8 Steps to Create a LinkedIn Organic Growth Strategy

Tasked with managing your company’s LinkedIn page?

Get ready for the line of questioning around raising its follower count, increasing impressions and engagements, and earning conversions as quickly as possible — well, if you haven’t been asked already.

Leadership often thinks going viral with a witty line or a stunning visual is easy and sparks the masses to fall in love with a brand overnight. But the truth is that growth on LinkedIn takes time. And if you’re doing it organically, this path to cultivating a community on LinkedIn might feel daunting.

Creating a LinkedIn organic growth strategy is easy. An individual or a team of any size can tackle this project with minimal hurdles. It may require the involvement of a few other stakeholders to streamline processes and move things along, but most of what you need is readily available and doesn’t require costly resources.

Let’s explore why you need a LinkedIn organic growth strategy and the steps to take.

Why You Need to Focus on Organic Growth for LinkedIn

Organic growth for LinkedIn builds a loyal audience of followers translating into cost-effective brand awareness and positioning your company as an industry thought leader.

More than 1 billion people around the world use LinkedIn, and while you shouldn’t be aiming to reach every one of them, your community — no matter how big or small — is there waiting for you. It’s just a matter of identifying your audience, engaging them with your content, and making this group feel connected to your purpose.

Still don’t believe you should focus on a LinkedIn organic growth strategy? Here are a few reasons why you need to:

• Engage your audience: Advertisements are labeled as such on LinkedIn, but organic posts provide an opportunity to educate, connect with, and empower your target audience without causing them to feel like you’re blatantly pitching or selling.
• Create a community: Once your audience finds consistent value in your content, you’ve cultivated a community that remains engaged and amplifies your message.
• It’s free: Rolling out an organic growth strategy for LinkedIn doesn’t cost a penny!
• Budgets are constrained: Marketers are asked to do more with less in every industry. Budgets are constrained in the current economic environment, so it’s critical to develop and implement an organic growth strategy that complements the LinkedIn ads you’re running (if any at all).
• Getting started is easy: Repurpose your existing content inventory into pieces to use on LinkedIn, and now there’s a steady stream of content to roll out on LinkedIn for the next few weeks or months.

Overall, while paid advertising has its place, organic growth on LinkedIn fosters strong connections and positions your company as an authority capable of cutting through the noise—as a no-cost acquisition channel. In a time when everyone is inundated with choices, reaching your audience while reducing customer acquisition costs (CAC) is a significant victory.

Guide: How to Create a LinkedIn Organic Growth Strategy

Take a look below at the steps to create an organic growth strategy for LinkedIn, and remember to tailor each step for your company and its industry. A delivery platform and a payment processor, for example, could both create an organic growth strategy but with structures varying greatly.

Modifying the steps in our organic growth strategy guide based on your company’s unique profile positions you for the highest chance of success.

#1. Identify the KPIs and audience

Know what you want to achieve? As a marketer, this is always where to start. Considering input from company leadership and your own perceived priorities, identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) that you’re focused on accelerating.

In terms of LinkedIn, some of the most popular KPIs include impressions, engagements, shares, comments, click-throughs, and followers. Typically, several of the KPIs for organic growth on LinkedIn are interconnected and will increase with each other. So don’t be surprised if, for example, you choose to focus on increasing impressions and, as a result, engagements and shares also increase.

When developing a LinkedIn organic growth strategy, be mindful of who you’re targeting as well. Don’t try casting too wide a net. Focus on your company’s ideal customer profiles (ICPs). With each piece of content developed and rolled out on LinkedIn, keep the buyer personas in mind.

Identifying the KPIs to prioritize and the audience you’re aiming to reach defines the purpose of your organic growth strategy, both for LinkedIn and any other distribution channel you’re utilizing. It’s a foundational step for marketing as a whole.

#2. Craft content mix and repurpose what you have

Social media should feel social, and yet many companies continue to use LinkedIn as a repository for link previews to blog posts and landing pages. Not an image or video in sight!

Put yourself in the audience’s shoes. Open the LinkedIn app on your phone, and what catches your eye? It’s the 45-second video or the graphic depicting what you need to know.

Organic growth on LinkedIn only achieves success with a diversified content mix. Link previews, while necessary (and useful!) from time to time, create friction between your audience and your desired outcome. Presenting the same themes with a multimedia focus is much more engaging, leading to the organic growth you’re seeking.

But avoid burdening yourself with creating entirely new content by repurposing the content your company already has. Blog posts, webinars, guides, and reports are all chock full of insightful takeaways, quotes, and data points to package into a static image, a ‘snackable’ video, an eye-catching carousel, or a downloadable infographic for LinkedIn.

