A social media audit is an effective way for a small business to understand how their overall marketing strategy is performing. If you are a B2B organization, performing a LinkedIn marketing strategy audit for 2019 will help you make sure you are leveraging effective lead generation techniques for your business.
Why You Need To Perform a Social Media Marketing Audit
Every marketing activity needs to be linked to a specific business goal to ensure a return on your investment.
Performing audits of your overall marketing strategy, content strategy, email strategy, and social media marketing strategy help you make sure that day-to-day marketing activities are effective. Social Media Marketing audits help determine the health of your lead generation strategy by:
- Measuring the effectiveness of your content marketing strategy
- Revealing potential opportunities for growth
- Uncovering new opportunities to generate leads in your current sales funnel
- Helping you determine where you may be losing leads in your current funnel
- Helping you gain insight into your overall marketing strategy
Part of your audit should include looking at your company’s performance on each of the social media platforms where you maintain a brand presence. B2B organizations should be including LinkedIn as a part of their lead generation platform.
Conducting a LinkedIn marketing strategy audit ensures your company is using effective lead generation techniques and meeting specific business goals.
Performing a LinkedIn Marketing Strategy Audit
Just as your sales and marketing departments should be working together to help generate more revenue for your business, your company’s LinkedIn lead generation strategy should be a part of your company’s LinkedIn marketing strategy.
This way you can create an effective goal for your marketing strategy: generate leads on LinkedIn. Moreover, your lead generation strategy has an effective playbook for attracting and qualifying prospects: a process that establishes your company as an authority to attract leads.
There are many benefits of conducting a LinkedIn marketing strategy audit, including:
- Help determine if your LinkedIn lead generation strategy aligns with your business goals
- May reveal effective lead generation techniques your competitors are leveraging
- Ensure your LinkedIn marketing and lead generation activities properly represent your company brand
- Determine if you have a clear personal brand voice
LinkedIn marketing audits can be done in as little as 30 minutes or can be more substantial. After the completion of a LinkedIn marketing strategy audit, you should be able to analyze your marketing goals for 2019 and determine what changes, if any, you need to make with your current marketing or lead generation activities.
Statistics You Want to Review During Your LinkedIn Marketing Strategy Audit
LinkedIn offers you statistics and indexes for different LinkedIn activities. Reviewing these statistics as a part of your audit will help provide additional insight into the health of your LinkedIn lead generation and marketing strategies.
Statistics and indexes you will want to review include:
- Who Viewed Your Profile
- Statistics on the posts you publish
- Statistics on the LinkedIn articles you publish
- The number of searches you have appeared in
- Your Social Selling Index (SSI)
Social Selling Index
LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index looks at how effectively you are leveraging LinkedIn to accomplish the four key areas of social selling, marketing, and effective lead generation techniques:
- Establishing and promoting your personal brand
- Finding qualified leads
- Building relationships with people in your network
- Using insights to engage with your network.
While SSI may be a vanity metric, knowing what your current SSI is and how you compare to others in your network and your industry can help you reveal potential areas for improvement as you complete the steps of your 2019 LinkedIn marketing strategy audit.
Steps for Conducting a 2019 Linkedin Marketing Strategy Audit
When you start your audit, you want to focus on five key areas: your LinkedIn profile, your LinkedIn Company page, LinkedIn Posts, LinkedIn Articles, and competitors and influencers in your space.
#1 Your LinkedIn Profile
We have written many comprehensive posts on how to create an effective LinkedIn profile, click here, to read one of them or you can click here to read another related article. When performing your LinkedIn marketing audit, you want to focus on how complete your profile is and ensure brand consistency.
You will want to make sure that your profile represents your company’s brand and creates a cohesive brand experience for your leads and customers. That way, no matter where your customers travel on the Internet, they can instantly recognize your company’s content.
