Step by Step Guide on How to Use LinkedIn for Marketing: Our Top 7 Tips
LinkedIn is a leading platform when it comes to networking and career development. It’s also a powerful tool to promote your business and generate targeted leads. With the right LinkedIn marketing strategies, you can make your brand more visible. You’ll gain authority over your competitors and dominate your market.
That might leave you scratching your head— How do I use LinkedIn for marketing? And what are the best tips to grow my business using LinkedIn? In this article, we’ll share with you a detailed guide on how to find marketing success on LinkedIn. The post includes seven tips to help you grow your audience and attract quality leads.
Ready? Let’s dive in.
1- Optimize Your Company Profile
We’ll start by creating a LinkedIn company page for your business. But first, you need to have a verified LinkedIn personal account to do that. Most business owners already have an account on LinkedIn, but it’s okay if you don’t. You can create one now with just a few clicks.
First, go to LinkedIn sign up page and fill in the information. You need to confirm the email address you used to verify your account. Then complete your profile by following the steps below:
- Use a professional profile picture
- Fill your work information
- Write a short description of yourself
- Enter details about your education and work history
- Send connection requestions to your work friends and colleagues
Once you finish creating your account, it’s time to create your company profile. To get started, click on Create a LinkedIn Page, then follow the steps below:
1- Choose a type for your business
There are four types you can choose from depending on what you want as an outcome. Pick your option based on the number of your employees. As a business with less than 200 employees, choose “Small business” and continue.
2- Enter your page identity
Now you need to enter your page identity information such as name, website, industry, etc. Make sure to select your company details correctly. (Be specific about the industry and the number of employees.)
Uploading a logo to your profile is optional. But, it’s a must for any business that wants to grow to use a logo across different social media sites. Having a clear and consistent brand identity online is crucial. It plays a major role in the growth of your business. It makes people trust you and determines the quality of prospects reaching out to you.
3-Complete your business page profile
You’re almost done! You only need to provide a few more details before your business profile is fully optimized. To get there, you need to:
- Enter a short description of your business
- Specify the location of your business
- Share your first post
- Use a few hashtags in your posts
Also, it’s crucial to choose a tagline for your business and upload a cover image. These are optional steps, but they help leave a strong impression on your visitors — which allows you to convert more. Once you finish those simple steps, your profile will be a 100% complete. You’re now ready to move to the next technique.
2- Post Valuable Content, Regularly
Content marketing is an essential part of any marketing strategy in 2020. It’s the best way to share your expertise and establish yourself as an expert on any platform. And LinkedIn is no exception. There are five types of consumable content you can share with your LinkedIn audience.
- Publish a short post with a few paragraphs. (You can use this to ask a question or share a link to an online resource, for example.)
- Upload an inspiring image or an infographic.
- Share an informative video, tutorial, or an advertisement about your products and services.
- Upload a document or import one from an outside source (such as Google Drive).
- Publish an article.
Each type of content is valuable in its own way. They can all work, depending on the audience and the message you want to communicate.
Be sure to share content with your followers regularly. But, you should always avoid old content or spammy posts. Publish what you believe will be valuable and can help your audience improve in some way. Also, try to avoid long-form articles because they don’t do well on LinkedIn. Instead, you can share a small piece of your post while linking to the longer article at the end.
3- Join Popular Groups in Your Industry
Joining groups in your industry allows you to connect with other businesses easily. And if you’re an active member of any group, you’ll be more visible to potential customers. It becomes easier for you to engage in meaningful discussions with like-minded professionals.
To search for groups in your field, you can use the top search bar. For example, let’s try “Digital Marketing.”
Click on the fourth result from the list where there is “in Groups” below. LinkedIn will show you dozens of pages of popular groups in your industry.
Now, you’ll send a request to join these groups and wait until you’re accepted. And once you’re in, you can start a new post or join other discussions.
Engaging in LinkedIn Groups drives more people to visit your business profile. That will open all sorts of possibilities for the work you’re doing. People will want to learn more about you and your company. But, be careful: Lots of groups don’t allow promotional posts and spammy content. Be sure to avoid that and read the rules of each group for you not to be kicked out. Try to be helpful before you start asking for any favors.
