LinkedIn for Content Marketing: My Ultimate Strategy 2026

What Is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a lead generation strategy that focuses on the creation of high-quality content on a consistent basis that is highly relevant to an audience of ideal customers.

It kinda works like this...

1. You write about a problem that many customers face and give them a solution.
2. Potential customers search for a solution to their problem on Google.
3. Your article shows up.
4. They read it.
5. You impress them so much, that they want to work with you.
6. They contact you.
7. You sign the deal.

Easy, right?

Content Marketing on LinkedIn

LinkedIn has seen some incredible changes in recent years.

Long gone are the days when LinkedIn was just a boring CV database. Today it has developed into a thriving community of more than 1.1 billion members around the globe, with more than 100,000 new users joining the network every day.

LinkedIn users are very active:

More than 50% log in at least once per month.
More than 40% of the monthly active users log in every day.

The overall quality of LinkedIn users is one of the highest among social media networks. More than 20% are senior-level influencers and decision makers. And it is incredibly easy to get in touch with high profile decision makers on LinkedIn.

Here is the challenge:

Many people are aggressively trying to sell on LinkedIn, and most users have their shields up because of this. "Who is this person? Why do they send me a connection request? What are they trying to sell to me? 🤨"

How do you get around this?

By standing out, positively:

creating useful content
having a kickass LinkedIn profile
building real relationships

Define Your Content Marketing Goals

Before we dive straight into content marketing strategies for LinkedIn, let's take a moment to think about your content marketing goals.

Do you want to generate more leads for your business?
Increase brand awareness?
Promote your products and services?
Connect you with ideal customers and clients?
Build a community around your brand?

Each goal requires a slightly different strategy for your content creation.

All content pieces and your intended audience on LinkedIn have to be in alignment with your end goal.

Once you have clarity on what you want, let's take a closer look at who you want to target.

Define Your LinkedIn Audience

Your ideal target audience should be as similar as possible to your ideal customer avatar. Here are some of the most desirable characteristics:

Benefits of using your products and services.
Has the capacity to pay for your products and services.
Lacks knowledge in areas that you will be able to cover in your content marketing strategy.

Build Your LinkedIn Sales Funnel

Ok, now that we understand the different content types and mediums, let's have a chat about how to fit everything together.

Not every person who is visiting your website is a red-hot lead, ready to buy instantly. Most people require six to eight touch points with a business to build enough trust and confidence in a buying decision.

By creating great and useful content, you create opportunities to nurture and educate your ideal audience over an extended period of time in their buying journey.

Your primary goal of content marketing is to increase the number of touchpoints with every reader, listener, and viewer and then to move people away from LinkedIn to your website.

How do you do that?

Create great content that is both educational and entertaining to potential customers and of great value to your ideal target audience
Encourage engagement with your content to grow your network. Whenever someone likes, comments, or shares your content, people in their network will see this in their newsfeed, this way your content can spread from your direct, first-level connections to second and third-level connections.
Engage with other people's content and leave meaningful comments to grow your network.
Get these new people to follow you, so your content will be seen by more and more people.
Encourage existing followers to follow your LinkedIn page and group and engage with them via direct message and emails
For each piece of content that you publish, create a content upgrade and place it on your website. This can be
Include the link to your content upgrades in each post.
Require people to submit their email address to download it.
Build an email list.
Create as many touch points as possible across all of your channels and publishing mediums.

Personal Branding on LinkedIn

To get the most out of your LinkedIn content marketing strategy, it is very important to think of yourself as a brand. People don't want to connect with companies; they want to connect and form relationships with other people.

People buy from people.

As such, it is crucial that you optimize your LinkedIn profile:

Get a professional headshot photograph
Upload a header image to your profile that communicates authority
Create a great LinkedIn Headline
Personalize your profile URL
Add a compelling description to each section of your profile
Add descriptions to all of your experiences
Add multimedia content for each entry
Add skills
Ask for recommendations

The three most important factors are your profile, header image, and headline. They will be displayed near any content that you post on LinkedIn and have a significant impact on whether someone decides to follow or connect with you.

Check out my article "Best LinkedIn Headline Formulas" where I share 50+ great examples of LinkedIn headlines.

