LinkedIn is a B2B business’s ultimate platform.
Instead of creating B2B audiences, like on Facebook—you get to tap into an entire platform of professionals. These are the people with the buying power to hire your agency or bring you on as a fractional CMO (or other marketing position).
And they’re all hanging out on one platform…ready to network.
Creating a LinkedIn content marketing strategy is like getting to speak at industry events, all thanks to your keyboard. With the right strategy, your LinkedIn content can get seen by your customer avatar (like your ideal agency client) and you can start landing contracts, employment, or freelancing work.
And you get to do this while solidifying your personal brand (a brand that can help you find better clients, employment opportunities, and freelancing projects in the future). Launching a LinkedIn content marketing strategy isn’t just a “nice-to-have” for B2B businesses.
It’s a must-have.
How to Create a Converting LinkedIn Content Marketing Strategy
Creating a LinkedIn content marketing strategy goes through the same 5 steps you’d use to create a strategy for a client. You have to know:
- Who your audience is
- What they care about
- Your content pillars
- Your schedule
- Your Customer Value Journey
Step 1: Who’s your ideal audience?
Your ideal audience is full of customers. If your LinkedIn audience is full of ecommerce business owners but your agency only works with SaaS brands—you’ve done something wrong. It’s just like marketing your clients’ businesses. You have to start with who before you move on to what.
Who does your business serve?
- Is it ecommerce business owners with less than $100,000 in revenue?
- Is it SaaS businesses with $1 million in MRR?
- Is it online coaches and consultants looking to increase course sales?
Use the Customer Avatar Canvas to write down all the details about who your business serves. We’ll use this in the next step to figure out what your ideal customer cares about so you can create content that interests them on LinkedIn.
Step 2: What do they care about?
As you fill out the Customer Avatar Canvas, what your ideal customer cares about starts to become obvious.
The “Haves” in the Before State tell you exactly what they want to avoid in the future. The “Haves” in the After State are the topics they’re dying to learn about so they can experience the After State. For example, if your ideal customer is an ecommerce business owner in the Before State they probably ‘have’ low customer lifetime value (LTV). In the After State, they have high customer lifetime value.
That means you know they care about increasing their LTV and your content can cover topics like:
Low Customer LTV? Here are 5 Ways to Increase LTV in 3 Months
Knowing what your ideal customer cares about tells you exactly what content interests them. That’s how you build an audience of people who want to hire you.
Step 3: What are your content pillars?
Every brand needs content pillars. These are the topics that you’ll cover on a regular basis. And they’re entirely based on the Customer Avatar Canvas. Using content pillars, you’ll never run out of content ideas because you always know what your audience wants to know about.
Create at least 5 content pillars based on their haves, feelings, average day, status, and the good vs. evil perspective they have in their mind. For example, the marketing agency targeting ecommerce business owners on LinkedIn can create content pillars like:
Have: They have low LTV and they want to have high LTV
→ Content Pillar: LTV
Feelings: They feel like advertising is getting more complicated and expensive and they want to feel like advertising gets them guaranteed ROAS
→ Content Pillar: ROAS
Average Day: They spend their day looking at their sales flop and they want to spend their day focused on the bigger picture for their business
→ Content Pillar: Being a founder/CEO of an ecommerce business
Status: They relate to a newbie entrepreneur and they want to relate to a successful, established entrepreneur
→ Content Pillar: Entrepreneur lifecycles of ecommerce business owners
Good vs. Evil: The best-case scenario is that they figure this out, but the worst-case scenario is they have to shut down their online store
→ Content Pillar: Ecommerce businesses “must-knows” to avoid shutting down your store
For each of these content pillars, you can create 5+ topics that you can create LinkedIn posts, articles, and videos on. Now, you have 25 topics to fill your calendar!
Step 4: What’s your posting schedule?
When people first consider posting content, they like to go big or go home. They want to post daily, record videos every other day and write 1,000+ articles 3x per week. Let’s start slow and work your way up (unless you have a dedicated team!).
A solid posting schedule to start out with is 3x posts per week. You can follow a Monday, Wednesday, and Friday schedule. Each of your posts covers one of your content pillars (LTV, ROAS, etc.).
Once you and your team get used to posting, you can start to turn some of those posts into videos. Allocate 1-2 hours in your schedule per week to record videos based on your created posts. You can post those videos in your 3x/week cadence or you can add them in on Tuesday and Thursday so you’re posting daily.
Whichever schedule you choose—make sure to stick to it. If there’s one part of your LinkedIn content marketing strategy that can go array its posting. If you don’t post, people can’t see your content, learn about your expertise, and build a relationship that leads them to hire you.
Have a team member assigned to content creation and posting to make sure it gets done.
Step 5: Your Customer Value Journey
There is no content marketing strategy without a funnel. To finalize your LinkedIn content marketing strategy, we have to figure out what call to action you’re using in 20% of your posts. The other 80% of your posts will be free content, where you’re not asking for anything in return. 20% will have a direct call to action to download a lead magnet, join your newsletter, hop on to a webinar, etc.
Think about the Customer Value Journey. Your LinkedIn audience goes from Stage 1: Awareness to Stage 2: Engagement when they follow you, like your posts, comment, or watch your videos. Now, we want them to go to Stage 3: Subscribe.
This is the stage where they share their first-party data with you (which we all know is very important these days…ahem, Apple).
With that first-party data, your CVJ moves to Stage 4: Convert! This is when your LinkedIn audience becomes profitable. You’re turning audience members into agency clients or your fractional CMO business has more interest than you can keep up with.
Better yet—you can continue mapping this journey so you reach Stage 6: Ascend and can take $1,000/month retainer contracts and turn them into $5,000/month retainer contracts.
That’s how you create a LinkedIn content marketing strategy that works.
Your First LinkedIn Content Marketing Strategy
LinkedIn is a playground for businesses. It’s like having a local coffee shop where, somehow, business owners from around the world are able to come and chat together. Through your conversations (a.k.a content), you get to filter out who you network with and build connections with people who’ve been waiting to hire someone just like you.
With the right content marketing strategy, your agency, freelancing, or even full-time employment marketing career can show you the abundance of opportunities available to you right now. The key is knowing how to get those opportunities to pop out of the woodwork and show you they exist.
And that’s why you implement this content marketing strategy.
So more customers, connections, and opportunities come to you.