4- Start Your Own Group
Sometimes, you won’t find targeted groups for your industry, or maybe you’re not allowed to get in for some reason. Creating your own groups on LinkedIn is an amazing solution if that’s your situation. Owning a group gives you the option to stand out as an authority in your field. It allows you to start discussions with your target audience and promote your offers as you wish.
To create a new group, click on the groups’ tab on the left, or click here. Then, click on “Create a new group.”
You’ll be asked to enter some details. Pick a good image for your LinkedIn group and upload it.
Then, make sure to use a unique name for your group and enter a detailed description of what it is about.
Having some ground rules for your LinkedIn group will ease the work for you as a moderator. So, be sure to set some basic guidelines for new members to read and follow.
Now that you’ve created the group, you can feature it on your company profile. To do that, go to your company’s profile and click on the pen, as shown in the picture.
After that, click on “Featured groups” from the left bar, and search for your group from the list. Click “Save” and you’re done!
Remember: Give your group members valuable content first to bolster your connection with them. Don’t over-promote your products and services on the group. And make sure to keep your posts professional and clean of spam.
5- Enhance The Power of Employees
Your employees’ profiles are the face of your company online. They’re one of the first things business professionals check when they decide to work with you. So, making sure your employees have completed their profiles is a huge plus for your brand. They could do that by filling their profiles with the right information. You could also ask them to add your company to their profiles as their current work experience. That grants your company more visibility and improves your rankings within LinkedIn’s search systems.
When you’re just starting out, it’s hard to get people to follow your company profile or join your groups. They look at your engagement numbers and assume that your content isn’t good enough. A great way to solve this problem is to get your employees and colleagues to react to your content. Their interactions don’t have to be fake to work. Tell them to be genuine about what they think of your content and interact more with what you share.
6- Use LinkedIn Ads to Sponsor Your Content
LinkedIn has 660 million users worldwide. It’s the second most popular advertising platform for B2B marketers, right behind Facebook. The best part about this? Unlike Facebook, LinkedIn is full of business-minded people who are ready to work. All you have to do is prove your worth.
LinkedIn ads come with advanced tools that allow you to target any audience you want. These tools also give you the option to retarget your website visitors and lost leads from your sales funnel. And get this: You have the option to set objectives depending on where you are with your business. Then you can select the audience you want to target.
You can also select the Ad format you want and compare metrics to see which one works best for your campaigns.
LinkedIn sponsored content is compelling because it comes in the form of native advertising. It blends in with the rest of the content on the platform, which makes it naturally more engaging to people. If you never tried LinkedIn ads before, it could be the missing piece in your marketing strategy.
7- Learn LinkedIn Analytics
In the beginning, you’ll create all types of content with knowing much about your audience. You’ll publish what you create at any time and in lots of different forms. But, that’s not a strategic approach to marketing. We all know how audiences differ depending on demographics, interests, industry, etc.
Thankfully, LinkedIn offers you the option to tailor your content specifically to your audience for maximum engagement. Whether it’s free or sponsored publications, you can learn more about the behavior of your audience. That helps you make changes to your content and tweak it to fulfill your followers’ needs.
Free content
To check your company page analytics, go to your company’s profile. You’ll find your last 30-day activity on the left sidebar. You’ll find “Followers”, “Visitors”, and “Updates”. To get more information on each number, click on an item from the list. You’ll be taken to a new page with a more detailed graph.
Sponsored Content
One of your main objectives when running LinkedIn ads is to lower cost and get a higher ROI on your spendings. LinkedIn campaign manager helps you do that effectively using analytics. It allows you to track the performance of your campaigns and compare results. You can test campaigns and make changes to your existing ones to increase meet your marketing goals.
Conclusion
LinkedIn is the best social network to connect with business professionals from any industry. It gives you the option to grow your company and offer your services to targeted audiences. Be sure to take advantage of any growth opportunity the platform provides you with. By following the tips above, you can quickly establish a strong presence on LinkedIn. But remember: always remember to put value first.
