How to write an effective B2B LinkedIn content strategy for your business

What do you do if you've taken over the social media reins of a business only to find out it doesn't have a LinkedIn strategy?

Some marketing people might panic, but us social media-types realise it's the perfect time for a reset. A chance for you to step back and rethink how LinkedIn should and could work for your business – and for you, the social media expert, to demonstrate what you do best!

Whether you're starting from scratch or refreshing your brand's approach, here are seven things you need to do to build an effective and useable B2B LinkedIn content strategy.

1. Define your goal(s)

Despite many of LinkedIn's flaws – mostly the AI-waffle pumped out by certain types of LinkedIn Lunatics – it's a useful platform, and an essential comms arm for B2B brands.

But the earliest question to ask yourself when kicking off your strategy is simply this – what do I actually want LinkedIn to do for our business

Answering this question should be the foundation of every LinkedIn strategy. And that answer will vary depending on where you work – are you a B2B or B2C business? Anon-profit or education provider? Or even governmental?

While not an obvious platform for directly marketing to customers, B2C brands can still win on LinkedIn by demonstrating culture and CSR activities – which is particularly useful for supporting growth when it comes to hiring.

B2B brands will likely want to do this as well, but they have to factor in LinkedIn's value from a lead gen and new business perspective (particularly when combined with ads). Plus new product and commercial announcements that will interest its audience.

Whatever your business, these goals need to be put in the context of the wider marketing plan and overall business aims. If they don't align, or at least logically ladder up, then this new strategy will never be approved by your SLT or board of directors.

Defining this goal, then presenting it upfront will help you secure that all-important senior buy-in.

2. Understand your audience

Once you know what you're trying to achieve, the next step is understanding who you're trying to talk to. That only happens if you take the time to get to know your audience.

Common questions to ask are:

• What are their pain points or concerns?

• What helps or hinders their day-to-day?

• What makes their working life easier?

• What makes it harder?

• How can we stand out to you?

There are many more.

The easiest way to do this is to ask them. Five or six interviews with existing customers will very quickly give you enough insight on trends and themes to provide solid answers to those questions.

Whatever you ask, audience research is a non-negotiable in any strategy.

You can also dig into other resources such as relevant Subreddits, social listening or even speaking to your own customer service and sales teams. Don't underestimate what people in the business already know!

3. Review the competition

No strategy is complete without some sort of glance towards the competition. This isn't about using the analysis so you can simply copy their activity, but digging in to the available data to determine what's working for them, what isn't, and what you can learn from it all.

Here a few simple starting points for LinkedIn competitor analysis:

• Followers: How do their follower numbers stack up versus yours. Who's interacting with their content – likes, comments, reposts?

• Content topics: While you won't know exactly what their strategy is, you can learn a lot from the topics they're posting about. Are they posting more about products, services and benefits? Or is their content more varied? Which ones seem to resonate with their audience.

• Formats: LinkedIn still lags behind other channels in terms of video effectiveness as copy-only posts and images (galleries or carousels) reign supreme. Bear this in mind when reviewing the formats the competition are using and which ones are working. Is good content being squashed by an ineffective formats and bad practice? If yes, it's something to take advantage of.

• Engagement: Taking into account all of the above, how is their audience reacting to the content? Is engagement good and consistent? Or hit and miss? Or simply non-existent? What are people saying in the comments? Gather as much of this information as possible to help you with your own efforts.

• Employee engagement: One sign of a culturally and strategically-aligned business is employee engagement efforts on LinkedIn. Are they regularly liking, commenting and sharing the brand's LinkedIn posts? If it's always and only employees engaging then the content isn't interesting enough for the rest of audience, but if it's employees and external followers then it's likely to be proving successful.

All of these will give you valuable learnings that you can apply (or avoid) when it comes to your own content on LinkedIn. More importantly, now that you know what the competition is up to, you can craft a strategy that will help you standout.

4. Channel audit – what's worked before (and hasn't)

The final bit of review work is looking back at your previous content. Whether you're new to the business or not, it's always necessary to review your channel – using LinkedIn's own insights – but also any social media analytics tools you have access to.

This will give you a better understanding of your brand's effectiveness on LinkedIn, but also inspiration for new ideas in your updated strategy.

Take a closer look at the following:

• Best performing content – across key metrics like impressions, engagements, as well as categorised by type (e.g. images or video etc.)

