Out of the many social media platforms that have become indispensable for businesses, especially SMEs, LinkedIn stands out as a powerful tool for marketing. But how do you know if your LinkedIn marketing strategy is actually working?
Leveraging the platform’s reach, tools and features properly can significantly boost your marketing efforts. However, in order to monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing strategy to ensure optimal results, you need to know what metrics to measure, how to measure them, and how to use this data to tweak and further refine your campaign strategy.
Understanding the power of LinkedIn for SMEs
LinkedIn has emerged as a powerful platform for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) to enhance their marketing efforts and connect with a highly targeted audience.
More than 80% of marketers say they’ve found their greatest marketing success with LinkedIn. Similarly, 97% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn for content marketing.1,2
This means the platform offers SMEs and entrepreneurs a unique opportunity to establish thought leadership, build brand awareness, and generate valuable leads.
How to use LinkedIn for marketing
Leveraging LinkedIn allows marketers to tap into a network of industry professionals, decision-makers, and potential customers. Unlike other social media platforms, LinkedIn is specifically designed for professional networking, making it an ideal platform to showcase your expertise and connect with individuals who are genuinely interested in your products or services.
By creating a strong presence on LinkedIn, you can gain credibility and trust among your chosen target audience.
You can take advantage of various features such as company pages, personal profiles, groups, and content publishing, to engage with your audience in meaningful ways.
Additionally, LinkedIn’s robust search and targeting capabilities allow you to reach the right people at the right time, maximising your marketing efforts and yielding better results.
Tracking the right metrics on LinkedIn
To know whether your LinkedIn marketing campaign is doing what it’s supposed to do – get you more business, increase traffic for your website, generate more qualified leads, etc. – you need to know how to track your metrics on the platform.
These metrics provide valuable insights into the performance of your LinkedIn presence and help you understand how well you are achieving your marketing objectives. Below are the 3 most important kinds of metrics you need to track:
Profile Engagement Metrics: These are the various measurements used to assess the level of engagement and interaction with your LinkedIn profile. From these, you can understand how your profile is performing and how effectively it is connecting with your target audience.
Some common profile engagement metrics include the connection growth rate, profile views, and engagement actions such as likes, comments, and shares. These will help you evaluate the effectiveness of your networking efforts, understand the reach and visibility of your profile, and assess the quality and relevance of your content.
Content Performance Metrics: These are measurements that will help you evaluate how well the content you share on LinkedIn is performing. By measuring these factors, you will begin to understand how well your posts resonate with your target audience and whether they are driving interaction and action.
Some of the common content performance metrics you can access include your click-through Rates (CTR), which reveal the percentage of LinkedIn users who clicked on a link or call-to-action (CTA) within your posts; your post engagement rate, which takes into account all the various actions taken by users in response to your content, such as likes, comments, shares, and clicks; and your follower growth rate, which measures how quickly your follower base is expanding on LinkedIn.
Lead Generation Metrics: These are used to evaluate how effective your LinkedIn marketing efforts have been in generating leads and driving conversions. These are crucial for both organic as well as paid campaigns.
Common metrics you can analyse in this category include inbound leads (leads generated directly from your LinkedIn activities), conversion rates (how many people your post reached vs how many of those actually converted by taking the action you specified), and customer acquisition costs (this is more for paid campaigns, where you measure how much it cost you to get each lead on LinkedIn).
Being on top of this data will help you understand the contribution of LinkedIn to your overall lead generation efforts, which will in turn allow you to track the effectiveness of your LinkedIn campaigns and content in attracting and converting potential customers.
Now that you know what to measure, the next logical question is: where will you get all this data from?
LinkedIn Analytics: Your all-in-one data tool
LinkedIn Analytics is a powerful tool provided by LinkedIn, allowing you to track and measure various aspects of your LinkedIn performance. It covers a lot of valuable insights for both personal profiles and company pages.
Using Analytics, you can get valuable insights and data about audience engagement, content performance, and the effectiveness of your LinkedIn advertising campaigns. This will help you make data-driven decisions, optimise your marketing strategies, and achieve your objectives more effectively.
Where can I find my LinkedIn Analytics?
To access LinkedIn Analytics, follow these steps:
- Sign in to your LinkedIn account.
- Navigate to your personal profile or company page.
- On your personal profile, click on the “Me” icon at the top right corner of the LinkedIn homepage and select “View Profile.” On a company page, go to the page directly.
- Look for the “Analytics” tab on your personal profile or the company page. Click on it to access your LinkedIn Analytics.
What metrics can I see on LinkedIn Analytics?
LinkedIn Analytics offers valuable insights in seven separate areas, ranging from what you do on LinkedIn to who visits your page, and even how your company as a whole is doing.
Here are the different types of data you can get from this tool:
- Content Analytics: These help you assess the effectiveness of your content, including posted videos, so you can evaluate the quality of the content pieces as well as the topics you focus on.
- Followers Analytics: This gives you insights into the demographics and sources of everyone in your network and beyond who is following your Page. Understanding who follows you will help you ideate how to engage with them more effectively.
- Visitors Analytics: This shows you the demographics and sources of everyone who visits your Page – whether it’s your personal profile or company page. Again, knowing who all have found you on LinkedIn and seen your page will help you tailor your marketing strategies accordingly.
- Leads Analytics: These analytics help you collect information on members who have filled out lead generation forms on your Page within the past 90 days, enabling you to gather quality leads from your Page visitors.
- Competitors Analytics: This helps you compare your Page’s followership and content engagement with that of your competitors, so you can see how your performance measures up and identify areas for improvement.
- Employee Advocacy Analytics: Using this, you can see how your employees are engaging with the content you and your company share on LinkedIn. You can also see the engagement levels for content recommended by your employees.
- Employer Brand Analytics: This is only for brands or companies that have Careers Pages on LinkedIn. It helps you understand how people are engaging with your Careers Page and see how to make it better.
How to use analytics to supercharge your LinkedIn marketing
LinkedIn can be a game-changer for every SME’s marketing strategy. Whether you’re just starting out or have been using the platform for a while, assessing your marketing strategy’s effectiveness is crucial.
By harnessing the power of data, you can gain valuable insights into the performance of your content, understand your audience better, and make informed decisions to optimise your strategy.
Whether it’s evaluating the effectiveness of your updates, analyzing follower demographics, or tracking lead generation, LinkedIn analytics provides the tools you need to measure success and drive tangible results.
Regularly monitoring these key performance indicators (KPIs) will slowly but surely help you refine your marketing efforts to drive growth and success for your company. But remember, cracking the LinkedIn code is an ongoing process. Stay proactive, and LinkedIn will become a powerful ally in your marketing arsenal.
Keep learning, keep experimenting, and keep leveraging the power of LinkedIn to grow your business!
Need help starting or managing your LinkedIn page? Drop us an email or call us today to schedule your free consultation!
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References:
- LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, Read me if you want to advertise better on LinkedIn
- LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, Brand Awareness
