09 Jan 5 Ways to Utilize LinkedIn in Your Marketing Strategy

Twitter is out and LinkedIn is in for B2B marketers. Simply joining LinkedIn and filling in the required fields is not enough to get your brand to utilize the platform. The right tactics on LinkedIn can turn this platform into a customer converter.

Your LinkedIn business page is an accessory of your website. Your business page is designed to drive traffic directly to your website and give your company credibility as an expert within your industry. Unlike Facebook pages, LinkedIn business pages do not allow interaction with other business pages or followers. In order to share content or follow people you must be logged in with a personal profile.

LinkedIn originally intended to be a space for business professionals to interact with like-minded businesses, look for job opportunities and vice versa, help businesses hire professionals with its resume-like format. Now LinkedIn has developed into much more and in order to fully utilize the platform, you must be strategic with your tactics.

Employees as Brand Advocates

Encouraging employees to connect their profiles to the company page will create social verification of a business and will help increase your followers. Employees can easily become brand advocates by sharing, liking and commenting on content so that your business’s content can become noticed within other networks. Your employees are your best asset and resource when it comes to creating an initial community.

Take Advantage of Content

As a business page on LinkedIn, you cannot interact with other businesses and people. Therefore, ensure any content on your page is extremely engaging. In order to grab the attention of viewers, post regularly with: status updates; pictures; product and service features; articles; and blogs. Take advantage of blog links by keeping the content valuable to your target market (you want clicks directly to your website). Once you build a rapport around your business on LinkedIn and your connections increase, you will able to interact via your content posts.

Join or Create Groups

Due to limited engagement on LinkedIn, it’s essential that you come up with alternate ways to get your content noticed in your industry. One great way to do this is to join groups on your personal LinkedIn profile to promote your business and service offering. There are currently 1.6 million groups on LinkedIn, which means that there are a number of professionals that engage with this tactic and groups with your specific target audience.

Once you join a group, sending messages to members of a group is a great way to engage with your target market and get your business noticed. If this tactic is not working for you than have initiative within your industry and create your own group. Groups are a great place for your ideal customer/client and will help build your business’ online credibility.

Showcase Pages

For medium to large companies, using showcase pages is an amazing opportunity for introducing new products and services. Showcase pages act as extensions of your company page and are made individually to direct a specific group of people geographically and demographically. Specific content can be shared on showcase pages that should be tailored toward the specific product or service and for the market that would be engaged by it. For small business that may not offer a wide variety of products or have large product launches, showcase pages may not be necessary;however, the option is available.

Use Paid Advertising

If you have allocated money towards a LinkedIn budget for paid advertising, then this is a great way to get noticed as a business page on LinkedIn and reach millions of people within your industry. Whether your goal is to accumulate leads, increase brand awareness or get direct customers, ads can help to target directly to the demographic that you are looking to reach. It can be difficult to engage with business and followers through a LinkedIn business page, so boosting your content is a great way to expand your reach and hopefully your engagement. If boosting posts does not fit into your LinkedIn strategy, delivering personalized inbox messages may fit better. LinkedIn offers sponsored InMail that helps to drive conversations within a personalized message to create direct awareness of your brand.

Does your small business need help integrating LinkedIn into your marketing plan? Contact us today.