LinkedIn Posts Our Network Loved

Not every blog-style post you create as an inbound marketer has to appear on your website, and not every social media update you share has to be a short, catchy tweet or video.

For B2B marketers, LinkedIn should also be an active part of your content strategy. Your LinkedIn presence should include a combination of sharing content from other sources that your network can use, posts that link to your blog and downloadable offers, and long-form content using the LinkedIn Publisher tool. This third category is a great way of establishing yourself as a brand, a thought leader, and a source of useful information for those who are part of your network.

Because my LinkedIn presence sometimes reaches a different set of readers than the Inbound Accelerator blog on our JONES website, the posts with the greatest response from readers may vary.

Have you joined my network? Connect with me and the JONES team on LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+, Twitter or Pinterest —whichever you use most to learn more about inbound marketing, brand development, PR and social media.

As my second round of gifts to my readers, here are links to the LinkedIn Publisher posts from the last year that readers liked, shared and commented on the most.

1. Rethinking Healthcare Marketing: Brand Awareness Isn’t Enough

What I have learned in a decade working with a variety of clients who serve the healthcare industry is that traditional ways of marketing healthcare aren’t enough. When patient satisfaction is at stake, it is essential to think beyond billboards and brand awareness.

Learn more about why I think marketing departments at healthcare facilities and related companies need to personalize patient communications as part of their content marketing strategy.

2. Strong Brand Identity, Inbound Marketing Amplify Each Other

“A strong brand identity provides an anchor for your inbound marketing strategy, while inbound marketing has the potential to amplify your brand’s message and grow it’s presence in the market. It’s a match made in heaven.”

Read on for five ways to ensure your inbound marketing is tightly linked to your brand identity, building a greater awareness, and improving the effectiveness of your marketing in carving out a position at the top of your industry.

3. Competitive Audits Should Dig Deep: 3 Areas To Inform Branding

Before you solidify the brand identity you want for your company, it pays to know what your competitors are doing and saying, and what industry influencers and customers are saying about them. That’s why one of the first steps we take in creating a brand is a competitive audit.

This post provides insight into three areas you need to research: media & public relations, messaging & positioning, and analyst opinions.

4. Leveraging Thought Leadership Articles to Generate Inbound Leads

Anyone who says marketing and public relations should be strictly separate strategies isn’t considering the realities of today’s communication world, in which fewer and fewer consumers differentiate between owned, earned, shared and paid content. It just makes sense to consider a “communications” strategy that encompasses all venues.

One way of doing so is leveraging contributed bylined articles to complement other inbound marketing content to drive website traffic and leads. Check out my post to learn how.

5. Transform Your Content Ideas Into Marketing Campaigns

Ideas for great content are fantastic. But that content can only achieve its full potential as lead and sales generating material if it is part of cohesive campaigns. Content needs to be organized and created with a purpose in mind.

6. 5 Marketing Projects to Finish in Q4

It may be too late to complete these projects yet in 2017, but even if they aren’t done now, there is still value in conducting media, marketing or blog audits and in planning ahead, no matter what time of year you do it.

You’ll find links in the post to helpful tools for planning campaigns and blog calendars, along with checklists of what to include when conducting audits of your marketing and blogging success.

7. 7 Secrets to Creating Great Marketing Content

In a world swimming in content, quality matters more than quantity, as it is imperative that the content you create be something that resonates with your prospects and customers, solving their problems and inspiring them to share it with others. In this post I outline the five criteria we use to gauge the quality of our marketing content, plus two rules I follow as a manager to ensure the content our team produces meets all five requirements.

8. Ghostwriting Done Right: 4 Rules for PR & Marketing

Some of the content created for your marketing and public relations campaigns needs the strength and influence that comes from a voice of authority. This includes blog posts and bylined articles or opinion pieces contributed to industry and business media.

That authority typically comes from a leadership position, such as your company’s top executives, product development gurus or lead researchers. Unfortunately, those people typically don’t have the time to write the content your PR and marketing departments need for increase brand awareness.

Read on for four rules of thumb to follow when using ghostwriting to put your executives’ experience and expertise into writing, without bogging them down in the details.

9. Rate Your Marketing Agency’s Content Quality

Take this eight-question quiz to determine whether your marketing agency is meeting expectations in creating the kind of quality content you need to fuel your inbound marketing strategy.

How would you grade your agency on: Reflecting your brand position in content? Meeting deadlines? Basic grammar, spelling and creativity? Communication?

10. How Two National Brands Use Media Audits

Planning successful marketing and public relations campaign starts with knowing your brand’s current standing and with knowing the direction of the conversation in your industry. That information comes from conducting media, marketing and messaging audits.

Among the audits we have conducted for clients over the years, we have helped major national brands identify ways to confront weaknesses and control the conversation in changing markets. Read two examples of how we helped clients uncover important insights, such as a lack of understanding in the market of one brand’s products, and the growing competition another faced from a seemingly unrelated industry.

Are you using LinkedIn Publisher to reach new audiences? Connect with me — I’m always eager to learn more from other marketers and to share my own experience and inspiration.