While many social networks saw business use decline in 2023, LinkedIn saw 5% business use growth. (Second only to the 16% business use growth of TikTok.)
Hootsuite’s Social Trends Report finds that change in usage is driven by a renewed focus on ROI. LinkedIn is the platform of choice for many businesses looking to make deals and recruit top talent. Especially those focused on B2B sales.
LinkedIn marketing tools make it easier to build an effective brand presence on the platform. They also help you understand the results of your efforts. That’s important for tracing everything back to that critical ROI.
Let’s take a look at how to incorporate LinkedIn marketing tools into your social strategy.
What’s the purpose of LinkedIn marketing tools?
Before we dive into our list, let’s talk about why you might want to use LinkedIn marketing tools in the first place.
Scheduling content
Scheduling content on LinkedIn allows you to focus your energy on creating quality posts, articles, and job listings. This is a better use of your skills than the manual labor of creating posts on the fly.
Creating your content in batches allows you to:
- Star focused on the themes central to your marketing strategy and goals,
- streamline campaigns, and
- get feedback on post drafts from team members and stakeholders.
When you choose a LinkedIn scheduling tool that also allows you to schedule content for other platforms, the benefits increase exponentially.
With a unified view, you can develop synergies throughout your content plan. This saves time switching between tabs. It also lets you check that you’re spacing your content appropriately for connections who follow you in more than one place.
Automated messaging
This is an area where you have to be careful, as most automated messaging tools are prohibited on LinkedIn. That’s because LinkedIn wants to encourage real connections between real people and companies. If you use blackhat strategies to game the system, you risk having your account restricted or even shut down. (Just don’t use them at all — that’s our strong recommendation.)
However, there are some legit tools you can use to automate messaging tasks on LinkedIn, completely risk-free. These are primarily tools that help you and your team manage, respond to, and streamline incoming messages. For example, tools that route incoming messages to the most appropriate person on your team, or that allow you to save templated responses to common inquiries.
To get into the finer details, check out our post on LinkedIn automation tools.
Performance insights
Measuring your performance on LinkedIn is critical to making that performance better. Improving your LinkedIn strategy involves studying both your best and your worst content. Learning from past performance shows what you should do more of, and which strategies you should leave behind.
Again, it’s helpful to analyze your results in the full context of your overall social strategy. Sure, LinkedIn will likely always be your prime social platform for recruiting — but it is also a valuable social marketing platform. Understanding how LinkedIn results compare to those on other platforms helps you understand how best to allocate your limited social marketing resources.
Generating more leads
As any good salesperson knows, you always need more leads to fill your funnel. And LinkedIn is the top platform for B2B marketers worldwide. So any tools that can connect you with more leads on LinkedIn and help your social selling efforts are worth your attention.
LinkedIn lead generation tools help ramp up your marketing efforts by ensuring you reach the right people (e.g. decision makers who can purchase your product or service) at the right time. This is the best way to maximize ROI over the long run.
Audience and competitor research
The best LinkedIn marketing tools help you improve your content marketing strategy. Detailed audience and competitor research are key here.
Odds are, your content is not going to go viral on LinkedIn. The LinkedIn algorithm is actually designed to stop content from going viral. That’s because LinkedIn is focused on connecting users with professional advice and expertise that is specifically relevant to them.
Put another way, the LinkedIn algorithm is designed to show people the content they are most likely to engage with. This differs from passive content consumption. That means early engagement signals are even more important on LinkedIn than on other social platforms.
The catch is that LinkedIn mainly values thoughtful comments from relevant people. These are worth far more than likes, shares, or ultra-brief comments. Audience and competitor research is the best way to understand what your target audience wants, and to learn what’s working best for others in your niche.
All of this can help to extend reach and engagement, which then reinforce each other in a virtuous circle.
10 best LinkedIn marketing tools for 2024
1. Hootsuite
We’re listing Hootsuite as a single LinkedIn marketing tool here. But in reality it’s a suite of social media management tools that help to enhance your entire LinkedIn marketing strategy. It can help with all the elements listed above — and a few more.
Hootsuite may be best known for its scheduling capabilities. And those are certainly helpful for saving time when sharing content on LinkedIn – either in isolation or as part of a larger social campaign. But perhaps the most useful feature of the Hootsuite scheduler for LinkedIn is its built-in recommendations for the best times to post based on your content goals.
In terms of messaging, Hootsuite Inbox helps you stay on top of both public and private LinkedIn messages by corralling everything in one social inbox. You can use automated filtering to assign messages to the right team members. This shows both followers and the algorithm that you’re active and engaged.
Manage all your messages stress-free with easy routing, saved replies, and friendly chatbots. Try Hootsuite’s Inbox today.
Book a DemoAudience and competitor research is another area where Hootsuite really shines. Using Hootsuite Analytics, you can build an audience profile with interests and behaviors from across your social profiles. Then use the built-in benchmarking tools to gain insights about your industry as a whole, or even specific competitors.
Map your findings back to your own specialist areas of knowledge to create LinkedIn marketing content and develop a brand voice that speaks directly to your most valuable followers. When organic content performs well, boost your best posts with just a couple of clicks. Take it all a step further by using Hootsuite’s built-in AI hashtag generator to find the growth-oriented hashtags that are most likely to maximize your LInkedIn audience.
