As a part of your social media strategy, what social media channels are you focussing on in 2022?
The unanimous answer to this question is going to be – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn.
We have covered Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter Marketing in separate blogs dedicated to those topics. For the sake of this blog, Let’s try to uncover or instead reinstate some of the features of LinkedIn that make it one of the best social media channels for B2B lead generation. It is also the most effective platform for delivering content and securing audience engagement.
LinkedIn marketing, in simple terms, means making connections, generating leads, promoting your brand, building business relationships, sharing your ideas and content, and driving traffic to your website using LinkedIn!
So, gear up for learning some of the best LinkedIn hacks that can help skyrocket your business growth and let’s see how you can use this tool up to its maximum potential.
LinkedIn for Business
There are many ways you can use LinkedIn for your business purposes. Let’s discover some of the ways and see how to build an effective LinkedIn marketing strategy.
Use it for Networking
LinkedIn provides your business with the best opportunity to connect with professionals along with your employees. It allows you to connect with your audiences, interact with them, and participate in discussions relevant to your business.
Lead Generation
It has acquired the status as ‘one of the best B2B lead generation platforms.‘ So, even if you are a small company or a big one, you can leverage its power to create awareness about your products/ services and generate quality leads for your business.
Content Marketing
Create exclusive content for your LinkedIn audience and drive it back to your website. You can use it for publishing articles for spreading awareness about a certain topic/update and even initiating a discussion driving social engagement; which acts as an opportunity to create brand awareness.
Recruit New Talent
As a business, you will always have the need to hire new talent. It acts as a Talent acquisition tool and allows you to sort out the relevant candidates, and even send direct messages to the candidates you find relevant to fill the position.
Reputation Management
What you decide to post on your profile, how you want to portray yourself as a brand in front of your audiences – this platform allows you control over your branding a.k.a brand reputation. You need to keep in mind all the aspects of the impression you make on the audience.
As a part of reputation management, we highly recommend that you must claim your business page on it, keep it updated and make sure it denotes your brand the way you want it. So when your brand name is searched on any search engine, your LinkedIn business profile is going to be one of the results appearing on the first SERP.
Let’s now have a look at how you can create a perfect business page for your brand on LinkedIn.
Create an Engaging LinkedIn Page for your Business
A LinkedIn company page is the place where other users can find out more about you after their interest has been piqued by one of your posts. It is a precious asset and needs to be optimized for information and interest.
Please ensure that all colours and fonts align with your company’s branding when adding your company’s banner, logo, motto, website link, and other pertinent information.
Your company description should be concise yet compelling and represent the values that your brand stands for. This description is gonna show on the Google result preview, so make it SEO-friendly by combining some relevant keywords.
In addition, claim a URL for your page that includes your company name and is free of random letters and numbers.
This enhances your credibility and makes it more likely that users will follow you or contact you.
You can have a look at DigiAvtar’s Linkedin Page for a better understanding. And connect with us on LinkedIn to learn more about marketing tactics.
Let’s dive deeper into how we can now create a solid LinkedIn Marketing Business Strategy.
Create An Awesome LinkedIn Marketing Strategy
Once you are done with creating and optimizing the Linkedin page for your business, it’s now time to devise the perfect marketing strategy to meet your goals. A detailed marketing strategy includes desired goals, marketing plan, execution steps, chosen content types, suitable advertising solutions, and valid analytics metrics to evaluate performance.
Your business LinkedIn marketing strategy should answer all of the following questions to be a valid and suitable strategy:
Who are the target audiences for your LinkedIn marketing campaigns?
What demographics, industries, designations, and interest groups do you want to attract? Be sure to have these in place, whether you are starting from scratch or building upon what already exists.
It is important to have a deep understanding of what they want, what they like, and talk about. It will help you in creating a content strategy geared towards their specific interests.
What are your desired business goals for LinkedIn marketing & advertising activities?
Determine what you want to accomplish and where you want to go. You can connect with your audience, interact with other brands, tell people about your online presence, or do whatever you want.
