How To Use LinkedIn For Marketing: 8 Steps

LinkedIn isn’t just for business professionals and job seekers, although millions of people use LinkedIn every day to grow their references and find job opportunities, but did you know you can use LinkedIn to grow your business, too? From increasing your traffic to targeting new prospecting, generating more leads and creating better brand awareness, LinkedIn makes an invaluable addition to your digital marketing strategy.

LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network with hundreds of millions of users in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide.  It’s all about establishing your professional profile, building and maintaining your career development, establishing connections with colleagues and classmates, getting industry insights and other types of business-related activities. It’s not like other social media marketing platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter or Instagram; there, businesses have direct access to consumers that they can easily market to with status updates, images and other casual posts.  Although I still love those social media networks, as B2B company if I were forced to choose between using only one social networking site for my business, from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other social networking sites, I would choose LinkedIn, period.

To use Linkedin for marketing as part of your overall strategy, here are 8 marketing tips that can help you establish your brand presence, connect to your audience, engage them with content and ultimately grow your business sales.

A company page is foundational to building a brand presence on Linkedin It provides a channel for visitors to learn about your company and to promote your products and services to customers and prospects.

But It’s important to understand the audience you’re trying to attract ahead of creating your Linkedin profile Page. Run a quick search for members who fit your customer target. Investigate their profiles to identify the types of subjects they follow. This will help you decide how to position your page.

Next start by adding your company logo, banner image, and a detailed description of your company. Be sure to mention specialties, key products, and services and include a sentence or two about what makes your company unique.

Give your brand more opportunities to be discovered by the right people. Add your company specialties, links, SEO keywords to make it easier for people to find you and to make your page rank higher on both Linkedin and Google searches. Highlight your business offerings in the description section of your company page and give Linkedin members a compelling reason to follow you.

Also be sure to take advantage of your existing page properties by linking your Linkedin company page to your company website, blog, and other social platforms.

Your employees are your best brand advocates. Encourage them to add their current position at your company to their profiles. This will automatically make them followers of your page and will feature your Company Page on their profiles, helping to drive more traffic your way.  Integrate your linkedin page link into your company communications, such as an email or your blog, to capture your existing customers. They will likely follow your company page when prompted.

Your Existing and potential customers may also be visiting your website to make it easy for them to follow your Company Page by embedding a Follow button on your site.

Find Groups talking about your brand or industry, join them, and take part in the conversation. Then, build brand awareness and promote your Company Page as a source of thought leadership. This will drive traffic and attention back to your page.

LinkedIn Ads provides you the ability to promote your business to anyone on LinkedIn. Using targeting options, like job title, employer, role, skills, interests, and geography, you can get in front of exactly the right people to help spread the word about your business. It allows you to design different types of ads, create logical groupings, define bids for specific campaigns, and measure performance with metrics such as impressions, clicks, and conversions. For more info on Linkedin Ads take a quick look at this infographic that talks about Linkedin best practices for creating ads and campaigns.

On the other hand, Linkedin sponsored content will let you reach beyond your follower base and to raise brand awareness, build relationships and drive quality leads. Sponsored updates appear in feeds across devices giving you more opportunities to reach the right people that matter.

To grow an engaged following, it’s important to lead with useful content. For every post promoting your company, make sure your posts focus on teaching others how to solve a problem or how to do their job better.

Use your company’s updates to showcase your expertise and establish your brand as a thought leader. Share a wide array of content with your followers, including insightful articles, company news, and more.

Quality is more important than quantity–especially when it comes to social media activity, but if you’re not posting to LinkedIn consistently then you’re missing out on opportunities to reach your audience more often. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram may reign when it comes to social sharing of stories, blog posts, and visual media, but when it comes to direct traffic to your main site, LinkedIn is far and away the No. 1 social referral source.

So stick to a regular posting schedule so followers can rely on you to keep them informed and up to date. The more you post on LinkedIn, the more people will find and visit your content. Posting more often (and linking back to your site) results in more traffic to your site. This not only increases your immediate reach, it can improve SEO for the pages you’re linking to.

Rich media like photos and videos can dramatically increase both comments and shares. Incorporate these formats – along with SlideShare presentations and links to articles – to maximize engagement with your posts.

Prompt your colleagues and followers to take action on your posts – every like, comment and share increases your reach throughout the LinkedIn network. For example, you could share an inspiring quote and ask viewers to “like” the post if they agree, or even share their own favorite quotes.

Engage with followers who comment on your updates to help build loyalty, continue the conversation, and further establish your thought leadership. People like to know that they’re being heard!

Use the Analytics tab on your Company Page to understand how your follower community is growing over time and what kinds of people you’re reaching. This will give you valuable insight that you can use to tailor your page and future posts.

Watch the Reach and Engagement sections of your Company Page analytics to see what resonates with your followers. Test different days, times, topics, and formats to identify what works best for your audience.

Final Thoughts

LinkedIn is a powerful platform for reaching a professional audience. your business can accomplish big things by using a strategy that incorporates frequent posting, making new connections, publishing relevant content and performing analytics. For better results, LinkedIn marketing should be integrated with your other social media marketing strategies.

Have you used any of these strategies? What’s working in your LinkedIn marketing today? Please share your comments below.