Marketing on LinkedIn has proved to be a winning strategy for several brands worldwide. This powerful platform offers every organization and individual a unique opportunity to access an expanded network of companies, professionals and several groups.
The present world is witnessing a highly competitive business scenario. Every brand has been struggling hard to make a difference in the marketplace and attract required amount of their potential clientele. In this context, LinkedIn has started acting as a profitable networking domain allowing business owners a chance to find, connect, interact as well as create a relationship with their target market irrespective of industry or location.
LinkedIn – The leading marketing platform of the 21st century
Despite the existence of several social channels equipped to meet consumer demands, till today LinkedIn remains the leading social network for business professionals. Years after its launch, LinkedIn is still innovative in its endeavor. With Microsoft acquiring the platform, LinkedIn operations have enhanced amazingly.
Marketing on LinkedIn helps brands in generating B2B traffic and increased lead conversion. Every company can amplify its business through well-devised marketing campaigns on LinkedIn with the latest features and updates of the platform.
In a blog ‘Why LinkedIn Is the Most Powerful Marketing Tool of the 21st Century’ marketing consultant & small business advisor Anfernee Chansamooth writes in – ‘LinkedIn is a powerful platform for doing business, besides being an information provider on recruitment and a portal for job search. This social media channel has gathered all attention of being the best marketing platform of the 21st century primarily for three reasons: media, partnerships and clients.’
Still confused?
Wondering how to do LinkedIn marketing?
Here’s a shrewd guide to marketing on LinkedIn in 2018:
LinkedIn, world’s largest professional networks generate leads. LinkedIn is a business and employment-oriented service used for mainly professional networking. Both employers and job seekers use it either for posting jobs or for posting their resumes/CVs.
A report based on April 2017 reveals that LinkedIn has 500 million members in 200 countries and more than 106 million members are active. One of the significant features of LinkedIn – members can create profiles and connect with each other in this online social network to enjoy real-world professional relationships. Do you know that the collection of people’s resumes and professional accounts enable you to gather authentic leads and business prospects?
LinkedIn is a social media platform that has a large group of educated professionals as its members. Find the most lucrative ways to leverage the knowledge and experiences of the LinkedIn users while giving them back what they desire for. This constructive way will allow any marketer to enjoy the benefits and get business for maximum profit.
Neil Patel describes it nicely how to generate more leads on LinkedIn:
But do you know how to promote business on LinkedIn?
Here are certain best practices you need to follow for effective marketing:
1. Create an effective professional profile
The most important step that would promote your business to your target audience is a well-defined profile of your company. Hence, create and optimize an effective LinkedIn profile with basic information. Set up your profile with your name and present all your professional information in the headline section. This section is quite crucial for your identity because it’s the element which is seen in search results and by every member in your network.
2. Build the company page
Don’t forget to update your company page section with essential information on your business. With recent LinkedIn updates, company page has become essential to connect to your target audience. Include your company website, your email address, blog URL or your phone number, etc.
3. Define your goals to audience
LinkedIn marketing goals include activities like generating leads and raising brand awareness, etc.
Tell your audience about your goals, write about you and your company and describe it to your prospective employer, customer or valuable connection. Experts consider this segment as your elevator pitch – telling your prospects about who you are and what you do.
4. Optimize your company page for search
Marketers need to optimize their company page for search. To achieve optimization, insert appropriate keywords for top profile ranking. LinkedIn uses specific keywords to determine how a profile should rank in search results. Additionally, the keywords used are visible in the employee listings on company pages. Besides keyword insertion, a business person can insert visuals of his/her professional experience. To establish branding one might include media (like Slideshare presentations, images or Youtube Videos) too. Undoubtedly, this section plays a vital role for marketers as they can use it for authenticating their authority over specific industries.
5. Attract Audience – Add Company Page Followers
Attract your audience and increase Company Page followers by three simple steps:
- Share your content with your employees’ networks.
- Invite customers and valuable partners to become followers. Send emails, newsletters and blog posts to increase followers.
- Allow your website visitors to follow your LinkedIn Company Page with a single click on the follow button attached on you site.
6. Engage audience with informative content on company page
Post relevant and informative content on company page for more traffic. People in your network will value your content and stick to your company page for more information. Furthermore, as a marketer, the contents also create an opportunity for your endorsement. You can include a direct link to your publications on your website and draw the attention of your prospective clients. Continue to publish thought leadership and engaging content to entice more followers.
7. Sponsor your best creation
Use the feature Sponsored Content, a native advertising forum on LinkedIn to promote those of your contents that have received higher engagement rates. Post them directly in the LinkedIn feeds of those professionals whom you want to reach on LinkedIn via Sponsored Content on LinkedIn.
8. Update your Professional Profile
Make status updates on your professional profile similar to the way you do it on other social media platforms. Tag people links and companies relevant to your update. Updation of all information would yield better results and promote your business.
9. Join LinkedIn Groups and grow your network
Groups are the best place to find more followers. Become a member of any of the groups that alight with your business.
With recent LinkedIn updates groups for 2018, attracting followers have become easy. JoAnne Funch in her article explains that until recently, as there was a lesser group activity, so LinkedIn has updates groups for 2018 with the new group features an user can enjoy the following:
They can discover and access groups more easily from the homepage and one can also see the latest content from his/her groups in notifications and the homepage feed.
In addition to that, they can post videos into groups: just to @mention the members, this way the conversation would continue.
This group update would ease marketing on LinkedIn; business professionals would view an increase in their potential clients.
