LinkedIn is a powerful platform for businesses of all sizes. It can be used to build relationships with potential customers, promote products and services, and even recruit new employees. Businesses especially love to use LinkedIn for B2B marketing campaigns, and one of the most effective ways to use LinkedIn is through community-based marketing.
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Community-Based Marketing Works
With LinkedIn’s strong network effects, community-based marketing is a highly leveraged way to reach more customers organically. In this post, we’ll explore the best ways you can leverage community-based marketing on LinkedIn. This enables your business to reduce ad spend, build your network, and position yourself as a thought leader.
LinkedIn Community-Based Marketing Stats
- Companies that post on LinkedIn weekly see more than twice the engagement rate of companies that don’t
- More than 50% of U.S. marketers used LinkedIn in 2021
- Around 33% of B2B decision makers use LinkedIn to do product or service research
3 Ways to Leverage Community-Based Marketing on LinkedIn
Join LinkedIn Groups
One of the best ways to use community-based marketing is by joining relevant LinkedIn groups. This allows you to reach a larger audience with your content, and build relationships with potential customers. When looking for groups to join, it’s important to consider the interests of your target market.
For example, if you’re in the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry, you might want to join a group like “Outsourcing Professionals.” You can also join groups related to your product or service offering. This enables you to connect with all the relevant professionals in your vertical.
Be patient! It will likely take months of consistent effort, posts, and engaging community members before you see results.
It’s important to note that not all communities are equally valuable. You may come across one group with tens of thousands of members, but with little to no engagement. Joining a group of a few hundred members with high engagement is preferable and will yield better results for your efforts.
A good way to measure the engagement in groups is to see how many posts there are per week. If the number is low, it likely means your posts will not be seen or will get very little engagement.
Once you’ve found a community, it’s important to contribute valuable content that will help members of the group. This helps establish your brand as an expert in your field, making it much easier to promote products and services later on. Further, many businesses make the mistake of being short-sighted with community marketing. It will likely take months of consistent effort, posts, and engaging community members before you see any significant results.
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Post Quality Content
Many businesses overlook the community they’ve already built; start community-based marketing outreach with your network. This is primarily done by posting high-quality content in the form of articles and commentary. With these posts, you share your insights, thoughts, and ideas with your network — and can even recruit new employees.
When done consistently, this will help you build trust within your community. This starts with your personal network; once you pass 500 connections, LinkedIn users will start to follow you. Once you eclipse a few thousand followers, you are primed to position yourself as a thought leader in your community.
Articles are long-form pieces of content you can write on LinkedIn. With articles, you can really showcase your expertise in your field. This is a great medium to show a case study, or a deep dive into a particular product or service your business provides. Additionally, you can place one of your articles on your profile, so it’s immediately noticeable when someone lands there.
When you post consistently, it will help you build trust within your community.
If you don’t have a dedicated content marketing team in place, this may be work you should outsource. If you’re producing it internally, each article should have a coherent topic, thorough research, and a formal drafting process. Once you have a draft, it’s important to get feedback from your team or colleagues. After that, you can finalize the post and publish it.
It’s also important to use relevant hashtags and @mention other users in your posts. This helps increase the reach of your content and gets more people engaged with your community. Using a combination of posts, articles, hashtags, and mentions should all be part of your community-based marketing strategy on LinkedIn.
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Use Sales Navigator
An advanced way to leverage community-based marketing on LinkedIn is to use Sales Navigator. Sales Navigator is LinkedIn’s flagship product, and it’s typically used by sales professionals to get leads and sales. This is a paid product, but it offers extensive features for community-based marketing if used correctly.
With Sales Navigator, you can create a list of all the community members you’d like to connect with. After you add them to your list, Sales Navigator will notify you each time they make a post, engage with a post, or have anything significant happen in their company.
Instead of spending hours looking for ways to add value to the conversation, Sales Navigator streamlines this process for you.
With this type of insight into key members of your community, you can quickly establish your brand and business. Instead of spending hours refreshing LinkedIn and looking for ways to add value to the conversation, Sales Navigator streamlines this whole process for you; there’s a list of actions to take as soon as you log into LinkedIn. This helps you automate many community-based marketing activities, so you spend more time connecting with your community and less time manually scrolling.
These are just some of the ways you can start leveraging community-based marketing on LinkedIn. These three methods are proven to work, and should be a part of your overall LinkedIn strategy. If you’re not already using community-based marketing, now is the time to start.
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