LinkedIn: What, Why and How

What is LinkedIn Marketing?

The days of closed economies are long gone. With the world economy opening up and businesses continuously crossing borders to expand themselves, business-oriented online service platforms like LinkedIn have played a pivotal role in connecting people across different geographies. To sustain themselves in the current competitive market, businesses are frequently on the lookout to find more opportunities to market their products to win orders.

In this current scenario, social media marketing has become a vital aspect of any business's marketing strategy. For instance, many independent entrepreneurs and small local companies try to reach out to maximum potential customers using various social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. You will find that these social media websites allow you to create your business pages and private groups to market your products to your targeted customers and provide after-sales support. These platforms also provide you with the opportunity for knowledge sharing to share your technical expertise and information about products and services and win customers by proving your products' superiority. This article will focus our attention on how you can use LinkedIn to promote your business.

LinkedIn has gained immense popularity among professionals since its launch in 2003. It started as a platform where professionals could connect with their colleagues and other acquaintances in their professional network. It was seen as a platform where a professional could showcase their job experience, what they have achieved in their career, their interests, and the kind of work they want to do. Even now, professionals use their LinkedIn profiles to do these things and showcase their credentials to prospective recruiters.

However, LinkedIn has grown a long way since its inception. It is now considered for social media marketing as well. The sheer size of LinkedIn users has become an attraction for businesses of all sizes. All big and small companies now maintain their professional LinkedIn pages and share content regularly to connect with their various stakeholders such as employees, customers, etc. These contents shared by companies cover multiple aspects:

  • Marketing content such as information on products and services
  • Educational content such as best practices to follow and other guidelines
  • Information on a company's performance to attract or inform investors
  • Various job openings in the company to tap into a large talent pool

These are just some of the few instances of how businesses use LinkedIn.

Coming back to LinkedIn Marketing, it has become a widely used method to generate business prospects for a company. Since so many businesses and professionals are already on LinkedIn, you need to tap into this vast resource pool and market your business to attract new customers.

Techniques to improve LinkedIn Marketing Plan

How To Use Linkedin For Marketing

First, we will cover some necessary steps you need to take to start marketing your business on the LinkedIn platform:

  • Your profile is what creates an impression on the visitor. So, suppose you're a business or an individual professional. In that case, your first objective should be to create your profile or business page so that it has all the relevant information and showcases your capabilities. An incomplete profile is a deterrent, hence completing your profile and updating it as and when required.
  • Your profile title should be attractive and informative. Your target customer should be able to understand by reading your profile title what you're into.
  • Use digital marketing techniques such as keyword optimization to rank your page higher when prospective customers search for your services or products.
  • LinkedIn provides you the option to add followers to your business page. Use this to invite your targeted customers to follow your page. Invite your employees to follow and share your page so that your reach is increased significantly and there is an organic growth of visitor traffic to your LinkedIn page.
  • Share engaging content on your page and profile and keep interacting with your network to increase your business's visibility and acceptance. Avoid using content that focuses too much on selling your product. Instead, share content that increases the awareness among your targeted customers and creates a marketing pull effect.
  • Use engaging and interactive content. You can use images or videos or conduct live interaction sessions with your follower. Create polls and feedback to increase customer engagement.
  • Use LinkedIn's various paid services to promote meaningful content and highlight them to your target customer base. You can also use LinkedIn's various ad campaign programs to increase your visibility and draw paid traffic to your page.
  • LinkedIn also provides analytics services that give you deep insight into how visitors interact with your content and page. Use these insights to improve your LinkedIn marketing plan and increase visitors.

Now that you have gone through the necessary steps to start marketing your business on LinkedIn or start generating new leads for your company, you can follow these few techniques to improve your LinkedIn marketing plan's effectiveness.

  • Focus on growing your network mainly with prospective customers and connections.
  • Be on a constant lookout to collect your prospects' email ids and grow your email marketing list.
  • Frequently share meaningful and high-quality content so that the prospective customers remember you.
  • Post relevant content and take advantage of LinkedIn's sponsored services to make your marketing content viral.
  • Join relevant groups and take an active part in various discussions
  • Create your group and conduct relevant discussions
  • Aim for a 100% complete profile. Customize your profile URL to make it enjoyable.
  • Use your employees' network to promote your business organically.
  • Avoid any hard-selling tactics and contents
  • Invite your customers to like and share your page. Please encourage them to share the positive experiences they have had with your products and services.

To conclude, LinkedIn Marketing is an essential part of growing your business and taking it to the next level. If used effectively, it can generate business leads that would have otherwise been inaccessible to you.

With over 660 million users worldwide, business-to-business marketers have found this platform the most effective and suitable to their needs than any other social media platform.