LinkedIn Groups activity best practices:
Use LinkedIn Groups for lead generation, find and join those groups that are relevant to your industry. According to social media experts, as a modern marketer, you must present educational messages and not promotional. Your primary focus should be to educate and inform your group members but avoid becoming self-promotional. However, you can apply 80-20 rule.
Iris Hearn presents in her blog How to Use LinkedIn Groups for Lead Generation says the good measure is to focus 80% of the time on activities that are sure to add value to the group such as industry information, opinion on posts, etc. The other 20%, you can post contents about your company etc.
10. Advertising on LinkedIn
There are two effective ways to advertise on LinkedIn: self-service ads and managed campaigns. Advertising on LinkedIn is useful option that allows businesses to achieve their goals and reach their ideal customers.
LinkedIn advertising best practices:
LinkedIn offers self-service solutions and this way you can target campaigns in a short time. According to the latest features of the company- you can create your budget, select clicks or impressions and can even stop your ads at any time using Campaign Manager.
Ad formats supported by Campaign Manager are Sponsored Content, Sponsored InMail and Text Ads. You can also enjoy the opportunity of Dynamic Ads, available through account-managed advertising. The account-managed advertising facility allows you for partnering with a dedicated LinkedIn team to create exclusively placed, highly visible ads for premium audiences.
How to optimize LinkedIn Ad campaigns
Following are the ways to optimize the performance of your LinkedIn ad campaigns. Focus on these to ensure a successful engagement of target audience:
- Create engaging content: Create ads that would grab the attention of your target audience.
- Test your ad variations: Monitor your campaign quality scores and identify poor creatives,
- Target the right audience: Narrow down your target audience and create ads for that particular set of audience.
- Set a competitive bid: Create a competitive bid to win an auction against other advertisers for the same target audience.
Improve your marketing campaign with analytics
Every marketer should analyze his social media activities, just posting information on any platform isn’t sufficient for completing his marketing efforts.
Why do marketers need analytics on LinkedIn?
Monitoring LinkedIn analytics dashboards allows the marketer to make data-informed decisions for more benefits. In addition to that, he can:
- define the purpose of his online activity
- identify a clear purpose for social media activity
- determine whether the outcomes he achieves will enable him to reach an overall goal
Mentioned below are some of the social media tools to trace LinkedIn Analytics:
Social Report
Social Report is a popular tool to provide daily digests of web analytics. It’s helpful to track social networking accounts and the interests, geographic locations as well as the gender of your readers. You can use this tool to get metric insights of LinkedIn. These types of metrics are essential for you to make your marketing strategies better according to your target audience.
Hootsuite
Another much-used tool is HootSuite, known for scheduling your LinkedIn account posts. This tool provides analytics after you purchase the paid version.
Social Pilot
Social Pilot is a much used LinkedIn Analytics Tool that is used to measure and improve your brand performance. This tool is ideal to find out what matters most for your LinkedIn Business Page’s best performance. Using this tool, you can identify who your total number of top influencers are, fans and what best content strategy you need to take for your brand. Social Pilot is ideal for improving your LinkedIn strategies and increase your targeted audience reach.
To effectively manage your business on LinkedIn, you must keep track of the recent features and updates of LinkedIn.
Features and updates on LinkedIn that will make a better business profile in 2018
LinkedIn has enabled a range of integration and data tools to help optimize marketing campaigns and boost your company’s brand message.
To plan a profitable Linkedin marketing strategy, you need to use the updates and features adroitly.
Learn the following secret ways on how you should be using Linkedin as a marketing tool-
Post Videos related to your professional interest
With rapid technological advancements, LinkedIn has also joined the league in allowing its members to post videos. This 2018 and beyond, all users can post captivating videos related to their professional interests to LinkedIn directly and enhance their on-platform content distribution.
Now, in its recent updates, LinkedIn rolls out two new ways to improve your videos experience. LinkedIn agrees that any video content gets shared 20x more times than any other type of material on the platform. This activity further enables businesses to reach a vast pool of audience.
In the blog, LinkedIn Video: Stand Out with Filters and Text, Peter Roybal gives a detailed idea of the recent launch of filter for sharing regular work moments.
Nowadays, LinkedIn members use videos to connect with their work communities for sharing projects, ideas and strategies. But, with its recent update, users can send “work high five” to their work companion, they can switch ideas on projects with the facility of “Side Hustle” or even share the recent information with the “On the Air” filter.
In addition to that, the platform also introduced text styles for adding context to the community you belong to. LinkedIn has launched three styles at present – FifthAve, Geometric and Plain for the convenience of all.
Conference Frames
LinkedIn has released their conference frames also- video filters for conferences and events like Snapchat. However, this feature is a little different than that of Snapchat. Companies can use the conference frames to brand their images and videos at industry events. According to this, conference attendees can add dedicated event frames to the videos they create while attending such functions. This is a remarkable feature added by LinkedIn- the addition gives organizations an opportunity to promote their events and functions through user-generated content.
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Conclusion
LinkedIn is a popular platform today to market and take your business to a wider clientele. This guide is compiled for you so that you can wade easily and grab your customers’ attention the way you have desired for. If you follow the experts’ rules and apply everything, needless to say, your LinkedIn profile would stand out amongst others. Apply your knowledge and create a LinkedIn network to engage with your audience, manage your professional account and enjoy the results of your LinkedIn activities. If you could find better ways why not use them for effective LinkedIn marketing.
