Harnessing LinkedIn’s potential to grow your business involves strategic networking, content creation, and leveraging its professional platform. In this guide, we’ll explore effective strategies for using LinkedIn to expand your reach, build relationships, and generate leads. Let’s delve into actionable tips to maximize LinkedIn’s impact on your business growth.
LinkedIn, the social networking platform designed specifically for the business community, is a great social media platform to market your business. It was launched in 2003 and currently has over 850 million members worldwide, making it a hub for generating leads, creating brand awareness, and building relationships with potential customers. Let’s take a further look into more marketing benefits that LinkedIn offers and the best practices that will grow your business.
What is LinkedIn marketing?
As an engaging social media platform designed for business professionals, LinkedIn can be used as a powerful marketing tool. Statistics show that more than 50% of decision-makers use LinkedIn content to vet organizations. This shows that the platform carries a good amount of weight when it comes to influencing users.
Using LinkedIn as a marketing tool could encompass promoting individual or business interests by creating brand awareness, sharing content to drive traffic to websites or blogs and making new business connections or nurturing existing relationships. LinkedIn marketing is also said to generate leads 227% more effectively than other social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
What are the benefits of LinkedIn marketing?
LinkedIn can add many benefits to your digital marketing strategy. It will help you reach professional audiences and launch business-to-business (B2B) campaigns. The benefits of LinkedIn marketing include:
Gaining trust
It’s important to connect with your audiences in a way that makes them trust your brand and what it represents. According to a survey, 80% of consumers consider trust a deciding factor when purchasing from brands. Gaining your consumers’ trust will also help you stay on their radar.
Generating leads
Ideally when marketing, you want to target high-quality customers. That means you don’t want to waste your marketing efforts on people that aren’t likely to convert. LinkedIn is a good place to generate leads because you can encourage your customers to come to you. For example, you can encourage them to engage with your content or invite them to join a webinar and then stay in touch with the people that expressed interest.
Increasing traffic
LinkedIn offers users the option to integrate their website or blog and generate content on various social network sites. This makes it easier for businesses to direct traffic to your website.
Targeting audiences
In any marketing strategy, getting the right message to the right people is a big concern. LinkedIn’s targeting capabilities are highly specialized to allow you to target the exact industry, company size, and job role of the people you want to target your marketing to. So if you’re selling web design services, and want to target a niche, LinkedIn would be the best place to reach them. And as mentioned above, you would be targeting high-quality leads, making your marketing strategy more efficient.
Customizable budget
Some marketing strategies are only viable for big businesses because they can cost a lot. LinkedIn, however, is versatile. You don’t have to spend more than you can afford to reap its benefits. You can select your budget so that you have control over how much you spend and formulate a strategy accordingly. This way, you don’t have to miss out on advertising opportunities.
Are there any best practices for LinkedIn marketing?
Each social media platform has its benefits and so you need to formulate your strategy accordingly. LinkedIn marketing is different from other platforms in that its users are more inclined to engage with thought leadership content rather than direct marketing and selling posts. If your followers find you blatantly pushing your product or services, you will likely not get the results you’re hoping for. Here are our best practices that will help you get your business noticed in the right and grow it:
1. Refine your profile
It would be best if you always had an updated and consistent presence in order to keep your audiences engaged. Keep your business’s page active and well-maintained so that customers know it’s a current business. You want them to know that your brand is active and engaged.
2. Define your audience and goals
It’s important to start any strategy with goals so you can streamline your processes and measure success. Once you know which direction you want to go in, it’ll be easier to find the audience you want to target and generate high-quality leads.
3. Optimize for search
As with any marketing strategy, one of the goals is to increase brand visibility. You can do this with LinkedIn by optimizing your page so that people can easily find it when they search for services your business offers. Use keywords and include them in the About section of your page so people can easily find and see what you do. Link to your LinkedIn page from your website and other social media platforms to boost your search ranking and finally share relevant content that your followers are likely to engage with.
4. Use analytics
Analytics give insight into what’s working with your strategy and what’s not. Taking a deeper look is worthwhile so you’re not investing time and money only for you to not have any meaningful returns. Analytics will help you see what your customer’s behavior and preferences are so that you can drill down on them and optimize your strategy to better serve them.
5. Give a face to your employees
Customers want to see a face behind the brand to know that you are human – just like them. It will increase reliability and trust because your business will appear more candid. If potential customers feel a strong emotional connection with you, they’ll be more likely to convert. Let your customers know what’s happening behind the scenes and introduce them to the people that work hard to provide services for them.
Final thoughts
LinkedIn offers many benefits and if used right, can be a powerful marketing tool. Follow these tips and your business is sure to grow. You can also contact our digital marketing experts for a more streamlined strategy to get your business the attention it deserves.
