More than 55 million companies use LinkedIn for business. LinkedIn is not just solely a prominent social media platform to recruit top talent anymore. With more than 700 million users it has become a powerful platform to network, connect, market, and sell. According to a report by Content Marketing Institute, LinkedIn was named the number 1. A social media platform for helping organizations achieve specific objectives.
With the help of LinkedIn, any company or organization can propagate its ideology, attract the right audience, and develop a sales pipeline. With this much number of users, the possibilities of experimenting with different marketing strategies on LinkedIn are infinite. This blog/guide will tell you about several LinkedIn tools and marketing strategies you can apply practically. To make the most out of your LinkedIn marketing strategy you need to read the entire blog.
How to Use LinkedIn for Business
Steps to create a LinkedIn account for your business.
1. Create a LinkedIn Page
Before you start building a LinkedIn marketing strategy for your business, you need to create a professional LinkedIn page. If you already have one you can skip this step, if not you need to do this to move ahead.
Steps to create a LinkedIn page
- Step 1: Visit the LinkedIn Marketing Solutions website, click on the LinkedIn page sections. Then click “Create your Page”.
- Step 2: Choose a suitable category for your LinkedIn business page.
- Step 3: Fill in your company details. A page preview is displayed parallelly as you fill the form step by step to show you how it will appear.
- Step 4: Last but not least, add your company logo and tagline (make sure to use a strong and attractive tagline). This step is optional, but do not skip it as it’s crucial to upload your company logo. Companies with logos on their LinkedIn page get customer attention and visits 6 times more. Plus, a logo is a company identity, it represents your business ideology.
- Step 5: Click create page button.
2. Complete Your LinkedIn Page
Take your LinkedIn business page from basic to the next level by adding more details. The more information you provide to viewers, the more what you are offering will get clarity. LinkedIn business pages with full and clear details get 30% more traffic than the ones with only basic information.
To add more details click on the pencil icon below your company profile name.
3. Share Your LinkedIn Page
Now that you have completed your LinkedIn business page, the next step is sharing. Without sharing the page, the entire effort can go to waste. Share your LinkedIn page with your employees, write a mail telling all your employees to visit the page, and add it as a workplace. Connect visitors with your company thought leaders, to people who help build your business.
You can share the page with your customers as well, you can write an introductory message and send it to all your customers. Make use of all your digital points such as newsletter, website, social media platforms- ask people to follow you. Tell people what you will be offering them- in short, what’s in store for them if they follow your LinkedIn business page. On LinkedIn, page admins can also invite their connections to follow the page.
4. Add LinkedIn Button
Add social media icons to either the header or footer of your website or newsletter. This is crucial as it makes it easy for people to find your business LinkedIn page. You can find the latest LinkedIn icon and download it for use.
5. Create a LinkedIn Marketing Strategy
Now that your company LinkedIn page is ready, you need to create Linkedin Marketing Strategy.
You need to clear your strategy, ask yourself questions. What will be the purpose of your LinkedIn page, what kind of message you want to deliver to your audience, will your budget include LinkedIn ads?
Get familiar with LinkedIn demographics, discover what kind of posts your audience is viewing, who is your target audience, what are their interests. Do an audit of your LinkedIn users, the more information you can get, the better.
Effective LinkedIn Marketing Tips
Learn how to market your business like an expert on LinkedIn.
1. Post-Good Photos and Videos
Posts with photos and videos receive more engagement on any social media platform same holds for LinkedIn. According to LinkedIn, posts with images get 98% more comments than average. Also, posts with collages including 3-4 images attract more audiences. Videos can reach an audience 5 times more than any other content form. Plus, a video posted on any LinkedIn page or platform is prioritized by a LinkedIn algorithm.
2. Optimize Posts for Better Reach on LinkedIn Page
When you start publishing on your official LinkedIn business page there are certain practices you can apply. LinkedIn’s algorithm rank posts according to the following measures;
- Your connections,
- Engagement probability,
- And interest relevance of users.
In short, LinkedIn tries to show people what they want to see and what they can like. Your posts should also aim to do so. When you publish posts that interest your target audience chances are more they will like your posts as well.
You can also notify your company employees about the post published. Involving employees can give a push to circle your post, this is a great way to enhance your company’s presence.
Here are some of the best practices to use for your LinkedIn Business Page:
- Share relevant content
- Post content timely
- Try to hold user attention by posting attractive images and videos
- Include a clear Call to Action
- Name the audience you are trying to reach such as “calling all content writers” or “hey, graphic designers”
- Tag people or employees
- Lead your post with a question or an interesting fact
- Create LinkedIn polls
- Include only 2 to 3 hashtags in a natural way
- Write appealing headlines and respond to comments in a short time
3. Post at the Right Time
At what time does your post matter most. Like any other social media platform, it’s important to post regularly to maintain engagement with your followers. LinkedIn estimates that brands that post once a month reach 6 times more users, a brand that posts twice a week reaches an audience 2 times more. Again brands or companies who post daily reach even more traction. With this what time you post also matters. According to Hootsuite, following time is best to post content on LinkedIn business page to make the most of marketing strategy;
7:45 a.m., 10:45 a.m., 12:45 p.m., and 5:45 p.m. EST.
You can use social media scheduling tools such as Hootsuite, SproutSocial, Social Pilot, Buffer, Social Bee (I prefer Sprout Social and Hootsuite).
4. Go LinkedIn Live
The only format more engaging than videos is LinkedIn Live, which sees 24 times more engagement than pre-recorded videos.
You can go live with several ideas such as chat sessions, office week activities, webinars. Before hosting a LinkedIn live make sure to promote the event at least 7-8 days before to make your connections aware. Posting about the event a day or even two days before is not sufficient. You have to give people time and yourself as well, creating the hype can be beneficial. An example is given below.
5. Target the Right Audience for Your Business
One of the best marketing tools of LinkedIn is its organic targeting option for posts.
Page admins can see entire analytics data based on their business page, you need to click on your followers’ number to see analytics data. You can get data such as organization size, geography, employee advocacy, companies to track, others. If your budget allows you can go for LinkedIn ads. LinkedIn ads help organizations to reach people outside their usual reach.
Bonus: LinkedIn Marketing Tool that Can Help You
LinkedIn Groups
Just like Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups serve the same purpose. As a brand, you can be part of a communication thread, you can make out meaningful conversations with your clients offer them solutions. This place is for communication sole purpose, with groups help you can enhance engagement as well.
To Sum Up
At the end of the day remember that LinkedIn is a professional platform. Your business can create a strong presence with its help. You can get to know different professionals, reach the other side of the world and widen your contacts.