No doubt… LinkedIn is one of the most powerful social media platforms when it comes to business. It is specifically set up to connect different classes of professionals and to open up business opportunities. So, it goes without saying that a successful LinkedIn campaign can result in big bucks for your company.
But let’s face it – staying maximally productive on LinkedIn (or any social media) isn’t always the easiest task. Between cold outreach, content creation, network building, and customer service via some software for call centers, it’s so easy for your marketing team to get their hands full and miss out on important opportunities. But here are 7 simple but effective ways to get the absolute best from your LinkedIn marketing team.
Create a Clear Plan
If you’re going to crush your marketing campaign, you need to have a strategy… and it has to be good. According to a survey of 3,217 marketesors, it was reported that marketers who set goals are 376% more likely to achieve success. So, you need to start by documenting your marketing strategy, including what your specific goals are and what audiences you’re trying to attract.
Once your marketing strategy is in place, you need to create a clearly defined plan for achieving each of your goals. This allows you to be proactive rather than reactive in your marketing efforts. And yes, it’s okay to modify your plans as you get more audience insight and feedback from your customers.
Promote Continuous Learning
Social media marketers are expected to have many skill sets, but depending on the experience levels of your marketing team members, some may need more training than others. At the very least, your marketers should be highly skilled in copywriting, managing ad campaigns, using web analytics, excelling link building, scheduling social media posts and manipulating LinkedIn’s algorithm to reach even more audiences.
So, if you want great employee productivity that delivers, it’s definitely a good idea to enroll them in relevant online courses that will improve their marketing skills and collaborative learning. It might even be useful for them to become certified in project management for organization and leadership skills, etc. Interestingly, LinkedIn offers a wide range of relevant courses for marketers that help them to improve their craft. The best part? Most of these courses are free. You can also use many employee monitoring tools to find areas for improvement.
Establish a Working Process
If you’re serious about productivity, then you can’t ignore well-defined processes. LinkedIn marketing involves many repetitive tasks. Also, you’ll have to pay attention to the established processes involved in generating leads via LinkedIn. You might also get interested in services provided by AdvizorPro, especially if you’re into insurance or financial industries.
Establishing a defined working procedure is a great way to save time and energy when doing such tasks.
But establishing a clearly defined working process doesn’t only improve efficiency, it also boosts the quality and consistency of your work. Processes can be developed for activities such as blog post creation, professional PR outreach, advertisements, and more. And you can document these processes in word documents as comprehensive bulleted checklists. This way your content creators, professional PR outreach staff and your advertisement managers can adopt your preferred work process.
Create Content Calendars
Studies suggest that content creation is a powerful tool that can be used to generate leads at a low cost. If you converse with successful bloggers, you’ll notice they all have one thing in common – content calendars. And although LinkedIn marketers are technically not bloggers, they can benefit just as much from content calendars. Among other things, content calendars help you to plan your content publishing such that your articles resonate with current trends, seasons, and audience needs.
One of the cool features of LinkedIn is that it has a publishing tool that allows you to create blog-style articles, which can rank in Google just as well as any web content. So, if LinkedIn publishing is one of your marketing strategies, then take some time out to create an informed content calendar. You’ll be better off for it.
Keep Things Organized
In the marketing world filled with several activities going on simultaneously, it’s so easy to get things mixed up and that can be a real problem. To maintain high productivity levels, your team must be able to track the progress of each project/activity at any given time. And one great way of doing this is by using project management tools. A Small Business CRM Software can also be used to boost team’s productivity.
“Project management tools such as Trello, Monday and Asana make it much easier to see who is doing what and monitor the progress of each project in real-time.
Tools such as LinkedIn Helper also introduce some level of automation to LinkedIn activities such as sending connection requests and cold messages. If you’re selling products, a Product Information Management platform will enable you to organize your sales and marketing content.
Keep An Eye on Your Competition
If there’s one sage advice most business gurus will agree on, it’s to never ignore your competition! You can learn a lot from your competitors especially if you’re an upcoming company in the space. The past failures and successes of your competitors can provide valuable insight regarding what to do (and not do) to be successful in your industry.
So, in addition to your regular LinkedIn marketing efforts, take some time to regularly snoop around your network to get a hint of what your competitors are up to. This can spark an even better idea that will undermine the competition and gain you more customers.
Stay Disciplined
Does that mean you should fire your employees for every little mistake? Certainly not. It’s usually a better approach to talk to team members when they show indiscipline, give them a verbal warning, and create a performance improvement plan based on pulse surveys for them if necessary. If they continue to display counterproductive attitudes, then you can step up the discipline to written queries, pay cuts, and even termination. This also includes effective employee onboarding.
The Bottom Line
LinkedIn marketing doesn’t have to be dreary and unproductive. With proper planning, organization, discipline, and clear processes, your marketing team will be more effective than ever before. You’ve got this!
Author Bio: Chioma Iwunze is a content marketing strategist at Time Doctor. She enjoys writing about productivity, remote work, marketing and business development. You can follow her on Twitter @cwritingnews. She also blogs at creativewritingnews.com.
