How to Use LinkedIn in Your Marketing Pipeline

Quick recap: your marketing pipeline is the step-by-step approach your ideal client takes from being made aware of your services through to being a loyal customer.

If your ideal clients, or the people who influence their buying decisions, use LinkedIn, then it can be a key marketing tool.

But how? How can you use it effectively?

Here are some top tips for how medium to small businesses can use LinkedIn as a highly effective part of their marketing pipeline. 

First, remember LinkedIn is a networking platform

This means your Personal LI Profile is crucial. As they say, people buy people. Hopefully, you have built up your network over your career and are always adding to it.

Those people you are connected to want to see what you are doing and your achievements. Make sure you keep them up to date.

Next, use your LinkedIn Company page differently to your Profile page

Lots of people get stuck on this, so let’s look at it in depth right from the beginning.

🎯 How you use them depends on your marketing aims

For most people and companies, you need to start by setting your LinkedIn goals as part of your Marketing Pipeline.

Typical Personal / Company LinkedIn goals might look like this:

➡️ Raise my Personal Profile to become a ‘Known Expert‘ so I can leverage my network to find more clients

➡️Raise my Company’s Profile to 1) find new clients 2) look amazing when prospective clients check us out 3) reassure current clients we are the right choice.

These are goals which mean you are using LinkedIn at different points of your marketing pipeline:

Aware – the profile-raising part

Interest / Considering – looking amazing when checked out by people who are considering you

Adopting / Loyal – making those customers who have chosen you (‘Adopting’ is when they adopt your product/service) feel good about their choice.

Now you’ve set your goals, decide on your content

Based on these goals, you should post this type of content on your Personal LinkedIn Profile:

✅ Items about you, your work, and what you have been up to, e.g. events attended
✅ Interesting tit-bits about your subject area, the sectors you work in, a few how-tos
✅ Sharing items from your Business LI page that showcase your work / the team
❌ Not many CTAs (Calls To Action). 
✅ The main CTA should be, ‘Follow our LI Page for the latest from [insert name of your company].

The Content you post on your company’s LI Page should mainly consist of:

✅ Business News, e.g. Team Hires, client wins, publication changes, etc (this should be the bulk of your posts)
✅ Odd bit of ‘Advice’ – aimed at your ideal clients
✅ Signposting to your blogs and articles
✅ Signposting to other pages on your website
✅ This page needs to have one clear CTA on most posts.

Some final advice

I always advise people to start at the pace they can keep up – social media posting needs to be treated as a marathon, not a sprint!

Often, in a spurt of initial enthusiasm and creativity, people and companies post loads of content. This can be good to see what gets the most engagement but it can quickly become tiring if you think you need to keep that pace up. 

Think quality not quantity – it’s better to have one or two posts per week that really engage people than many that fail to land.

Crucially, be prepared to fail. I have posted on LI, and not even the tumbleweed has bothered to turn up and watch my post get totally ignored. Meanwhile, I’ve had other posts about rocketing engagement. Remember, every post is a learning opportunity. Post, assess, and learn from it.

About the Author

Kara Stanford is a strategic marketer who has been transforming businesses for over 25 years. She has an effective, practical approach to marketing. If you’d like her alongside you in your business, check out her 1-1 Marketing Coaching Programme. 

On this 3 month programme, you get regular Zoom 1-1s with her, access to her in between sessions via WhatsApp and email to get your marketing questions answered, and the knowledge that you will finish your Coaching achieving your marketing goals. 

Spaces are strictly limited, so enquire now.