Social media has emerged as one of the most important tools for modern-day marketers and small businesses to attract prospects, generate sales, and engage with customers. While the most popular social media marketing platforms remain Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, LinkedIn is an often overlooked, similarly powerful tool to harness.
LinkedIn boasts an impressive 1 billion users from all over the world, which presents a golden opportunity for you to broadcast your products, services, and expertise to a massive, diverse audience. But how can you best take advantage of LinkedIn marketing and grow your business? That’s exactly what we set out to explain in this article.
Table of Contents
What is LinkedIn marketing?
Why is marketing on LinkedIn important?
How to use LinkedIn for your business
Top 5 LinkedIn marketing tips
Conclusion
What is LinkedIn marketing?
LinkedIn marketing involves the use of the LinkedIn social platform to build relationships, generate leads, grow your brand, and create and share content that drives visitors to your website.
This is a high-impact digital marketing strategy because of how successful it is in broadening networks. When you use LinkedIn to market your business, you can access perks such as quality leads, connections, and extended brand reach, among numerous others.
Why is marketing on LinkedIn important?
Unsurprisingly, there are myriad benefits available for those who are able to harness a platform noted for its huge array of business users and professionals. But before we delve into how to make the most of LinkedIn’s tools, let’s first take a look at the advantages this powerful platform offers.
1. It’s an effective way of reaching out to potential customers
LinkedIn can help you target a sea of potential clients through LinkedIn Ads. With LinkedIn Ads, you can precisely target the right people with content that resonates with them. This can increase brand awareness by showing highly relevant ads to people who are more likely to engage with your business.
2. Advertising on LinkedIn is cost-effective
Another benefit of LinkedIn Ads is that it is cost-effective. LinkedIn has a relatively low CPC rate: Expect to pay around USD 2.62 for every click your ad gets. This means that you can get more clicks for your ads using the same advertising budget you would on other platforms.
3. LinkedIn has a high click-to-lead conversion rate
LinkedIn has an average conversion rate of 9.23%. This is way higher than other top platforms, such as Instagram and TikTok, which have conversion rates of 1.08% and 1.1%, respectively. Therefore, if you want to generate leads from social media advertising, LinkedIn should be your go-to option.
4. It helps your business to gain trust
If you have a well-created and optimized personal or company profile on LinkedIn, you have a higher chance of establishing credibility with your target audience. You can showcase your achievements by posting the content to your followers, which creates a feeling of trust and boosts the chances of joining your leads funnel.
How to use LinkedIn for your business
Below, we’ll show you how to set up your account and best use LinkedIn’s features to grow and build your business.
Step 1. Create a LinkedIn Company page
A personal account is required to create and administrate a company page. Depending on how many users you want to help manage your page, you can do so by adding page admins later. Signing up using a work email address is recommended.
After logging in to your account, click on the “For Business” icon. On the pop-up menu, then click on “Create a Company Page.” From here, select the most appropriate option from Company, Showcase Page, and Educational Institution.
Upon choosing your page type, fill out the name of your business, company website, industry, company size, logo, and headline.
Your logo and headline should be designed to make a positive first impression among your followers, so take the time to create one that sticks with your intended audience. Remember that simple can sometimes be more effective than long-winded. For example, Pepsi’s LinkedIn headline is just: “We make soda.”
Step 2. Optimize Your Company Page
After creating the Company Page, the next step is to optimize it. Optimizing your company page grants you the opportunity to employ LinkedIn’s features to your business’s advantage.
This entails writing descriptive headlines and an overview, picking ideal Page topics and hashtags, and following relevant pages.
On your new company page, LinkedIn will request that you fill in all the required fields in the “Additional Information” section. This info will help inform visitors about your business as well as help LinkedIn’s SEO better log your page so that it appears in relevant search results. This can be extremely impactful, with companies that complete their pages receiving at least 30% more views per week.
Things to do to make your page optimized include adding translations, using relevant keywords in your company’s description, hashtags, a branded cover image, a high-quality profile image, and adding a custom call-to-action button such as “Visit our website,” “Learn more here,” or “Sign up now!”
