Think the only way to reach a large audience on LinkedIn is with paid ads?
It might take more time to build your audience and engage people through organic LinkedIn marketing, but it’s well worth the time and effort. Here are ten tips to help you take your organic LinkedIn marketing to the next level.
10 Tips for Organic LinkedIn Marketing
Building your organic LinkedIn reach is all about being authentic and offering value. Here are ten tips you can use to achieve this.
1. Engage With Other People in Your Niche
When you look at social media from a business perspective, it’s easy to think of it purely in terms of marketing. Your audience is spending time on LinkedIn, so you want to reach them, engage them, and bring them to your website.
The marketing aspect of social media is huge, but it’s not the only part of it.
It’s also about the social side of building connections and sharing knowledge. You can’t do the marketing part without the social part, particularly when it comes to organic reach.
To grow your organic LinkedIn reach you’ve got to engage with other people in your niche and build real connections. If you can connect with people in your industry, and showcase the value your content offers, then they’re likely to share it with their audience, further expanding your reach.
The search tool in LinkedIn is a great way to discover new people in business. Simply search for your keywords and use the tabs at the top to filter between people, companies, groups, posts, and other useful options.
When sending connection requests, make use of the “add a note” feature. This will make your request much more personal and is the perfect way to introduce people to your brand.
With over 800 million members, there’s plenty of scope to build your audience!
2. Use Thought Leadership
LinkedIn is a platform where thought leadership does exceptionally well. The focus LinkedIn has on business means people are looking for new information and new ideas to share, and as an industry expert, you can offer them this.
All social media is about an exchange. Your audience is exchanging engagement for the value of your content, which is why thought leadership can be so powerful.
Use your knowledge and harness your industry connections to create high-quality content that offers people useful insights. If you’ve grown your connections and have taken the time to understand what type of information your audience is looking for, then these thought leadership pieces can have a huge reach.
Organic LinkedIn is all about offering value and your expertise, and industry knowledge is just that: a valuable resource.
Another great bonus when you bring your connections in to help with your thought leadership is it expands your audience even further. If someone has contributed a quote, then tag them in the post and make them excited to amplify it to their connections.
3. Post Videos Effectively
Think about how you engage with LinkedIn. The chances are you don’t spend lots of time carefully reading each word. Instead, you scroll down, skimming posts until something interesting grabs your attention.
Long lines of text don’t grab people’s attention in the same way as a video.
YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world for a reason: we love video.
It can also convey messages much more efficiently than text, which is extremely useful when you’re trying to get your point across. The key thing to remember is to keep it human.
Yes, LinkedIn is business-focused, but people are still drawn to human stories. Use this opportunity to showcase the culture and people behind your brand.
For example, you may have written a thought leadership piece about “the Impacts of Remote Work on Employee Morale,” but your video may be used to show how people deal with remote work in your own business.
Video is great at grabbing people’s attention, but you’ve got to be able to keep it personable. Showing the human side of your brand and keeping things light are great ways to do this.
4. Explore and Use Hashtags
Hashtags help LinkedIn to organize content so it’s easily discoverable for users. When you include industry or topic-specific hashtags with your posts, it means users who are interested in those subjects can easily search for your content.
Not only will this make your post more likely to show up on someone’s feed, but it also allows you to show up in the search results. If you take our previous example of remote work and employee morale, a quick search will bring up posts with #remotework, #futureofwork, #greatresignation.
These hashtags give you more visibility and they also allow your audience to quickly identify what your post is about. If it’s something they’re passionate about, then it may well draw them into reading the entire article.
5. Share and Comment on Relevant Content
Successful organic LinkedIn is about authenticity.
It’s not easy to grow your network without being active and authentic, and even if you can, the level of engagement is going to be much lower. Part of being authentic is participating in the community by sharing and commenting on relevant content.
Whatever niche you’re working in, there’s bound to be lots of other people with great ideas talking about it on LinkedIn. This is a great opportunity for you to learn new things, but it’s also an opportunity to grow your brand.
Let’s go back to our example. The top result for our “remote work and employee morale” search has 53 comments. That’s 53 highly-engaged people who have likely read the article and scrolled through all the comments. Throw in the people who have read through all the comments without commenting themselves (people love to read comments), and that’s a good-sized audience of highly-engaged people.
Just leaving a thought-provoking, expert opinion in the comments is a perfect way to associate your brand with the topic. It shows you’re an active participant in industry discussion, and it showcases your expertise, all while introducing your brand to new people.
6. Be Authentic and Use Your Brand Voice
It’s easy to do all the right things and still not come across as authentic. Why’s that? It’s because many brands can seem like everything is written by an automated bot; there’s no character.