The goals may be different regarding whether you are planning LinkedIn b2b marketing or b2c marketing. Some of the business goals are:
- Build Brand Awareness
- Strengthen Brand Reputation
- Engage With Your Target Audience
- Generate Qualified Leads
- Sell Your Product Or Service
What are the types of engaging content on LinkedIn?
Use the contents suggestion tool to find the topics your audience is interested in. This should be at the heart of your LinkedIn marketing strategy. Engage people with your LinkedIn page by posting insightful, original, and well-written articles regularly.
Choose topics that you’re an expert on with sound advice and supplement your content with visuals and/or statistics wherever appropriate.
Consider sharing industry reports, how-to guides, or thought leadership articles via the LinkedIn Publishing Platform. Weave your product features into intrinsically exciting posts, such as a challenging customer problem you were called upon to solve or essential lessons you have learned over the years. Give that personal touch. Build a content calendar by identifying the most popular or trending topics in your industry.
What are the suitable metrics for performance evaluation?
Whether you’re promoting awareness of their brand or boosting credibility among peers, you need to measure progress in real-time.
You need to demonstrate how effective your marketing is by including key Linkedin metrics in your social media reports, like follower growth and post engagement. Because the type of content tends to be more on the professional side, it requires a separate content strategy with its own benchmarks.
Let’s have a look at the 5 most important metrics to track performance:
- Impressions: Impressions are the total number of times your Linkedin post has been seen.
- CTR: CTR is the total number of clicks your post receives divided by the total number of impressions. It measures the percentage of people who see your post and click through to learn more.
- Engagement Rate: This will help you determine what resonates with your followers and allow you to create more of what your audience loves.
- Follower Demographics: Look at your follower demographics to understand who your content reaches. Does it align with your ideal target?
- Followers – Total & Organic: Knowing which posts generated the most followers creates a feedback loop allowing you to improve the effectiveness of your content marketing.
Are you skilled enough or need professional help in social media marketing?
With LinkedIn advertising solutions you can target visitors to your site, generate leads, email and contacts lists, and measure conversion tracking to achieve higher results, along with LinkedIn Campaign Manager analytics reports to help you decide what advertising strategy fits your business goals.
Even if you’re an experienced digital marketer, targeting on LinkedIn is different from other platforms. You can target based on what people do professionally instead of what they do in their personal lives.
You can choose from a variety of Ad formats, such as:
InMail Ads, Text Ads, Video Ads, Dynamic Ads, Carousel Ads, Objective Based Ads.
Top 12 LinkedIn Marketing Tips for Growing Your Business
Focus on Content Marketing
- Help your audience by publishing content related to their interests.
- Answer queries related to your business industry & potential clients’ needs.
- Publish content related to trending events in your industry that adds value to viewers.
- Mix content formats using visual media types in your content including Graphic Designs, Infographics, Videos and Powerpoint Slides.
- Try to publish or share content daily in the early morning, lunchtime or early evening as these are the periods of increased activity on LinkedIn.
- Share related useful content for your audiences from other pages, accounts, websites or other digital platforms.
- Try to upload videos which are shorter than 10 minutes directly to LinkedIn to get priority over externally shared content and access post analytics data.
- Focus on publishing posts directly on LinkedIn rather than sharing from other platforms.
- Use the “Content Suggestions” tool to find what your audience is engaging with to share or to come up with ideas for future published content.
- Add related hashtags to your published content to increase visibility & reach.
- Align your business content marketing campaigns on LinkedIn with other marketing campaigns on other marketing channels.
Optimizing your content so that it adds value to the audience and increases engagement will make your LinkedIn content marketing campaigns more successful.
Join LinkedIn Groups
Use LinkedIn Groups to make connections with people who work in, or are interested in, your industry. By joining them, you will be able to share content with other members, build your contact list, establish yourself as an expert in your field, and increase brand awareness.
There are several other benefits that come from joining LinkedIn Groups. You can inspire thought leadership in your industry by joining groups related to your industry and participating in discussions within them.
Additionally, by joining Groups, you can view complete profiles of other members of the same group without being connected.
Create your own LinkedIn Group
One of the perks of managing a LinkedIn Group is that LinkedIn makes it simple to interact and communicate with the members of the Group you’re in charge of.
You can either send messages to group members or create a group post. Your group’s page allows you to send messages to members or share content with them.
