What is LinkedIn Marketing?
The Microsoft website offers various marketing tools for businesses to generate leads, improve brand awareness, create relationships and partnerships, share content, make new connections, find new employees, and more.
Why Use LinkedIn?
There are 660 million users around the globe who use LinkedIn. That’s 660 million reasons to focuses at least some of your marketing resources on the website.
Top Tips to Using LinkedIn Marketing for Your Business
To grow your business in the new year and beyond, consider these important tips. Each will bring you ever closer to new business stakeholders.
Start With a Robust Company Page
LinkedIn makes it simple for businesses to create a company page. Better still, it’s completely free. Use this page to highlight the company’s brand, history, and more. The page is also useful to post relevant content that will encourage visitors to return. Companies should also use this page to promote team and employee achievements and re-share the best employee mentions.
Zero In On Your Goals
A company’s LinkedIn page shouldn’t be confused with its overall website. As such, before setting up the former, it’s important to think about what an organization wants to accomplish. Will it serve as a productivity tool for social media or brand awareness, or primarily as a job-posting site? Is the page for general visitors or a targeted group? There’s no wrong answer here, but understand the most effective LinkedIn company pages are those with a clear purpose.
Optimize Search
Like the larger internet, your LinkedIn company page will only find success if people can find it. That’s why it’s important to use LinkedIn’s different search-related tools to grow your audience. This includes incorporating keywords and phrases that stakeholders might use to search for your products or service. It would help if you also linked external pages, including your company website address, to your LinkedIn page. LinkedIn also recommends sharing related content on the page and doing it often. Depending on your industry, this content should get updated often for positive engagement.
Follow, Please
As updates get made on your LinkedIn page, your followers receive alerts added to more engagement. Getting LinkedIn followers can be accomplished through Follow buttons on your company’s website or blog. You can also encourage employees to share important Page posts with their followers on the service. External promotion is also important. Make sure the LinkedIn page gets advertised on company emails, newsletters, and blog posts.
Custom image collages (3-4 images in one post) perform very well.Videos should be about 1-2 minutes and should capture attention within the first few seconds. Add subtitles for those watching with the sound off.Live video generates 24x more comments than regular video on LinkedIn.Documents, like PDFs or PowerPoints, can showcase what makes your brand unique.Kudos and team moments can highlight colleagues or employees—a personalized shout-out is always appreciated.
Use Sponsored Content
There’s nothing wrong with boosting what’s on the company LinkedIn page with sponsored content. Just don’t go overboard. To maximize the use of paid content, be sure to use targeting to reach the right audience. You can also take advantage of LinkedIn’s Direct Sponsored Content tools to test variations of your messaging. LinkedIn suggests include some combination of the following rich media on your company page or posts:
Spend on Advertising
Work With Employees
Ultimately, it’s not some monolith business that controls how your company is viewed on LinkedIn. Rather, it’s the employees. Because of this, employees should be encouraged to maintain a robust LinkedIn profile, which includes linking back to the company’s page. Over time, this synergy will encourage engagement and get the company’s name out there for the world to see.
Rinse and Repeat
Marketing campaigns aren’t always successful, and constantly rethinking plans is expected. LinkedIn offers marketing performance tools that make it possible to point out what’s working — and what’s not. Use these tools often to determine when adjustments are necessary.
Customize your company’s public URL: Make sure the company address in LinkedIn is relevant and professional. Ideally, it should match the company’s name. Avoid using numbers.Who viewed you? The Who Viewed Your Profile feature allows you to identify the people who visit your company page. Knowing this information is perhaps most useful when using the page to post jobs.Export your connections: You can use connection information to grow your business outside of LinkedIn using the export tool. Take this user information to send an online newsletter, discount codes, and more. Remember, it’s all about engagement!Create or join LinkedIn Groups: Take advantage of these groups to connect with similar businesses through LinkedIn. When you don’t see a group that provides a good fit, start from scratch, and create a group.Use Twitter: When your Twitter account is added to a LinkedIn profile, you can quickly share status updates across both platforms.
Check It Out
LinkedIn marketing provides businesses with numerous tools to take companies to new levels. To get started, create a LinkedIn page, then use the tools for engagement. You’ll be happy you did.