Or, use OwlyWriter AI to generate automatic captions when you share curated content on LinkedIn. Show both humans and robots that you are adding value and perspective to everything you post.
Finally, track your results and refine your strategy in real time with custom reports that come automatically to your inbox, or create easy-to-read reporting presentations for multiple stakeholder groups with a few clicks.
Pro tip: LinkedIn is one of the best social media platforms on which to make use of an employee advocacy strategy. Hootsuite Amplify has you covered there.
2. Native LinkedIn marketing tools
Source: LinkedIn
Several paid and free LinkedIn marketing tools are built right into the social network itself. Some of the most important native LinkedIn tools for marketing are:
- LinkedIn’s native scheduler: Post up to 90 days in advance using your laptop or Android device. For full details, check out our blog on how to schedule posts on LinkedIn.
- LinkedIn native Page and Profile analytics: Track visitors, followers, competitors, and content effectiveness. Premium LInkedIn users get additional profile analytics data. Read more about LinkedIn analytics tools.
- Sponsored Messaging: This paid solution can help you reach new contacts and bring in leads.
- Sales Navigator: Another paid LinkedIn tool to help sales professionals save leads, get relevant alerts, and reach an extended network.
3. Crystal
Source: Crystal
Crystal is an AI-powered tool that uses publicly available data on your prospects to collect information about their personality. It then extrapolates insights that help you understand their communication style and purchase motivations, as well as how they make decisions.
On the marketing side, Crystal integrates with your CRM to pull personality data that leads to better campaign and message targeting on LinkedIn.
All of this allows your sales and marketing teams to build stronger connections using LinkedIn. Accessed through a Chrome extension, you can use this tool with public LinkedIn profiles as well as LinkedIn Recruiter and LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
4. Zopto
Source: Zopto
Zopto allows you to import lists from your CRM to create targeted campaigns on LInkedIn. You can also use Zopto to build new, advanced prospect lists and filter them using a wide range of factors. It includes a LinkedIn scheduler.
Zopto uses a dedicated IP address, messaging scale-up, and randomization to simulate natural behavior. They say, “our platform works seamlessly with LinkedIn’s policies, ensuring your outreach is both effective and ethical!”
5. Canva
Source: Canva
You might not think about design as much for your LinkedIn posts as you do for your content on other social platforms. But great-looking images are key to stopping the scroll on LinkedIn, too. Canva has a collection of free Linkedin post templates to make sure your posts start off on the right foot.
You can also design your LinkedIn company page or profile banner with Canva, helping you look more professional. (Looking professional is what LinkedIn is all about, after all.)
Great news for Hootsuite users: You can access Canva directly within Hootsuite to add some flair to your LinkedIn posts without switching tabs.
6. 6sense
Source: 6sense
6sense is a great solution for those looking for LinkedIn B2B marketing tools They use potential buyers’ “digital breadcrumb trails” to uncover buying signals. This helps you better understand your audience so you can create targeted LinkedIn campaigns that speak directly to your prospects’ pain points and reach them at the right point in the purchasing cycle.
6sense integrates with LinkedIn, so there’s no need to worry about running afoul of the LinkedIn user agreement. It’s all about adding insights to your existing LinkedIn relationships and campaigns so you can target the right people at the right time.
7. B2Linked
Source: B2Linked
B2Linked is a certified LinkedIn partner focused on helping businesses with LinkedIn ad campaigns. LinkedIn is all they do, so they have platform-specific expertise. They use micro-segmentation, advanced ad bidding, and A/B testing, among other strategies, to maximize ROI. Their LinkedIn ad reporting is also top-notch.
Their tools for LinkedIn marketing are only accessible through an account management package, so this is not a cheap option. (Packages start at $2,000/month.) But for those who want to really focus on LinkedIn marketing and advertising, it may be worth the investment.
8. Terminus
Source: Terminus
Terminus is another certified LinkedIn marketing partner focused on LinkedIn ads. Their tools can help with account matching, targeting, and reporting for all LinkedIn ad types. Terminus connects to your CRM and can be used to coordinate multi-channel ad campaigns. (It’s not exclusive to LinkedIn.)
9. Sprout Social
Source: Sprout Social
Sprout Social is another tool that integrates with LinkedIn and does not raise user agreement concerns.
Sprout allows you to schedule LinkedIn content and analyze performance. There are useful targeting filters and collaboration tools, too.
See how Sprout Social compares to Hootsuite.
10. Dux-Soup
Source: Dux-Soup
Dux-Soup connects your CRM with LinkedIn so you can grow your LInkedIn network while centralizing prospect data and generating more leads.
It helps you find relevant LInkedIn profiles, send connection requests, and then follow up automatically with InMails and messages. Building your LinkedIn network creates new leads for your sales team. Pairing this with an employee advocacy strategy can help build an even larger network that maximizes your LinkedIn marketing collateral.
A warning, though: Dux-Soup’s LinkedIn marketing automation tools may conflict with the LinkedIn user agreement. Make sure you understand how it works and what you’re getting into.
Easily manage your LinkedIn Page and all your other social channels using Hootsuite. From a single dashboard, you can schedule and share content (including video), reply to comments, and engage your network. Try it free today.
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