As many of us know, social media is increasingly becoming a large part of our daily lifestyles, and has in turn become a fundamental marketing tool for small and large businesses alike. Social Media Marketing (SMM) is a strategic way for your business to engage with prospects and customers online to grow your marketing network. Many corporates and professionals have joined LinkedIn as a way to maintain their professional business status, while simultaneously keeping in contact with important connections and influencers. With over 600 million registered professionals, LinkedIn is recognized as the largest resource of B2B marketers to tap into. In this post, we discuss several ways your business can utilise LinkedIn as a marketing tool.
1. Optimise your LinkedIn Profile
This may seem like the most obvious, straightforward step, but it can be easily overlooked when your focus is on more advanced marketing tactics. Just like elementary school provides you with the building blocks for a successful schooling and business career, your LinkedIn account is the starting point of all your LinkedIn marketing efforts.
Whether you are choosing to generate a business page or personal account, it is crucial that you make specific profile improvements that will increase your chances of getting noticed by the people who count. For example, ensuring you have a profile picture gives you up to 21 times more profile views. Additionally, you can include relevant skills, company values and business bios that clearly define your brand identity.
2. Connect with your Connections
Interact with your prospects as much as possible. If you want to reap the full potential of a LinkedIn account, grow your engagements and increase your exposure, you need to put in the effort to connect with prospective customers. Encourage employees and co-workers to create LinkedIn profiles, follow industry influencers and engage with appropriate content and target audiences.
Business professionals and potential clients use LinkedIn as a business resource, so genuinely take the time and effort to develop a bold, interesting profile with useful and relevant content. Spend time engaging with industry-specific profiles, images and articles. This leads us to our third point;
3. Publish Content that Adds Value
Marketing on LinkedIn is less about generating sales and promotional content, and more about creating content that interests your users, and adds value to their lives. Use LinkedIn to create, share and publish industry-related content that serves a purpose to your users. Whether it is to educate, inform and guide your users, or even simply to inspire and entertain your audience. Providing your audience with content they are genuinely interested in improves your level of engagement. When individuals engage with your graphics, articles and posts, there is a likely chance that these engagements will be seen by other potential connections, further increasing your reach.
4. Run Ads using the Matched Audience feature
Another effective LinkedIn marketing strategy is to target your most relevant users through paid adverts on the platform. The Matched Audience feature allows you to retarget individuals who have previously visited your profile and company website.
Since these users have already experienced your brand, there is an increased chance you will convert them successfully the second time around. Retargeting provides prospective clients with a gentle reminder of your existence and can gradually influence them to reconsider your service offerings.
5. Feed Your Efforts with Analytics Data
Do your research. It is important to have an in-depth understanding of not only your target audience, but the platform you are using to reach that audience. If you do not gain the necessary insight into your industry within LinkedIn, you will end up aimlessly posting content that receives minimal views and engagements. The good ol’ LinkedIn Analytics data provides you with a comprehensive awareness of how your posts and your profile are preforming. Make a point of checking your performance data regularly, and adjust and improve your marketing campaigns accordingly.
We hope these few simple steps assist you in building and maintaining a strong LinkedIn profile, which will in turn contribute positively to your social media marketing strategy. If you feel that the concept of social media marketing goes beyond your personal capacity, The Web Shack is more than happy to give you a helping hand. For more information on social media management and marketing, take a look at our packages.
