How to use LinkedIn to nurture, engage, and build an audience for your business

Much of marketing is about cutting through the noise, and LinkedIn is probably one of the noisiest places you can find.

Part of the reason it is so noisy is that almost everyone is there.It is unusual that a professional has no LinkedIn Profile, but even if they don’t someone from their company will.

With a population that vast (one billion and counting), the law of averages dictates that much of what people post has very little value. You only have to open up your LinkedIn feed to see something self-congratulatory, sensationalist, or trite.

Now, that may not sound like the sort of environment in which to build and audience, but it is in fact the ideal place.

In a world full of unimpressive and uninteresting chatter, you have an opportunity to be one of the rare experts and leaders who says something useful. Like the nugget of gold in a muddy stream, people will be delighted when they find you, and will be on the lookout for more.

Here is how to use LinkedIn to attract an audience to your business.

Offer genuine value

LinkedIn is peppered with ego posts designed to elicit praise for the author. They don’t add any value, and they don’t start meaningful conversations.

81% of buyers want their partners and vendors to be experts who challenge their assumptions, and you can prove that you are that expert by what you share on LinkedIn.

Your perspective is unique, and things that might seem obvious to you are revelations to people who aren’t in your sector and don’t have your experience. Simply by consistently sharing insights that people need, and perspectives they may not have considered, you can start to establish yourself as the expert that your prospects want and need.

Show authentic personality

Especially in the B2C space, brands like Innocent Smoothies shook up the branding and social media, and started a craze which persists to this day for brands to present a subversive, anarchic persona that consumer find amusing.

Plenty of brands attempt to replicate that success, with varying degrees of success. However true impact doesn’t come from being like other successful brands, but from being authentically yourself.

No every brand can and should be quirky for its own sake — being bold and standing out is a good goal, but only if what is standing out is a genuine reflection of the business.

Show the people behind the brand

The phrase ‘people buy from people’ is well used now, but the central truth is still valid — people gravitate to personalities that they like.

The output of a brand’s page on LinkedIn is well complemented with content from individuals with the business, whether leaders or team members. It communicates that there is a dedicated team behind the brand, and offers a glimpse of the personalities that prospects would be working with if they were to partner with you.

Join up your LinkedIn strategy with your wider content strategy

Remember, if your marketing strategy is working well, LinkedIn is not the only place where people will encounter your brand. And, given it takes about 7 interactions for someone to remember you, it is an excellent opportunity to repeat and reinforce your message.

Your marketing gathers much greater momentum if you are offering the same expertise and building on the same message in email, on LinkedIn, on your blog, and in your adverts. Joined-up marketingcuts through far better, and starts more and better conversations.

Using zero-click content to support your strategy

Rather than using a LinkedIn post to promote a piece of content by linking to it, a more effective approach to deliver insights without asking the reader to take extra steps.

Posts that offer value without that added step are referred to a ‘zero-click’ content. Because they keep people on the site in question (in this case LinkedIn) and don’t create any ‘friction’ by asking the audience to do something that interrupts the flow of their scrolling zero-click posts get around 30% more engagement than posts that use links to promote content.

Recognise that LinkedIn is a long game

To be successful at generating conversations, leads, and engaged communities on LinkedIn, you need to be consistent and persistent.

Because of the amount of content competing for prospects’ attention, even without the other demands on their time a headspace, it takes a lot of dedication to build a presence and an authority on LinkedIn. When you do, though, you have a dedicated audience who will think of you as the first port of call when they have a problem at you fix.

For a comprehensive, data-driven guide to earning the eyeballs and the market share your business deserves, download our free guide:

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Or if you want to talk to someone straight away about designing a joined-up, strategic, results-focused marketing campaign that builds and nurtures a pipeline of warm leads, then email our CEO Jenny (jenny.knighting@nutcrackeragency.com) and she will book some time to talk.