If you are a business owner, you know that networking can be a powerful tool to expand your business. However, it can be very difficult for business owners to find the time to be truly present and engaged in their business and their community. One way to defeat the barriers of being a business owner and fully engaging in your community and your business is to leverage technology. Whether your business is already on LinkedIn or you’re just getting started, there are some effective strategies you can use to grow your business and use LinkedIn for marketing.
Let’s look at how to use LinkedIn to market your business.
Define your LinkedIn marketing goals
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The marketing strategies you use on LinkedIn will not differ from those on other social media platforms. Beginning each campaign with clear objectives is essential. Exactly why are you launching this LinkedIn advertising campaign? Where do you want this to lead you?
Specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely (SMART) objectives are what you should strive towards. In particular, make sure you have a way to track the results of your campaign.
Know your target audience
Accurately identifying the preferences and passions of your target demographic is a crucial part of social marketing. Marketing to people who have no interest in what you’re selling is a waste of time and money.
If you expect your target audience to frequent the professional networking site LinkedIn, you should give a more in-depth description of their typical characteristics.
Even if you’re selling B2B items, it’s not a corporation but rather a single manager at each firm who ultimately decides whether or not to buy. In this light, it’s important to consider which upper-level management will make the final call, or who will make purchase recommendations inside an organization.
You can get a good indication of the kinds of individuals that are interested in your LinkedIn company profile if you already have one up and running by checking the stats. What kinds of people tend to enjoy and share your content, and is there anything consistent about them?
Learn from LinkedIn influencers
There are two distinct LinkedIn user populations to consider:
- Users of LinkedIn who have established themselves as experts in their field thanks to the material they’ve shared.
- Individuals with over 10,000 followers who offer anecdotes that don’t provide any light on their expertise on LinkedIn. A lot of interest, but not much in the way of actual results.
You need to find out who is producing high-quality material in your specific field. Read up on them, learn from their mistakes, and incorporate their strategies into your own.
Connect with people you want to impress
Again, knowing your demographic is essential for making the proper connections. For instance, I don’t limit my LinkedIn connections to those who may become paying customers. When creating material, keep your peers in mind who may find what you’ve created useful.
Be wary of interacting with inactive LinkedIn members who don’t utilize the platform beyond checking their messages once every three months.
If you find that your network is full of inactive users, or that you aren’t getting responses from your target audience, that’s a sign you need to clear out your network. Use LinkedIn management tools to manage Linkedin connections and bulk disconnect from inactive accounts.
To get the most out of LinkedIn, you need to adopt a social media mindset. Don’t think of it as “set it and forget it” advertising. If you have followers but provide them nothing of value in return, they aren’t doing you any good. They’d add you to a long list of people they follow but don’t pay any attention to, and eventually, you’d disappear from their minds entirely.
LinkedIn is a great place to publish blog entries that will pique the curiosity of your target audience. Posting thought leadership pieces on LinkedIn is a great way to establish yourself as an authority in your field.
You may certainly promote content that you have published elsewhere by sharing links to it on LinkedIn, but the site’s algorithm gives preference to content created specifically for it rather than boosting connections to external sites.
Keep in mind that the ultimate purpose of your LinkedIn account is to be useful to your target market and that curating other people’s relevant content may do this as well as your original articles.
Invite people to follow your page
If you want more people to see your LinkedIn page and get familiar with your brand, you may encourage your administrators to invite their own networks to follow your page. If you want to increase your following, it’s better to have your social media managers, salespeople, or marketing pros personally choose those who are most likely to do so.
As your invitation rate increases, so will LinkedIn’s allowance of invites you can issue.
Empower employees to promote and engage on your behalf
For brand accounts, employee advocacy is make-or-break in terms of content distribution and reach.
For instance, if I create a piece of content about B2B marketing, I may offer it to my employees to distribute on their behalf.
The employees could then share that content on their LinkedIn pages, or they could send that content to customers, partners, and anyone else they interact with every day.
If employees are empowered to share your content, they can increase their reach, engage with your target audience, and see measurable results, such as increased connections, engagement, and traffic.
Conclusion
LinkedIn is a powerful marketing tool that, when used correctly, can grow your business effectively. The key is to use the platform to your advantage and interact with your target audience directly.
Brenda is a passionate business blogger, tech nerd and gamer. She is interested in topics that
cover business communication, sales, online branding, digital marketing and social media,
business tools and extensions, as well as organization and management of LinkedIn
connections.