How to Succeed With Content Marketing on LinkedIn

Now that you have selected your content marketing goal and defined your ideal audience let's make a plan!

To succeed on LinkedIn, you have to understand the different content types and content mediums where you can publish your content and interact with potential customers.

LinkedIn Content Types

As with most other social media platforms, LinkedIn is prioritizing native LinkedIn content. This is content that is published on the platform itself and doesn't require users to leave the LinkedIn website.

At this moment the following native LinkedIn content types exist:

LinkedIn articles
LinkedIn text posts
LinkedIn photo posts
LinkedIn video posts
LinkedIn document posts (Also known as carousel posts. Learn how to create LinkedIn carousel posts in Canva.)
LinkedIn Stories (Update: this feature has been retired since Sep 30, 2021.)

LinkedIn also allows you to post links to external websites but these will get far fewer impressions in other people's newsfeeds and should generally be avoided. I will share some of the best workarounds further down the text.

A hybrid form of content is "engagement" in the form of likes, comments, and shares.

LinkedIn Content Mediums

Different LinkedIn content types can be published in different mediums within the LinkedIn publishing platform.

Your personal LinkedIn profile
Your company page
LinkedIn groups
Direct messages or LinkedIn InMails
Emails
Other people's content.

Articles can only be created on your personal LinkedIn profile, but not on your company page.

LinkedIn Content Strategy

What content types work best on LinkedIn?

All native LinkedIn content types such as articles, text posts, photo posts, and videos work great on LinkedIn. They always outperform any external content such as sharing a link to an article on your website. So let's take advantage of this and only create native content.

LinkedIn frequently changes its algorithm and prioritizes different content types.

For a long time, LinkedIn articles had the highest reach regarding views. In 2017 LinkedIn started to prioritize text-only posts. Beginning of 2018 the focus was switched yet again to native LinkedIn videos.

Make sure to keep a good content ratio: 10-20% promotional, 80-90% high-quality content and create a good content mix of all native content types with a focus on videos.

LinkedIn videos

LinkedIn videos have a high priority in the LinkedIn news feed at the moment because LinkedIn is actively trying to compete with YouTube and Facebook videos as the top video platform for business content.

Not everyone has time to watch a 10-minute video. Especially in a work environment, it is not possible to listen to the audio track of your video.

To overcome this, you should include subtitles in each video and add a summary of your video in the video description.

Use videos to promote other content on LinkedIn, for example, a LinkedIn article.

LinkedIn text and photo posts

Text and photo posts are still very important and come in second place.

Try to avoid adding links to external websites within your post text. Instead, add them in the form of a comment to avoid punishment by the LinkedIn algorithm.

You can safely link to other LinkedIn content, that is anything that is hosted on the linkedin.com domain.

This allows you to re-promote your native LinkedIn content such as videos and articles in context.

LinkedIn articles

At the moment articles have a very low priority in the LinkedIn news feed.

Articles can embed many types of multimedia content such as videos, slideshows, and even other LinkedIn posts.

I recommend using LinkedIn articles as an intermediate step between LinkedIn videos, texts, and photos on one side and articles on your website on the other side.

A LinkedIn video, text or photo can give a short and concise summary of a topic. Each piece of content can promote one of your articles. Each article can link to content upgrades and other articles on your website.

Which topics and themes work best on LinkedIn?

Wondering what to write on LinkedIn? Here is a list of my favorite topic ideas for LinkedIn:

Content that is both educating and entertaining
Content that creates aha moments
Content that evokes emotions
How-to content
Opinion pieces
Industry news
Achievements
Events
Announcements
Life and business lessons
Knowledge and skills
Mindset
Leadership
Strategies
Tactics
Productivity
Soft skills

It is important to have a good content mix of different topics and themes to maximize LinkedIn posts engagement.

If you only wrote about one topic over and over again, you would exhaust your audience.

I recommend having a different theme for each month, a unique theme for each week based on your monthly theme, and a different content type for each weekday.

Check out my article about storytelling for LinkedIn marketing with more than 54 additional topic and theme ideas.

What style works best on LinkedIn

Try to avoid corporate-sounding language at all costs. It will instantly kill any engagement with your content.

Instead, try speaking in a personal and down-to-earth style in the same way you would speak to a friend.

