How to Build Your Audience for LinkedIn Marketing

Marketing on LinkedIn is a cheap, effective way to spread the word about your brand. Let’s assume you already know that LinkedIn is a good platform for your company or brand. How do you grow the organic audience for your LinkedIn page so you can actually see an ROI for your efforts?

LinkedIn Marketing Basics

There is no magic formula for getting an audience overnight (at least, not one that won’t get you in trouble with LinkedIn’s admins). But these five steps seem to be part of the playbook for the fastest-growing companies on LinkedIn:

1) Use rich visual content. Don’t rely on text alone. Use rich images (not stock photography!) and video. If you have a particularly fun image or useful video, pin it to the tops of your posts.

2) Optimize for SEO. Yes, LinkedIn allows search engines to crawl public pages. Make sure your company page follows SEO best practices for LinkedIn pages.

3) Keep a regular posting schedule—but don’t flood the airwaves. Quality is much more important than quantity here. But you need to post on a regular schedule, as it sets expectations with your followers and is good for SEO. Don’t quit because you don’t see results right away—building an organic audience can take months, even years.

4) Enlist help. Most companies will encourage their employees to like and share content, and that’s not a bad start. But you can do even better by engaging your current fans and brand advocates (and we’d include your vendors here, too!). Ask them to post about your organization and tag (or link to) your page. Also, when you post something that you know someone would want to see, go ahead and tag them in a comment.

5) Enter the conversation. If someone comments thoughtfully on a post, engage with them (respectfully, of course). Strong “comment depth” does wonders for getting a post in front of a larger audience, and can even help a post go viral.