When it comes to choosing the best topics for LinkedIn content marketing you want to focus on delivering tangible value to a specific target reader.
Selecting the right topic takes several steps to ensure your LinkedIn article performs well.
Below we break this into three steps to simplify the process.
Step 1: Understand Your Target Market and Industry
Stick with your industry and expertise when brainstorming topics for LinkedIn content marketing. You understand your market best, so coming up with article ideas that your prospects engage with will be much easier.
By knowing (and writing for) your target market, you won’t have to dig as deep to understand what draws them in, the pains they have, and how they respond to certain content.
The author of this LinkedIn article on pricing strategy founded a consulting firm specializing in pricing. We helped him write this in-depth article on pricing strategy and how pricing is a key component for businesses. He and his team are deep experts on the topic and targeted this article to CEOs, CFOs and CMOs responsible for driving business profitability.
Building a portfolio of LinkedIn articles around topics within your industry will help you develop market authority. If you’re in the technology industry and write an article about the “Top 10 Best New AI Innovations,” chances are you already have many connections interested in reading it. They will get value from it, engage with it, share it, and potentially turn into customers after reading it.
Conversely, writing an article about the “Top 10 Best Artists in New York City” may be interesting, but won’t deliver tangible business value to an IT audience. Know your readers and give them something of real value.
Step 2: Do Your Research
So you have your target market and industry nailed down. Now you need to do your research to optimize your topics for LinkedIn content marketing. You want to research industry trends, burning pains, unresolved issues, or business questions your target reader often deals with.
Does your company specialize in a strategy to solve a problem that others can’t? Research it. Google it. Ask people in your network (simply messaging them on LinkedIn about questions or problems they have) can uncover opportunities). See where people are looking for answers.
You want to choose LinkedIn content marketing topics you can really dive deep into. If your topic is in a niche area, writing an article about it will draw attention to the problem. It will also give you an opportunity to explain how you can solve it. This positions you as a market authority and a trusted solution provider in the mind of the reader (emphasis).
The writer of this LinkedIn article on social media for hotels is a specialist in social media for the hospitality industry. She has deep expertise in social media and extensive experience applying it within the hospitality industry. This “X for Y” combination brings the two together and provides immediate tangible value to any hotel owner or marketer.
Professionals are constantly looking for information to get an edge. Search key phrases and trending topics to see what people are saying. Build a list of questions people in your target market need answered. Then compile your content topics for LinkedIn around delivering answers to those questions.
Step 3: Dive Deep Into Answering Questions
With all the research and list of questions you’ve created, now is the time to go deep. Group questions around related topics, then write deep, long form LinkedIn articles centered on the topic. You’re ideally look to write 800-2000 words per LinkedIn article. That means going fairly deep.
Some topics may be too broad to cover in a single article. You will need to narrow these down into subtopics or multiple pieces of content (pro tip: cross-link your related articles just like you’d do on your website blog to keep readers reading).
In this LinkedIn article about AI digital agents, the author focuses the deep functionality and benefits AI platforms can provide to business. The article answers both how and where to implement them. Immediately, the reader knows what the article is about and what questions it will answer.
He then focuses on answering these “how” and “why” questions. Smart AI digital agents is a big topic that can go in hundreds of directions. By starting with simpler “how” and “why” questions and providing tangible examples, he was able to go deep and build a highly effective LinkedIn article from the ground up.
The result is creating a piece of content that not only generates interest, but also drives substantial thought leadership value for your market.