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More than 300 million companies use LinkedIn for business. Not only is it the most prominent social platform for hiring and recruiting top talent, but with over 690 million members, LinkedIn marketing is trusted by more and more brands to sell, network, and connect.
A central important question to ask here is: are you using LinkedIn to its maximum potential for improving brand awareness, boosting leads, building your network, increasing revenue, and more?
Since most of the other social media platforms are overpowering, LinkedIn often gets overlooked, but it can be highly powerful in reality. LinkedIn finally understands the gold mine they are sitting on and have made great strides in making their platform valuable and accessible for marketers. Another intriguing aspect about LinkedIn is that, unlike Facebook, LinkedIn organic reach is still very relevant today.
Let’s break down the many aspects of using LinkedIn like it was meant to.
What is LinkedIn Marketing?
The process of using LinkedIn to enhance brand awareness, foster business relationships, generate leads, make connections, drive traffic and share content to your website is what makes up the building blocks of LinkedIn marketing. LinkedIn has become an essential part of marketing strategies for many successful businesses today, owing to its effectiveness for expanding professional networks.
The many features you have access to when using LinkedIn include brand-building, connection, and analytics, to name a few. It is efficient in sharing best practices, collaboration, and targeted marketing efforts for business, even though it is primarily a platform that serves individual professionals.
How To Set Up A LinkedIn Business Page?
Creating your LinkedIn business page is a simple process. If you don’t have one already, then follow these steps to create one.
- On the top right corner, click the Work icon.
- Scroll down to the end of the menu and click Create a Company Page.
- Select a category that describes the size of your business.
- Fill in the relevant details about your company. You can see how it looks while you add content through the page preview option. A good idea is to use the same URL for your brand as your handle on all other social media platforms.
- Upload your brand’s logo and tagline. Even though this step is optional, it is best not to skip it. Your logo will bring you up to six times more visits than those without one.
- Click Create Page.
If your page looks basic, then taking it to the next level is simple: add more details. You can incorporate information about your services/products and improve your ranking in search results. Complete pages get 30% more views.
11 LinkedIn Marketing Tips to Grow Your Business
1. Create a powerful company page
What makes a company page powerful?
It could be anything from content to aesthetics, depending on your brand and image. An informative and complete company page is integral for any business on LinkedIn. This is the place where you’ll be doing most of your targeting. Picture it as a virtual store irrespective of using your page for either selling or building brand recognition.
Use your company page to narrate positive experiences people have had with your business. Showcase the efforts and successes of your team. LinkedIn is a platform that connects people, so it pays off to emphasize the public faces of your company.
2. Claim your business profile URL
Many users are unaware that you can create a custom profile URL and claim it as your own. This makes it convenient to reinforce an unwavering personal brand, but also get a LinkedIn link that is easy to remember.
It can be hard to find you if you do not claim your URL. You can claim your URL by messaging LinkedIn through Facebook messenger. A LinkedIn representative will respond and ask you for some information, after which your URL profile will be yours.
An unclaimed URL looks unattractive, and your audience will not take it seriously, not to mention it’s difficult to share. Customize it to your specifications and ensure that you choose a name that is the same across all other social media platforms.
3. Harness the power of LinkedIn endorsements
LinkedIn offers a valuable feature called Endorsements. This feature is a sure way to prove your credibility. With LinkedIn Endorsements, you can get users to vouch for your brand based on their experience. This way, it proves to your target audience that you hold the expertise you claim.
As Mark Zuckerberg said”, People influence people.”
Show your gratitude to everyone who has endorsed your services. It helps with building brand awareness and making meaningful connections with your audience. This is the apt time to call in favors and get endorsed by colleagues, friends, and satisfied clients. Pages with endorsements have an increased chance of being visited through LinkedIn searches.
4. Create your own LinkedIn group
Social media is changing as we speak. Companies have shifted from broadcasting ads to engaging with their audience.
Using a LinkedIn marketing strategy that is devoid of creating groups will be ineffective when implemented. Businesses are focusing on building niche closed communities instead of developing huge public pages where the visitors feel unseen. Unlike Instagram and Facebook, people on LinkedIn are looking to further their professional network, build brands and increase industry knowledge. This makes LinkedIn Groups an excellent idea for bringing customers together, especially if you’re a B2B company.
LinkedIn has unique management features that are absent on all other social media platforms. For instance, you can send a daily or weekly digest of group activities to your members in an effort to keep them engaged.
5. Join LinkedIn groups and stay active for better LinkedIn marketing results
Participating in discussions on LinkedIn groups is an ideal way to appear social. You can network with other businesses and be able to communicate with your target audience as well. You can utilize the search bar to locate suitable groups.
LinkedIn Groups offer a dedicated space for industry professionals to seek advice, share expertise, and develop relationships. Although they have been present for a while now, the changing currents are moving towards more self-selected communities that are nurturing their importance.
By joining LinkedIn Groups, you can gauge how your target audience is doing. You can learn about their interests along with other crucial information that can come in handy with your marketing strategy.
6. Share LinkedIn updates on other social channels such as Twitter for better reach
Social media has a targeting capacity along with reach and scale that comes at a much lower cost than all other marketing channels. Hence your brand must go where the people are.
You need to find a social media platform that is a good fit for your business. Invest in them wisely to get the desired reach. You can edit your posts that are on LinkedIn to fit in with other social media channels such as Twitter and Instagram to gain more visibility with your target audience.
