Out of all the social media apps, LinkedIn is the most professional of the lot. It’s an American employment service where people can find recruitment, companies or fellow co-workers. While other social media apps may be helpful for you to get an audience, LinkedIn is mostly helpful to get your brand’s name across to other businesses. So it’s a good idea to invest 30 minutes to set up your profile and make it professional and appealing to potential employees, brand partners etc.
Considering the different markets that LinkedIn caters to, the marketing also differs.
Here is what LinkedIn itself advices to businesses or professionals for marketing while setting up a profile:
- Profile – as said earlier, your profile should aim to be 100% complete. Don’t leave out any detail to the imagination of the viewer, everything should be transparent. If there is any development, then keep updating it on your profile: this can be new achievements by your company or a sample of your latest work. The important thing is to make it authentic. Make the profile radiate your company’s tone and energy. That way, your profile stands out and is unique to your style.
- Page – the page is where you post content (like a feed). Here, potentials will see your work and brand you as good or bad so you need to make sure your page is the best version of you. You can post, respond, share, comment and even upload big files like PPTs, PDFs and Docs.
- Audience and goals – this goes for every marketer. Defining goals gives you a clear idea about who your audience will be. And once you know these two, you can decide which tone and words to use in your page – this comes especially handy while deciding job titles for potential employees. The clearer it is, the more leads and conversions you can get.
- Optimize – this cannot be stressed on enough. Optimizing is the strongest way to gain organic followers. Whatever you do, optimizing cannot be ignored when you are marketing.
- Key words – we have discussed this uner SEO. keywords are those words that people may use when running a search on Google. So your page must contain such words so that potentials are drawn to your page and you appear in the initial search finds on LinkedIn. You should also include them in your ‘About’ section, so that it is clear to the people who you are and what you do.
- Link to your page – Linkedin is like your business’s resume. And a must in the resume is the link to your website. It will boost your search ranking as well. Make sure to also keep your current employee’s details up to date.
- Content – Goes without saying that you have to post what people want to read. Sales type content does not do well on LinkedIn so you mustn’t market blatantly. What does best is new ideas. Anything fresh and not seen before gets any business wonderful traction. Content on leadership is also a huge audience puller.
- Followers – the higher the followers on your page, the more authentic you will look and greater the engagement will be. Use the follow button excessively. Make sure every part of your page is enhanced in a way that people who see it will want to follow.
- Rich media – rich media includes custom images, videos, live videos, PDFs or PPTs, and shoutout messages to appreciate employees. Such media is much more interactive than normal text and is therefore more engaging on LinkedIn.
- Highlight your best content – If your best content is not reaching the right audience, you can use LinkedIn’s targeting system or track the number of leads you are getting by conversion tracking.
- Linkedin CAMPAIGN MANAGER – this is the paid method of advertising on LinkedIn. It has self service ad campaigns. The types of ads include:
- Sponsored content
- Message ads
- Dynamic ads
- Text ads
The campaign manager helps you define your goals and your audience. Here you can set up any relevant features like “click” “follow” etc. you can also use analytics to find out which campaign is doing best and how many people are actually looking at your ads and how many conversions are happening.
NOTE: LINKEDIN IS KNOWN TO WORK BEST WITH B2B (BUSINESS TO BUSINESS) MARKET SYSTEMS THAN B2C (BUSINESS TO CONSUMER).
Other than what LinkedIn itself urges its marketers to do, here are 5 tips and more to market on Linkedin:
1. Post actionable content
Like mentioned earlier, content goes a long way to get traction to your profile. But now we will look at a specific kind of content – ACTIONABLE CONTENT. Any content that is helpful, informative and entertaining to the users is actionable content. The best example of this is How-To tutorials either through videos or blogs.
2. Matched Audience Feature
You may think LinkedIn’s advertising is not as powerful, but Microsoft’s addition called the Matched Audience Feature took LinkedIn’s marketing to the next level. It basically allows you to retarget your existing consumers. 98% of people who visit your website may not convert to consumers. The next batch again will have 98% who won’t convert. So what do you do about the 98% who first visited? You retarget them.
3. Search for people.
LinkedIn is the most powerful of all other marketing and social platforms and can find the right kind of people with laser-like accuracy. Under ‘people’ you can filter out locations, connections and current companies.
4. Chat with other professionals.
You’ll find a lot of like minded individuals in your industry so chat with them, make connections, host programs and group chats where you and audiences (both potential and existing) can interact with each other. You have the feature to see which groups in your industry are most active, and you can choose to join these groups and make your brand or company’s presence known.
5. InMail
Inmail works like direct messages. It has a three times more effective reply rate than traditional emails but the only drawback is that it is a paid feature. You can reach out to prospects in a more personal and custom way compared to traditional reaching out options on LinkedIn.
Some more marketing tips:
● Targeting: this is LinkedIn’s most powerful and useful tool. Why? Simply because linkedin is the only platform that has given marketers access to everyone’s job titles or the jobs they are looking for. This way you can target anyone who is in need for something you can offer.
● Follow LinkedIn’s marketing blog. It’s a custom curated list of articles that help users get effective tips and stay on top with LinkedIn marketing.
● Add a pro finder badge to your profile. Profinder badges help to promote your freelancing services. Your profile name, photo and the service you provide on Profinder. This is a way of adding authenticity to your website and business. It’s telling people that you are trusted by a community of professionals.
● Paid LinkedIn sales solution – the Sales Solutions allows you to target, research, and engage with new customers with ease. LinkedIn claims that with this feature, you will be able to land 35% more clients than when not using it. And this has proven to increase conversion rates up to 20%.
● Or better, create your own linkedin group and invite your existing employees to join. New potential employees and even consumers may then be tempted to join as well.
Linkedin is a professional platform, so more than hoping to find consumers, you will probably find new potential employees. A linkedin business account is very much needed especially if you are in the information and technology or software building sector. Remember to share actionable content at least more than once per day. You need to mark your presence on LinkedIn to effectively generate leads because the world is quickly shrinking and the doors of opportunities, closing.
