LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional social network. It has become the platform of choice for clinical, technical, and business leaders within healthcare to network and connect with each other.
As such, it is an ideal platform for healthcare IT marketers to:
- educate the market
- generate awareness of their company’s brand and solutions
- engage with target decision maker and influencer audiences
In this blog, we’ll take a closer look at the three main reasons to leverage LinkedIn as part of your overall healthcare IT marketing strategies, as well as specific content marketing strategies.
#1: Sharing Thought Leadership Content
Most LinkedIn subscribers participate because they want to build their professional networks. They also benefit from thought leadership content shared among colleagues. Such shareable content may already exist on your website—such as blogs, case studies, white papers, or videos. Or, you can create new content as original LinkedIn articles.
In either case, marketers can use LinkedIn to create and distribute educational thought leadership. Follow these best practices to increase reach and impact.
Consider the nature of your content. Good content should be thought provoking. It should discuss relevant problems, their impact, and possible solutions in an informative and relatable way.
Provide context within your posts. The best way to solicit interest and engagement within busy LinkedIn feeds? Add a few brief sentences that summarize the key points of the content you’re sharing. This will entice scrollers to want to read more.
Drive followers to your website. Be sure to direct your readers to your website so they can learn more about your company and solutions. Have high-value content like case studies or white papers? Consider adding gated landing pages to collect lead information.
#2 Generating Company and Brand Awareness
Generating awareness involves getting your content in front of as many people as possible. The more your target audience engages with your content, the greater the reach across the broader network. This results in increased awareness of your company’s brand and solutions.
There are several simple tactics you can use to maximize the number of impressions—and thus boost awareness of your LinkedIn content.
Post regularly. LinkedIn users are far more likely to follow your company’s page when they see a steady stream of valuable content. In the healthcare IT realm, weekly is an ideal target. Anything more, and followers are less likely to read each post. Much less, and engagement decreases.
Leverage your organic reach. A simple way to increase exposure on LinkedIn is to get your employees to like and share your content. One, it casts a wider net across the network. Two, it results in LinkedIn prioritizing your posts over content perceived to be less engaging.
Use hashtags. Hashtags enable users to discover and follow specific topics of interest to them. Using hashtags in your LinkedIn posts allows you to associate your content with key topics, tradeshow events, and technologies useful to healthcare IT audiences.
Include mentions. Like hashtags, mentioning other companies or LinkedIn users in your posts triggers your post to appear on the feeds of those who like or follow those entities. Once again, this increases your organic reach.
Consider sponsored content. LinkedIn collects data that is highly beneficial for targeting. Where we work, our professional interests, titles, skills, experience, education, and more are all important. For a fee, you can leverage this demographic data to promote posts within the feeds of targeted healthcare IT decision makers.
#3 Increasing Engagement
Engagement is the next level of achievement beyond awareness. Effective engagement doesn’t just involve passively consuming content—but also actively engaging with it. This occurs when users view, like, share, or follow your posts.
To drive engagement, LinkedIn posts should have a clear call to action. One that encourages readers to click on content links (e.g. website, YouTube channel) or to take a specific action. For example:
- downloading a white paper
- scheduling a demo
- reaching out for more information
Including more than one call to action provides different options for audiences to engage with your content—based on their preference or perspective. For instance, a single post might encourage users to download a white paper as well as visit a booth at an upcoming trade show.
Integrating LinkedIn into Your Content Marketing (and Overall Marketing) Strategy
LinkedIn is frequented by healthcare IT decision makers and influencers in search of interesting and relevant content related to their professional roles. This presents a unique opportunity for healthcare IT marketers to create and promote relevant thought leadership that generates awareness of their company and solutions and increases engagement across target audiences.
Are you ready to take your LinkedIn strategy to the next level? Our team of product marketing experts can help you leverage LinkedIn to increase the reach and impact of your content marketing strategy. Contact us to learn more.