And here’s a little-talked-about secret: LinkedIn, like many social media platforms, prefers that users stay on its platform. As such, the platform’s algorithms may reduce a link preview post’s visibility in users’ feeds. So If you’ve participated in the tidal wave of link previews, chances are impressions and engagements aren’t quite where you’d like — hence why your content mix needs to be diversified with images, carousels, videos, and more.

In addition, make a concerted effort to interact with other company pages and individuals. LinkedIn allows your company page to comment and reshare any post, so use it as an opportunity to show you’re paying attention to and finding value in external content.

#3. Let your brand shine through

Large enterprises and startups alike go to great lengths to establish a brand identity. On LinkedIn, you need it to shine through because social media platforms are essentially window shopping. Audiences are ‘passing through’ when they see your posts, and your job is to get them to not only pass through again but, more importantly, to enter through the doors.

Your company’s page on LinkedIn should reflect a message, tone, and style consistent with your website and all other touchpoints.

Embrace injecting some personality into the LinkedIn presence, though. While this doesn’t mean writing so informal that the copy resembles a high school text exchange, use a few emojis to illustrate and emphasize key points — and, again, rely on visual media to command the audience’s attention.

#4. Determine posting frequency and schedule

Posting daily for a few weeks straight or multiple times in a single day before going radio silent for days or weeks kills the momentum you’ve built up.

Organic growth on LinkedIn requires consistency, but don’t mistake this for a need to post beyond what your company is capable of. One post daily or one post on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays might be a perfect starting point for you and your company.

‍Buffer conducted a study using millions of LinkedIn posts and identified the best times to post on LinkedIn throughout the week. Use this data when committing to an initial posting frequency and schedule, and monitor performance to understand if specific times or days of the week work better for your LinkedIn page.

#5. Deploy employee advocates

Employee advocacy isn’t a new concept, but it’s finally exploding in popularity for its ability to take employees — an asset every company has — and equip them with megaphones on social media. Yes, it’s a lot like influencer marketing (but without the added expenses).

Running an employee advocacy program as part of your organic growth strategy generates significant earned media value, too. In 2022, Sprout Social’s earned media value from employee advocacy reached nearly $450,000. Any amount of earned media value is welcome, and it’ll only increase as more employees participate and share more of your content on LinkedIn.

In addition to contributing to organic growth on LinkedIn, employee advocacy motivates employees to perform at a high level and increases employee sentiment.

#6. Partner with external individuals and companies

Your company’s LinkedIn page should be all about you, your products and services, and your thought leadership in the industry. But it should also incorporate individuals and companies with whom you do business. Maybe there’s a customer champion who could write a LinkedIn article on your page (or theirs!) or host a LinkedIn Live event with a company you’ve launched an integration with.

This leads to extra exposure, cross-pollinating your audience with the partner’s audience.

#7. Analyze data to adapt the strategy

Being strategic is adapting your organic growth strategy for LinkedIn after analyzing data that reveals what’s working and where you’re missing the mark.

Do more of the good and less of the bad. Sounds simple enough, right? Yet far too often marketers get caught up in overcommitting to their strategies.

However, being agile and adapting your LinkedIn organic growth strategy returns the best results. While there’s nothing wrong with rethinking the playbook, adapting strategy is what separates stellar marketers from everyone else.

Therefore, if you notice that a specific content type or a posting cadence isn’t meeting expectations, examine analytics in LinkedIn’s administrator dashboard or with a social media management tool. You’ll uncover the insights to determine actionable next steps, ensuring you stay on top of your goals.

#8. Test new ideas for breakthroughs

Playing it safe is fine, but taking risks fuels inspiration and leads to breakthroughs even if the first iteration doesn’t pan out.

Once you’ve established the parameters of your organic growth strategy for LinkedIn and are posting consistently, you’re ready to think bigger. Go for the flashier rollouts, launch a LinkedIn newsletter, or explore any other idea that, early on, you thought wasn’t worth the extra effort.

What you’ll learn is a successful organic growth strategy — for LinkedIn and beyond — is achieved when you test ideas and build upon their results.

Build a High-Impact LinkedIn Organic Growth Strategy

Now you’re prepared to create an organic growth strategy for LinkedIn that establishes your company’s brand as a must-follow for consumers, industry experts, and other groups within your target audience.

Focus on the fundamentals, and don’t bite off more than you can chew in the beginning. Deliver content on LinkedIn that your audience responds to, and adapt the LinkedIn organic growth strategy in real time to stay on top of trends impacting performance.

‍Interested in supercharging your organic growth strategy for LinkedIn with one of our experts? Get in touch with Right Side Up and we’ll connect you with an expert ready to help.