Writing as a brand is different from writing as an individual, but it should be no less characterful. Brands have amazing stories and amazing people behind them, so harness this to find your brand voice.
Sit down and define your brand voice and keep it consistent with your social media posts.
Organic LinkedIn isn’t just about ticking off a checklist. It’s about engaging people and one of the best ways to do that is through personality.
If your brand is more lighthearted and fun, then don’t be afraid to showcase that in your thought leadership, videos, comments, everything. If that means making a lighthearted joke about remote work, then do it!
If you have a good understanding of your target audience, and a clearly defined brand voice, then it should be easy to portray an authentic, human brand rather than a faceless entity.
7. Cross-Promote Your Content on Other Social Media Platforms
Great content is great content whether it’s on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, or any other platform, however, you do have to make some little tweaks to it.
To grow your organic LinkedIn reach, you’re going to create content that’s specifically targeted towards your LinkedIn audience, but you should also be cross-promoting it on your other profiles. If you’re putting a lot of resources into your content, then you want it to have the maximum reach, so there’s no point in limiting it to LinkedIn.
The more you share your content, the more data you collect to help inform future strategies.
You may find you get some helpful comments on Facebook with suggestions for future content, or you might find your post goes really well on Instagram where you have a slightly different audience. All of this information helps you to streamline your organic LinkedIn strategies and find out what works best.
You work hard on your content, so get it in front of as many people as possible.
8. Join Industry Groups
Groups are another great tool LinkedIn offers.
Some of the biggest groups have millions of members, and it’s a little bit like having a ready-made audience that’s been hand-picked for you. Groups allow you to do everything on this list and the best part is, you’ve got an engaged audience that shares similar interests to you.
Don’t forget the key elements we’ve talked about though. You’ve still got to be authentic and offer value; this isn’t just a place for shameless sales pitches.
Be an active participant in the group and don’t just share your own content. Draw attention to other people who are doing great things in your industry, and mix it in with your ideas and thought leadership.
If you can be an active member of an engaged group, then it can have a big impact on your organic LinkedIn reach.
9. Post Regularly
One of the hardest things with any kind of online marketing is being consistent. It’s not easy to constantly create amazing content, make social media posts, comment on industry discussions, and engage your email list.
It also takes time to see the results of your organic LinkedIn efforts. Your reach might be growing at a good pace, but it still takes time to see the payoff in terms of revenue.
This can be demoralizing and it’s the reason why a lot of brands make a start on their organic LinkedIn but don’t see it through. They get tempted by the shortcut of paid advertising and their organic reach falls by the wayside.
The thing is, the point where people tend to give up is often right before things actually take off. When they do, and you can consistently reach a large, targeted audience without paying for each click, it can have a big impact on your business.
When it comes to social media, consistency is key.
The best thing to do is create a content calendar and try to stick to it. Whether you’ve got time for a post every day, or once a week, stick to it!
10. Test Content Types
You’re going to grow your audience much more quickly if you learn from what you’re doing. LinkedIn analytics can give you powerful insights into what works and what doesn’t and you should be using this to inform your strategy.
What types of content get the best engagement? Which CTAs result in the highest number of clicks? Which headlines grab your audience’s attention?
These are all questions you can find answers to with the help of your analytics. The more you grow your audience, the more information you will have to help you create optimized content that gets people clicking to your website.
Frequently Asked Questions About Organic LinkedIn Marketing
What is LinkedIn organic marketing?
Organic LinkedIn marketing is your ability to reach your LinkedIn audience without paid marketing. It allows you to engage your connections and showcase your brand without paying for each click.
How do you do organic promotion on LinkedIn?
The best organic promotions on LinkedIn use valuable content to engage a targeted audience. Through regular posts and comments, you can grab people’s attention and keep your brand relevant.
What is organic content on LinkedIn?
Organic LinkedIn content is posts and comments that appear naturally on users’ feeds rather than as paid ads.
What is an organic impression on LinkedIn?
An organic LinkedIn impression is any time unpaid content is shown to a member. Your total number of organic impressions shows how often you’re reaching your audience through organic content.
Organic LinkedIn Marketing: Conclusion
Organic LinkedIn marketing is an excellent way for brands to engage their target audience. LinkedIn’s professional focus means it offers a demographic of people that works well for many brands, and this is something you should be taking advantage of.
By creating an authentic profile that showcases your brand voice and engages your industry with valuable content, you can quickly grow your audience. This allows you to reach a targeted, engaged audience with your message, giving your brand added authority and introducing it to potential customers.
If you’re looking to improve your social media results, then organic LinkedIn marketing could be a great option for you.
Have you had good results from organic LinkedIn marketing?
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