you to reach the target audience using the sponsored content. However, to make use of this feature, you ought to be a premium member. Then you have to sign in to campaign manager, create your Ad and post it as Sponsored content, Text Ads or Sponsored InMail.

Step 5. Creating LinkedIn Marketing Content

The next step is creating content that will resonate well with the audience you are targeting. Note that every reader has their best preferences. Not all LinkedIn Users want to read about Public Relations. Even those that are interested in PR related topics will have different sub-topics they will read more. This is the reason why in the steps above we have talked about defining the objective and also the target audience of your LinkedIn Marketing campaigns. As such the content that you include in your LinkedIn Marketing campaigns should be what the target audience wants to read and at the same time meet your marketing objectives.

In addition, your LinkedIn audience will be characterized by persons who are more business-oriented. Therefore, you need to customize the content to fit the context. This is somehow different from the case on Facebook. The Facebook audience is looking for relaxation and entertainment and as such business topics often pass unnoticed or often ignored. The opposite stands for LinkedIn, and therefore the reason why content shared on LinkedIn Marketing campaigns needs to be business-oriented.

Therefore you can consider:

• Creating Links to your latest content on your company blog or elsewhere
• Repurpose your blog articles

To post LinkedIn marketing content, you need to use LinkedIn Publisher. To get started with publishing LinkedIn Marketing content:

#1 Click on the “Write an article” box.

This is usually displayed on the news feed page and looks as shown in the image below.

#2 Now you will be directed to the Publishing Platform where you will the option to:

• Add a cover at the top. This is recommended so that you can catch the reader’s attention. However, if you don’t include an image, LinkedIn selects an image in your content to act as a thumbnail.
• Add Images, video or share a slide.
• Add links to your content

To do that, select on the icon with a plus sign which on the left side. Here is an image illustrating how the publishing platform looks like.

#3 You can copy and paste content on the LinkedIn publisher

Once your content is ready and customized for your LinkedIn Marketing objectives, proceed to the next step.

Step 6: Post the Content to Your Personal Feed and Promote It

After you have published the content, this doesn’t mean that automatically the audience will start flocking to read it. It is important that after posting the content on your personal feed, you promote it. In this regard, you will want to share your LinkedIn Content across your social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, etc. You might also choose to share your posts on LinkedIn groups to increase engagement.

To share your content on Twitter and Facebook:

• Click on the post you want to share and on the next window; you will see the sharing button.
• Click on the button and then you will see a popup asking you to share on LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter.
• Click on the social media platform where you want to share the post and follow the prompts. To promote the content further, you might ask your followers on other social media platforms to re-share the post.

Another method for increasing your engagement is sharing a public post. This allows you to make your posts visible to a larger audience. This is done when you are creating the post. Click on the post settings to enable public viewing. In addition, if you are targeting particular persons for your PR agency campaigns, use the “@” feature to mention the person on the post title.

Step 7:  Advance your LinkedIn Marketing Using Analytics

It is also important that you check the statistics on your post to determine the posts that earn more engagements. The importance of doing this is that it allows you to know the content type that resonates well with a certain audience. To increase the engagements, repurpose such posts and share them again on LinkedIn and other social media platforms. To check out the performance of your LinkedIn Marketing content, use the following alternatives.

• For monitoring and optimizing your free campaigns use the LinkedIn page analytics and the Stats page is shown on top of each of your posts.
• And To monitor and improve the performance of paid campaigns, use the LinkedIn Campaign Manager and also conversion tracking feature.

Key Takeaways

LinkedIn Marketing is effective for PR agencies. Based on the nature of their business, these agencies will often target business-minded individuals. These are professionals in various fields. One great advantage of LinkedIn is that it allows marketers to target effectively. Consider that being a professional network; the users will most likely indicate their capacity for LinkedIn titles. Therefore, you can effectively target PR agency customers.

To optimize LinkedIn Marketing campaigns for PR agencies, follow the above steps. This will involve creating the personal profiles, then the company’s LinkedIn page and the guidelines for targeting your audience. Come up with appropriate content and also share it widely on other social media platforms. Lastly, it will be important that you check how your campaigns perform on LinkedIn.