When considering brand consistency, you will want to look at:
- Your profile picture
- The background image used
- The logo used for your company in the Experience section
- The logo included in the LinkedIn articles you publish, as well as the posts you generate
You will also want to make sure that you have included all necessary information in your profile and that LinkedIn indicates your profile is 100% complete. Some areas people tend to skip when completing their LinkedIn profile include:
- Attaching media files to your Summary and Experience Sections
- Receiving recommendations from current and past clients
- Completing the Skills Section and receiving Endorsements
- Including Volunteer Experience, if you are a part of non-profit organizations
- Including any Certifications or other Accomplishments
The more information you include in your LinkedIn profile, the more likely prospects will see you as an authority and understand that you and your organization are a good fit for their company.
#2 LinkedIn Company Page
Many people ignore this aspect of LinkedIn, but a complete and active Company page can help your leads better understand your organization while providing your company with a way to promote current activities. You may need to be more social while communicating through your LinkedIn profile, but on the LinkedIn company page, it is more accepted to be more promotional.
When auditing your LinkedIn Company page, you will want to review:
- Are all of the sections of the Company page complete and contain up to date information?
- Is there a background image and company logo?
- Is the content on the page consistent with the company brand experience?
- How often are you posting content to this page?
- Do you include videos, infographics and other forms of content to attract and engage your Company page followers?
You will also want to look at what you are posting on your Company page compared to your LinkedIn posts.
#3 LinkedIn Posts
People often confuse LinkedIn posts with LinkedIn Articles. LinkedIn posts are short (between 100-200 words) updates that you post directly to your newsfeed. You can post 3rd party content, videos, company generated content, and updates regarding recent professional activities. LinkedIn Articles, which we will be looking at next are different and require a different strategy.
When auditing your LinkedIn post, the things you will want to consider include:
- How often are you posting?
- When was the last time you published a post?
- What types of content are you posting?
- How much engagement from your network are you receiving from your different posts?
#4 LinkedIn Articles
LinkedIn articles are long (between 700-3,000 words) pieces of content that resemble a blog post and are published using LinkedIn Publisher. They are promoted outside of LinkedIn through Pulse and can be seen by your 1st, 2nd and 3rd-degree connections on LinkedIn.
When auditing your LinkedIn articles, you will want to review:
- How often are you publishing these articles?
- When was the last time you published an article?
- How many people responded to your call to action in each article?
- What is your call to action?
- How much engagement have you received from each article?
#5 Competitors and Influencers Research
An important part of your LinkedIn marketing strategy audit is comparing how your marketing strategy stacks up to your competitors LinkedIn marketing strategy. It is also important to take a look at what the influencers in your space are doing on LinkedIn so that you can determine the best way you can leverage their influence to meet your lead generation goals.
Things you will want to consider when researching competitors and influencers on LinkedIn include:
- How often do they post?
- What types of content do they post?
- How frequently do they publish LinkedIn articles?
- How do they promote their brand?
- How many followers do they have?
- How much engagement do they receive from their presence on LinkedIn?
Once you have completed your LinkedIn marketing strategy audit, you will want to use the information you gathered to help you take a look at your current goals and how these goals may need to change for 2019.
Goals that you may want to add or change in 2019 may include:
- Increasing the engagement you receive from posts and articles
- Increasing the number of 1st-degree connections you have
- Increasing the referral traffic you receive from LinkedIn activities
- Revising your content strategy
- Improving your SSI score
- Improving your call to action acceptance rate
- Improving your connection request acceptance rate
Your LinkedIn marketing strategy is only effective if it is in line with your business goals and implementing effective lead generation strategy to move people through your social media sales funnel and off of LinkedIn into your sales funnel.
If so, we invite you to have a conversation with one of our LinkedIn strategy experts. Whether or not you decide to work with us, we will offer some insights and strategies that can help you be more successful. Here is a LINK to schedule.
About RevGrow
RevGrow is a B2B LinkedIn Marketing and Lead Generation firm based in Dallas, but proudly serves clients throughout the United States. RevGrow specializes in helping business owners, consulting firms and sales professionals grow their revenue by generating a steady flow of qualified leads and targeted C-level appointments, while positioning you as the authority in your field and someone prospects will know, like and trust. You can connect with RevGrow on LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube.