Step 3. Grow your LinkedIn follower base
After setting up your Company Page, it is time to get it out there and in front of the people that matter. Here’s how:
- Ask your employees to add your page to their profiles: Now that you have a Company Page, ask your employees to update their profiles with the relevant link. By adding your company’s name to their experience section, their followers can now easily find your page and follow you.
- Publish regular content: Your LinkedIn Page will serve as your company’s hub and where people go to find business updates. Therefore, posting valuable content regularly is important. This content will appear on both your company’s page and followers’ feeds, and it is recommended to post at least once per day with topics ranging from news, announcements, product iterations, and company achievements.
- Add a LinkedIn plugin to your website: Creating a LinkedIn plugin for your website is another way to attract followers to your LinkedIn Page. You can develop one by going to https://developer.LinkedIn.com/plugins and choosing “Follow Company” from the list of available plugin options. This will generate a javascript code that you can copy and paste on your website. Website users who click on this link will then be able to follow you directly on LinkedIn.
Step 4. Use LinkedIn Analytics to monitor your growth
LinkedIn’s Analytics is a powerful tool that allows you to track and measure engagement on the platform.
In addition to follower growth, you can track profile views, connection requests, and post-engagement metrics. Analyzing these metrics enables the development of strategies to help you improve your content marketing efforts.
Top 5 LinkedIn marketing tips
1. Thought leadership
Posting thought-leadership content on your LinkedIn Company Page builds your reputation as an industry leader, further helping to drive traffic to your website and generate sales. This is because content that shares knowledge, advice, or valuable insights, which should be part of your LinkedIn marketing strategy, will likely be seen by users.
When posting on your personal or Company Page, always remember to be original and consistent, as this will trigger LinkedIn’s algorithm to recommend your content to other LinkedIn users.
2. Create or join a group
Creating a LinkedIn group is a great way to boost your business’s visibility and engagement with your target audience. You can even create different groups for different audiences, which enables you to segment contacts in your marketing list.
Apart from creating groups, joining relevant LinkedIn groups will also help you grow your customer base. LinkedIn groups enable you to build connections with various professionals within your industry, so join as many relevant groups as possible. They will also help you to understand people’s interests, dislikes, and concerns and contribute to discussions directly.
Take time to connect with group members by directly messaging them and inviting them to groups you have created. As your group grows, so does your business’s visibility.
3. Target your customers with LinkedIn Ads
Like Facebook, X, and Instagram, you can also run ads on LinkedIn. The platform allows you to run different ad formats to help market your business to its one billion-plus users. These include sponsored content, sponsored messaging, text ads, and dynamic ads. The effectiveness of these ad types will depend on your business’s needs.
For example, Freshworks was able to lower its cost per lead by 55% using LinkedIn Ads, while Global Villages was able to boost its leads by 1,800% using sponsored content.
4. Include images and videos
Adding multimedia elements can make your LinkedIn profile visually appealing. Although text alone is sufficient to network effectively, videos and images are also an important part of a successful LinkedIn strategy.
This is because visuals can help convey your ideas faster and easier, making them easily consumable. They also perform better, with content that contains videos and images receiving up to 94% more views. In addition, those that feature infographics can receive up to a 12% boost in website traffic.
Take the example of the airline company KLM, which was able to achieve a 33.86% view rate via its LinkedIn video marketing campaign, 26.3% more than the average benchmark. Furthermore, it increased their engagement rates and lowered their costs-per-view.
5. Work with LinkedIn influencers
Influencer marketing is not just limited to TikTok and Instagram. You can also hire LinkedIn influencers with a huge following who can help you to promote your business.
Some companies, such as Hootsuite and Teal, have recently partnered with influencers to market their businesses. Hootsuite’s LinkedIn creator campaign is among one of the most successful, working with creators such as Dude with Sign to earn more than 1.2 million impressions, 5,600 link clicks, and over 18,000 engagements. Teal’s campaign earned them 1.7 million impressions and a 1% average engagement rate across 27 posts, according to the company.
Conclusion
LinkedIn marketing is a social media marketing strategy that you should incorporate into your marketing mix for lead generation and engagement with your audience. We hope that by following the tips in this guide, marketing on LinkedIn should no longer be something viewed as daunting but rather an exciting opportunity for you to further grow your business.
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