If you’re like us, we’ve spent much of the first part of the year diving into tightening up our 2023 marketing strategy and one platform we’re continuing to invest more time and attention on is LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is one of the best ways to connect and build meaningful relationships with potential partners, customers, and investors.

When used properly it can be a powerful marketing tool.

If you run a B2B (business-to-business) organization and you’re strapped for time (aren’t we all?), often our recommendation for the founders and business leaders we work with is to prioritize showing up and engaging on LinkedIn.

However, many B2C (Business-to-customer) businesses also have relationships with other businesses to cultivate – especially if you are working to get your products into retail locations.

No matter what side you land on it’s important to remember that LinkedIn is for meaningful, non-transactional connections.

To kickstart your LinkedIn strategy, we’ve put together some best practices for using LinkedIn to network and market your business (and yourself)!

How to suck less at LinkedIn

1. Give your profile some TLC

Headlines Matter

Your headline is KEY to introducing who you are and should go deeper than just listing your job title. It also plays a big factor in how the LinkedIn algorithm shows you in searches, which makes your headline prime real estate for keywords.

However, don’t mistake keywords for overly used buzzwords like ‘passionate’, ‘creative’, ‘innovative’, and ‘experienced’, etc. These words won’t tell your audience what you do and do little to convince them that you actually do have any of these qualities.

Instead, try making a statement about what you do, who you serve, and what kind of impact it has.
Shay Rowbottom does a great job of making a strong LinkedIn first impression, showcasing exactly what she does, the audience she serves, and what kind of results she produces.

Tell Your Story in the About Section

The “About” Section of your profile is your opportunity to showcase your unique talents and illustrate how they make a positive impact on the people you collaborate with.

It’s an invaluable way to make yourself stand out from the crowd by highlighting the value you bring to the table.

Plus, it’s a great way to be creative and have fun with your profile to further showcase your individuality!

Ben Wise is a great example of a thoughtfully crafted About section:

A few other ways to improve your LinkedIn profile:

Fill in your Skills Section
Have a high-resolution professional profile photo & header/banner
Ensure that your work experience is completely filled out
Customize your LinkedIn URL for your name

2. Show Up Consistently

Of the nearly 250 million monthly active users on LinkedIn only 3 million share content on a weekly basis.

That’s just a little over 1% of monthly users posting content. So what does that mean?

Those 3 million users who are sharing content (the top 1%) are getting about 9 billion impressions (the number of times a post is shown) each week.

By showing up consistently 3-5 times/week, it is very achievable to become part of that 1%!

A few ways you can show up are:

Engage with other people’s content through likes and thoughtful comments that help you build genuine relationships
Share helpful insights and information by sharing personal and professional stories that are relevant
Demonstrate thought leadership by facilitating much-needed leadership or industry-focused conversations

Sam Baker recently made a post that connects the Season 3 finale of Mad Men to questioning the importance of having a physical office location.

This started a conversation about the work-from-home movement, the overall love of Mad Men, and office culture. She managed to create thought-provoking content and interacted with her audience in the comment section.

This is a good example of showing up in an interesting and relevant way, through your content and interaction with your audience.

A few other ideas for creating engaging content are:

Have an opinion or viewpoint –
- If you’re going to comment/re-share a post. It’s one thing to be supportive/positive (which has its place) and another thing to help the conversation move forward.
- Start comments with “I wonder if…” or “What if….” or “Another view would be…” and end comments with “What do you think?”
Create content with a specific audience in mind –
- Not all posts you write will be relevant or engaging for all people, and that’s OK.
- By sharing and creating content that is niche to you and your industry – you’re more likely to attract more qualified leads/engagement.

3. Storytelling over blatant self-promotion

We tend to advise our clients to share a handful of case studies and blogs on their business accounts to serve as a “portfolio” if people check out your profile.

However, when it comes to developing your LinkedIn marketing strategy, the best place to focus is engaging “human-to-human” using your personal LinkedIn profile.

For example, the same week Christina had a personal page post that had 8k views, she shared a Noel & Co. page blog through her personal account and it got approximately 100 views.

What does this tell us? Your audience doesn’t want to be sold to and the LinkedIn platform is looking for engagement between people.

Instead of prioritizing creating content for your page, share stories of what you are currently working on, share your recent client wins, and ask questions that start a relevant conversation.

Create a human connection that your audience will feel connected to.

If you’re still not convinced that storytelling works, check out the post below from Emily Crookston which got over 4,000 impressions. She tells a story of a book she recently read, connects with her audience by highlighting her key takeaways, and then encourages engagement by ending her post with a question for her audience to answer in the comments.

Check it out here:

Not every opportunity for engagement has to be long-form content.

Simply starting off your post with an attention grabber like “I have a confession” or “Unpopular Opinion” is another great way to connect with your audience.

If you have a rebellious personal brand, we’ve seen that colorful language doesn’t hurt, either.

Check out this example of an “edgy” confession post.

4. Share Relevant Content

While we’re sure your dog and kids are absolutely adorable, sharing pics of them may not be the best way to engage your audience unless you have a leadership or professional story that makes it relevant to talk about your kiddos or fur babies, like this one.

Instead, share articles and content that are relevant to your industry.

Make sure that the content is useful for your target audience and is in line with your overall marketing strategy. Larry Long Jr, a professional emcee, speaker, and sales acceleration trainer (+ a handful of other amazing things!) that has 36k followers on LinkedIn often shares upcoming events for other speakers that shares helpful insights gives thoughtful shout-outs, and is highly engaging content (in this case, with 26 comments) like this.

Want more traction on LinkedIn

Christina credits Emily Crookston, the Founder, and CEO of the Pocket Ph.D for inspiring her personal LinkedIn strategy and approach

Here’s a great recent article by Emily sharing the top 5 LinkedIn mistakes people make.

(Hint: One great piece of advice from Emily is that you should comment on a few people’s posts before sharing any posts of your own)

Another fantastic free LinkedIn marketing resource

Emily also hosts LinkedIn Hot Seats, a monthly 60-minute Zoom call where she will look at as many LinkedIn profiles as she can in the 60 minutes and share tips and tricks along the way.