• Content that can be reused – high-performing content that can be updated and reposted – whether it's monthly, quarterly or yearly.

• Content that can be repurposed – sometimes content fails because of the format, not the idea. What can you see that should have worked, but didn't. Does it need a new format? Or angle? Was the hook strong enough?

• Content that needs to die – quite simply... what should never, ever, be posted again.

• Any brand inconsistencies – while you're doing a channel audit, don't forget to review some of the more mundane elements that are likely not to have changed in years – e.g. tagline, page buttons, business overview, locations, URL(s) and more. This is the kind of stuff that's easily forgotten... and yes I would also include profile and cover images in that list too! You'd be surprised how many can be outdated.

5. Approach and delivery

Armed with all of this information, you'll now be ready to define your overall plan: the messages you want to get across, the content you're going to post, the frequency, and the format.

Naturally, this involves defining my favourite element of social media management – content pillars. (That link has everything you'll need to know to create your own).

After that, it's a case of building your content calendar with the activity you know is needed, while leaving gaps for anything ad-hoc that pops up. In my experience, most social content calendars are 50-75% planned – leaving room inevitable last-minute or ad hoc ideas (that still fit with the strategy).

You'll also want an idea of the content formats you'll be posting on LinkedIn – supported by your research and your own knowledge of best practice. Lay it all out in your content calendar to give you a clearer idea of what's coming up, helping you communicate that to the rest of the business, but also act as guidance for your to do list.

6. Setting objectives and KPIs, then measuring them

Any strategy has to end with objectives, KPIs and how you're going to measure them. These should of course be SMART, while your KPIs need to act as pillars for those overarching objectives.

This Hootsuite article highlights nine that you may want to consider, based on your overall goal(s) for your LinkedIn channel. You can monitor several at once but don't spread yourself too thin otherwise your content won't work for any of them.

Here's a summary, with what to measure for each (which may also mean working with other people in your marketing or analytics teams):

1. Increase brand awareness – impressions, audience growth, share of voice.

2. Manage/improve brand reputation – brand mentions, hashtag use and social listening.

3. Increase website traffic – link clicks, referral traffic, traffic spike correlation, email sign-ups.

4. Improve community engagement – overall channel engagement, UGC, engagement rate and comment sentiments.

5. Boost conversions/sales – conversion rate from LinkedIn to relevant landing pages, CTR and anecdotal mentions of your content (don't underestimate that last one, but make sure sales and account teams are up-to-speed with what you're doing).

6. Lead gen – form submission, sign-ups (email, webinars etc.), and enquiries.

7. Promote events – event sign-ups or registrations, mentions of event hashtag or product name, traffic, sales and engagement on promotional posts.

8. Customer service – DM response times, satisfaction surveys, NPS scores, Trustpilot or Google reviews, and testimonials.

9. Attract candidates – speculative CV enquiries, increase in candidate quality, in-person mentions of LinkedIn content.

7. Review, refine, evolve

The final aspect of an effective strategy is defining how often you're going to review your activity versus your goals and KPIs.

Every social media manager will secretly admit that they look at performance on a daily basis. We just can't help ourselves! That has its uses for identifying short-term trends and initial post performance, but for an overall perspective you need to extend that timeframe.

Even if your content strategy has evolved what you'll be doing, you can still consider year-on-year performance – particularly if the themes of the content are similar each year. This gives you a broad perspective on growth and areas for improvement.

I also recommend four major strategic review points – usually after every quarter (however that lines up for you, e.g. calendar or financial year) – to assess what is and isn't working from your new strategy.

Once you add in a monthly audit you'll have enough information to support those quarterly reviews, and give you early insight to see if you're going to hit your targets. And if you are, how much you're going to increase them by in the next quarter!

As you approach the 12 month anniversary of your new strategy, you'll need to consider how much of it needs updating or changing. However, as you've been reviewing it regularly anyway, this should feel like an update, rather than starting from scratch... again!

If that does happen, time to start this process all over again – and go back to the top of this post.

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About Dave Endsor and Chapter

I'm Dave, a social media strategist and founder of Chapter. I have over 15+ years of agency and in-house experience, helping hundreds of people and businesses use social media more confidently, strategically, and purposefully.

I've worked with well-known brands including Blue Light Card, Miller Homes, Bayer, The Access Group and many more.

Fun fact: I led the social media team that helped Game of Thrones star, Emilia Clarke, launch her charity SameYou.