The path to using LinkedIn for marketing is daunting, but the right content can make all the difference.
7. Use proper images for a business profile, banner, and others
Visuals play a prominent role on all social media platforms, and LinkedIn is no different.
Even if your content is riveting, it will fail to reach its potential without the proper image. Using an image in tandem with your company name and logo will make your company page stand out in their feed.
Ideally, the photos should be original, taken with care, and reflect you and your brand values. But it’s hard to come up with some powerful image every time from your library so you can make use of stock shots. Many free stock sites hold a constant supply of professional images that can take your content to the popularity it deserves.
8. Post the latest updates on LinkedIn and keep your page active
Having a regularly updated business profile is critical to attract followers and appear relevant. LinkedIn marketing services are futile if your profile is obsolete. An active page suggests that you’re there and want to stay involved with your followers at all times. Some ways to do that are:
- Keep the branding fresh with new background images and more.
- Recycle rich content such as YouTube video links to ensure their relevance.
- Keeping a check on website links to make sure they work.
- Monitor LinkedIn activity to increase views and visibility.
9. Utilize LinkedIn Ads
Apart from making your company visible, LinkedIn is an incredible tool for target marketing. LinkedIn Ads market your business directly to your audience. The new ways of LinkedIn targeting capabilities are:
- Website retargeting that offers marketing to LinkedIn members who have visited your site.
- Contact targeting gives you a chance to integrate your contact list into a customized audience.
- Account targeting enables you to reach decision-makers that are already in your target accounts.
LinkedIn Ads work optimally for reaching small-medium-sized companies. You can use the ‘Company Size’ filter and target the companies that are most likely to buy your product or service.
Based on the objective you pick, you’ll be given the different ad types. When it comes to choosing what’s best for you, testing is key. Split test the various ad types and see which ones result in more conversions at each part of the funnel. (Tip: A cost-effective and easy way to get people at the top of your funnel is by running a video ad)
10. Search for targeted customers and drive best results from LinkedIn marketing
Organic targeting is one of the most remarkable tools of LinkedIn marketing. You can target posts based on your followers’ profile data, including industry, organization size, geography, language, and preference. You can mention your targets by their names which definitely makes a more profound impact. InMail messages have a 52% chance of being opened when sponsored.
The buyer persona for LinkedIn needs a closer look at the professional side of your prospect. Instead of what brand they like or which coffee they love, you need to ask yourself the questions that tell you more about them on a business and professional level.
Besides the usual targeting options like location, language, country, you can also target more specific attributes of your audience.
This is what sets LinkedIn apart from the other platforms and what makes it so strong for B2B Event marketing. It’s easy to include and exclude specific settings and make layers of them. Your comprehensive event marketing campaign would be incomplete if you skip LinkedIn. After all, it is biggest platform used primarily for professional networking.
11. Share high-quality posts with rich media
With LinkedIn, you have the opportunity to share content in different formats. You can create rich media through:
- Text posts
- Text posts with images
- Live videos
- Uploaded videos
- Slide posts
- Podcast snippets
It isn’t safe to assume what type of content is most liked by your audience. Experiment with 3 or 4 types of content. Compare each with reference to reach and respond to that with how hard it was creating that content. A single concept can be used in different formats, making testing it more manageable and accurate. Once it is decided what content brings back the most favorable outcome, you can create more.
LinkedIn Marketing Agency
There are undeniable advantages to hiring professionals for your LinkedIn marketing campaigns.
Why? Because they know what they’re doing and will bring you the highest return on your investment. Here’s how:
- You get dedicated personnel that lead and manage your strategy.
- You receive support in many services, such as content writing and marketing.
- The strategy is planned by keeping your goals in mind.
- They do all the leg-work such as tracking phone calls, generating leads and revenue.
- The analytics report is comprehendible for future action.
Running a business has enough components without worrying about social media marketing. This is why hiring an agency will get that load off of you. You can witness your business grow while the agency pushes your agenda of building brand awareness, finding your target audience, engaging with followers, creating content, developing LinkedIn ads and landing pages and boosting website traffic.
LinkedIn Marketing vs. Facebook Marketing vs. Twitter Marketing
Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are quite different but often seen together in the same general marketing category.
The platforms and audiences call for subtly different messages and offer businesses different options to engage with their audience. Knowing your audience cannot be stressed enough so that you know where you can reach them optimally.
Facebook lacks when it comes to well-defined messages that are focused on your businesses’ audience. It can be a place to display thought leadership and well-branded content, but the advertising tools are pricey so consider them wisely before using them.
Twitter has embraced the short and simple breaking news style of updates. These updates need to be able to capture the audience and lead them to your website or landing page. Building a solid community hinges on content and its linkability to be shared across all other platforms.
LinkedIn produces lengthy content that gives insightful updates that are more than headlines. The audience is professional so matching the tone with that mindset is essential.
The Facebook vs. Twitter vs. LinkedIn comparison has no clear outcome since every platform comes with its set of pros and cons. You can use all of these for your business or limit yourself to one which is determined by your established short and long-term marketing goals.
Wrapping Up…
Are you finally ready to get on with LinkedIn marketing?
LinkedIn has come a long way since its launch and has developed into an integral platform for job seekers, marketers, businesses, and other professionals. Don’t underestimate its power, as it does wonders for your business that none of the other platforms offer.
