How Can you Use LinkedIn to Market your Business?

Have you ever considered that LinkedIn might be the perfect marketing platform for your business? Now, with over 500 million users worldwide, LinkedIn is a great space to connect with professionals locally and internationally. With a LinkedIn marketing campaign, you will not only have the opportunity to increase brand awareness, but you’ll form connections with professionals in your industry, learn from innovators, and join conversations about relevant topics of today. Needless to say, LinkedIn has a lot to offer you. Here’s how you can effectively market your business on LinkedIn.

Personal profiles matter

Before we start talking about your LinkedIn company page, we need to spend some time on the personal profiles of you and your employees. How many times have you “cyber stalked” someone in an attempt to learn more about him or her? LinkedIn members will undoubtedly search your name to find out more about you and your business and when they do, you need to have your best foot forward. You want your personal profile to be memorable and set you apart from your competition. Start by completing it. Your profile should show 100% completion, but that doesn’t mean you can set it up and forget about it. Rework your profile over time. Update your skills and achievements frequently to reflect your growth. Your profile photo should be of good quality. The picture should only present you and it should be both professional and personable. Your profile should list at least five skills with the most relevant skills for your industry listed first. Adding your location can help recruiters in your area know you’re around. LinkedIn claims that more than 30% of recruiters use advanced search based on location. Finally, it is important to summarize your experiences and goals. This is your stage to briefly but creatively tell your story. Why should your audience trust you? What sets you and business apart from your competition? If you use at least 40 words and include keywords and phrases, your profile will be more likely to appear in search. Share these guidelines with your employees as their LinkedIn presence can help improve your reach tremendously.

Get your page up and running

A LinkedIn page is like a profile page for a business. Your LinkedIn page will be a space for business professionals to learn about your brand’s mission, products and services as well as engage in conversation with you and your employees about innovative ideas, trending topics, and current events. Setting up a page is free for all LinkedIn members. While the LinkedIn page set-up is straightforward, there are a few things you should keep in mind. The company tagline will be your followers’ first impression of your brand. Simplicity is key. Let your audience know what you do in one sentence and save the rest for your company description. When writing your company description, use keywords and phrases as LinkedIn members can search by keyword. Let your company’s personality shine here as you describe how your product or service is the ideal solution to your audience’s problem. Add your company logo and choose a cover image that stylistically aligns with your business’s website. Remember to complete all of the information about your company, such as its location, size, industry and your website URL. Also, consider enhancing your page by using LinkedIn Career Pages or Showcase Pages. The former helps you increase brand awareness while recruiting talented business professionals and the latter allows you to advertise special products and services to niche audiences. Setting up your company page may sound easy, but completing the process lazily will hurt your chances of success.

It’s not all about the product

Your audience on LinkedIn will differ from your audiences on other social media platforms. LinkedIn members are professionals who spend their time and energy on the site in hopes that it will help them professionally. You should publish content not only to market your products and services but also with the aim to advise, inform, and create discussion. Your LinkedIn page is a great space to publish thought leadership. Make a name for your company as an expert on a topic within your industry. LinkedIn suggests posting daily and while this may seem time consuming with everything else you juggle, LinkedIn’s Content Suggestion feature can make the task of daily posting easier. If you have no time to post original content or you just want to mix it up, Content Suggestion allows you to view trending topics and share interesting articles to specific audiences. Have employees comment on articles and get a conversation started.

A picture is worth a thousand words

Every post you create should contain media. Pictures are good, LinkedIn video is 5x better. Share behind the scenes footage that is “raw” or authentic. Overly produced videos and pictures will not give the impression your company is approachable. Gain your audience’s trust by showing them the uniqueness of your company and employees. If you decide to include video, it should only last 1-2 minutes, but it should grab the audience’s attention within the first few seconds. Don’t forget to add subtitles. Your audience will want to hear from the people who make up the company so sharing your employees’ best posts is a great way to give them a voice. Plus your employees’ networks of followers are far more extensive than that of the company so they will become one of your best tools for increasing brand awareness. While you are experimenting with these various types of posts, it will be important to keep track of what bodes well with different audiences. LinkedIn Analytics can help you assess which content followers engage with the most so you can give your audiences more of what they want.

Don’t forget SEO

Best practices for SEO apply to your company page. This was mentioned above, but remember to use keywords throughout the text of your company description. If a potential customer were to search for your products or services online, what phrases or words would he/she use? Links will also be crucial for SEO. Creating links from your business website, blogs, and other marketing platforms will help improve your search ranking. Ask your employees to create personal profiles on LinkedIn and add your company name to their work experience section. This will automatically create a link to your company’s LinkedIn page. Simply sharing content on a regular basis will also increase your search ranking because your content will appear on your public page and therefore it will be indexed by Google.

Utilize LinkedIn targeted updates to create a multilingual campaign

LinkedIn allows you to select specific audiences for specific posts. In order to do this, though, you must have at least 300 followers. With LinkedIn members stretching all over the world, it can be beneficial to create translated content for markets abroad. First, you will draft an update. To optimize the content for your followers in foreign markets you should translate the posts. LinkedIn does not have a feature to do this for you so you will need to hire a translation company. Once your content is localized, choose the “public” option from the update box at the top of your screen. Then you are able to select your targeted audience. You can choose your audience by language, geography, job function, university, company size, seniority level, or industry. So if you have a number of followers who speak a foreign language it is easy to share translated content specifically to them. LinkedIn also allows you to show your page’s name and description in over 20 languages. The translation for this text is provided. Marketing with LinkedIn is becoming increasingly popular as business owners discover the unique opportunities this platform provides. With a LinkedIn page you can start conversations about your industry and brand with talented business professionals all over the world. Get started on LinkedIn today!

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