LinkedIn – it’s where businesses and professionals go online to schmooze and rub shoulders. It’s where people show off their credentials and jostle for position of Top Dog in their industry. And it’s a crucial element of your social media marketing strategy
Unlike Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, where consumers expect to be marketed at by businesses, LinkedIn is far more sophisticated and nuanced. The power of marketing on LinkedIn is in its ability to grow brand awareness, create professional relationships, generate leads, and foster business partnerships. It is through these avenues that you’ll ultimately find new customers and increase your bottom line.
The platform offers excellent targeted, paid options for your advertising, but it’s very easy to use your LinkedIn account in a way that understatedly yet effectively markets your business without spending a cent.
LinkedIn Marketing for Your Business
Position Your Business as the Expert In Your Field
Content marketing and social media marketing go hand in hand, and LinkedIn is the social media platform to make your content work for you to market yourself and your company as thought leaders and experts in your field.
LinkedIn has a feature which allows you to link your profile with your website. When you upload blog posts to your website they will automatically appear on your LinkedIn profile as well. Now, if you’re following all of our advice here at The Social Savior, you’ll be creating interesting, engaging, educational blog posts already. This is one of the most basic and reliable ways to demonstrate that you know your onions and are a leader in your area.
Get Involved With the LinkedIn Community
LinkedIn Groups are the best way to engage with your professional community. You can keep abreast of contemporary discussions, moods, and opinions in very specific areas that are relevant to you. LinkedIn Answers is a similar space where users are able to pose questions to gather advice from a targeted community of professionals.
Activity in these forums is a fabulous way to casually market your brand on LinkedIn. Not only are you, yet again, establishing yourself as an expert and a leader, but if you get in first and provide best answers, you’re denying your competition the opportunity to take that space from you. Excellent defensive tactics.
Promote Your Events
LinkedIn isn’t just about the virtual world – it’s one of the best ways to encourage networking in the physical world too. If you’re hosting a business event or speaking at one, LinkedIn is bursting at the seams with potential clients, employees, or partners who would love to know about it. You’ve got a captive audience to steer toward your event so that you’re not just presenting to your family and loyal clients.
Use LinkedIn to Market Your Business and Yourself
Grow Your Emailing List
Most, if not all, businesses nowadays have an email newsletter mailing list to update receivers of recent achievements, products, upcoming events, or exclusive specials, just to name a few. For everyone you connect with on LinkedIn you should send a personalized email message to invite them to join your mailing list. Including a direct link to easily allow them to sign up, and to offer to join theirs in exchange, are great ways to increase rates of uptake.
Incorporating these quick and simple activities into the way your use your LinkedIn account may not seems like marketing, but it is. And therein lies the essence of content marketing and the aim of social media marketing on LinkedIn – you don’t want your marketing to feel like marketing.
Adapting the way you use LinkedIn to position yourself as a leader and an expert in your field, and by fostering connections on and offline, you will generate more leads, grow awareness of your brand, and establish business relationships. This, in turn, will lead to an increase in customers, an increase in business, and an increase in profits.