LinkedIn Growth Strategy

Engage with your content

Besides publishing your content on LinkedIn, it is essential to engage with other people.

If someone is liking, commenting, or sharing your content, connect with them, reply to their comment, thank them for their share, and start a conversation.

Maximize engagement with your content

It is necessary to structure your content in a way that maximizes engagement:

Always ask a question at the end of your content to encourage comments.

Actively ask people to follow you, to share your content, and tell them what kind of content they can expect from you in the future.

Engage with other people's content

You should also engage with other people's content and enrich the conversation with your unique perspective. Always think about adding value, never about promoting your content when you engage with other people.

If you leave high-quality, meaningful comments, other people will notice and click through to your profile and follow you.

The creator of the content will often connect with you and engage with your content in return.

When this happens, some of their followers will receive a notification in their newsfeed that the content creator engaged with your post, and they in return will check out your content and engage with it as well.

This is how you grow an engaged following on LinkedIn.

Use LinkedIn hashtags

Use the power of hashtags to get discovered by people who are interested in specific topics.

Create your brand hashtag. Other people can click on it and follow you.

For example, my LinkedIn hashtag is #timqueen. It's also an easy way for other people to check out more content of you.

(To craft a powerful content strategy, mastering LinkedIn hashtags would give you an added boost. Bookmark my complete LinkedIn Hashtag Guide to power up your content strategy.)

Publish consistently

It is vital to publish content on a consistent basis.

LinkedIn's algorithm is using a form of "engagement momentum" to determine the reach of your post. You can imagine it as a rolling reputation score.

Every time you post something, the quality of your content is measured by how well people react to it.

How many people read it, how many likes do you receive, how many comments, how many shares, etc. If you're better than the average of other people's posts, you earn engagement points.

These points add up over time and you will reach more people.

The only downside: The points have a half-life of a few days. If you don't post for a while, they are lost and have to be built from scratch again.

That's why I recommend posting at least three times per week, at best once per day!

Best time to post on LinkedIn

What is the best time to post your content?

It is critical to understand your audience. Where do the majority of your followers live? This will determine when most of them are active on LinkedIn.

It is essential to create as much engagement as possible within the first three hours of posting content to maximize your reach on LinkedIn.

Pick weekdays and times where most of your audience are active. Take office hours and unwritten rules into consideration.

For example, most people who work in companies might be in on Monday morning at 9 AM, but they are often busy catching up on everything that happened over the weekend, so 9 AM might not be the best time to post your content.

For more information on posting schedule best practices, check out my article: how often should you post on LinkedIn as a business?

Create processes and systems to organize your editorial workflow.

Content creation can quickly become overwhelming. To have a smooth content creation flow, it's important to organize your team.

The same principles also apply if you're a team on just one!

Your entire team has to be on the same page and has to know what’s expected of them and when.

Assign topics of your content strategy to specific writers and plan each writing project carefully.

Make sure to set specific content goals such as the number of words.

Set deadlines, when content has to be

managed
planned
researched
created/written
edited
reviewed
approved
published

Assign one or more roles to different team members. If you're a team of one, assign all tasks to yourself.

Who is the project manager?
Who is creating the plan?
Who is doing the research?
Who is creating/curating visuals such as photos, infographics, graphs, diagrams or videos?
Who is writing/creating the content?
Who is editing the content?
Who is reviewing the content?
Who is approving the content?
Who is publishing/scheduling the content?

Up Next: Creating Your Own Content Marketing Strategy for LinkedIn

Understand your readers and create a content strategy that speaks and connects with your ideal audience.

If you need inspiration, check out my article: Best LinkedIn Content Ideas for content ideas to attract your ideal clients on LinkedIn.

Keep the LinkedIn algorithm in mind at all times and make sure you mix up content types to appeal to different consumption styles.

Block out time to create content and publish on a regular schedule. Each content piece is the springboard to initiate a conversation or deepen relationships. This could form part of your efforts to sell on LinkedIn in under 30 minutes per day.

From there, nurture those relationships and convert them to buy from you.

Need Help With Your LinkedIn Content Marketing Strategy?

Then join my LinkedIn Accelerator Program today and discover how to get high-quality leads with a complete A-Z LinkedIn strategy!