This is great if you have something to share with a specific person in your group.
A group post allows you to share any content you’d like on your group’s page, making it ideal for kicking off discussions.
Create LinkedIn Showcase Pages
A LinkedIn Showcase Page is a niche page directly linked to your company’s main page that highlights specific initiatives and campaigns or features specific content.
Showcase Pages help you integrate specific products or marketing personas into your main page – this allows you to customize and target your content experience for your page visitors. You can use this to expand your network on this platform because other users can choose to follow your Showcase Page(s) even if they haven’t followed your main page.
Post company status updates and target followers
Publish Status Updates for your business on your LinkedIn page for your followers to see. This keeps your connections engaged and in the loop regarding your business’ latest developments, work, content, and updates. In your status updates, you can share written information, images, videos, documents, and more.
Leverage @mentions in your status updates
Want another LinkedIn user or company to see your status update? On LinkedIn, you can tag — or @mention — users and other companies in your status updates much like the way it works on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.
Include the @symbol immediately followed by the user’s/ company’s name in your status update or post for example @digiavtar. As a result, that user/ company will be alerted that you mentioned them, and their name will also link to their Profile and Page in the status update itself. This is a great way to boost engagement and interaction on your content as well as improve brand awareness.
Experiment with LinkedIn Sponsored Content and Native Ads
LinkedIn Ads are a smart choice if you’re looking to complement your organic LinkedIn marketing efforts with some paid advertising. One of the biggest benefits of LinkedIn advertising: is the targeting options.
LinkedIn’s PPC ads let you target specific job titles, job functions, industries, or company sizes, to name a few — you know, the people who are more likely to want/ need what you sell.
Follow The LinkedIn Marketing Blog
You can explore this resource to take ideas on how to use LinkedIn’s marketing tools, catch up with their updates, learn about new features, and much more.
Do not forget about InMail
Did you know that LinkedIn InMails get 3X better responses than traditional emails do? Invest in InMail and reach out to any LinkedIn user directly. You also get access to analytics on your InMail response patterns to help you target users better.
The only drawback with InMailing is that a free account does not come with any InMail credits at all. Company Pages cannot send InMails. A LinkedIn Premium account credits you with five InMails every month. A LinkedIn Sales Navigator Professional account allows you 20 InMails per month. Weigh the pros and cons of using InMail if you do not have a paid account yet.
Consistency, Consistency, Consistency
Consistency is vital to succeeding with LinkedIn marketing. Keep posting relevant content consistently and to keep things fresh, keep rotating your banner image every six months or so and match it to whichever event you are promoting at the time. And, of course, update any changes to your logo, location, or leadership personnel as soon as they happen.
LinkedIn Analytics
LinkedIn Analytics allows you to see how people find your page and what section engages them more, which CTA drove the most action, and also, what didn’t work.
You can also track your Showcase Page’s traction by comparing the page views for your different tabs. Also, by visitor demographics, you can have a sense of who’s interested in your company and who isn’t.
To find out how your page is performing compared with your peers, look at the Companies track table. With the help of this section, you can compare your page ranks with total followers and new followers. You can also see your every post’s engagement rate. This can give you deeper insights into what’s working and what’s not.
Make Connections, Build Relations & Nurture Them
You should connect to your buyer personas, strategic partners, other industry people, and other businesses.
You can then decide how to nurture a specific connection to build a strong relationship. A good relationship between a business and customers can lead to the exponential growth of your business eventually.
After building a relationship by selling customers your products or services, you need to show them that they are at the right and trustworthy place. You need to take care of them by asking them how they feel about your products, and what they liked and disliked most.
Remember, retaining your existing customers is far more important than making new ones. That’s why this is one of the most important parts of your LinkedIn marketing.
Conclusion
Whether you’re looking to grow your network, manage reputation, scale your business, drive traffic to your website, or find fresh leads; LinkedIn for a business is an extremely useful tool. So how you reap the benefits out of this social media platform is totally up to you and how you plan to utilize it. Digiavtar provides the best LinkedIn Marketing Services along with other Digital Marketing services to assist you in achieving your desired business goals. Connect with us to get more details on quotes.