What is LinkedIn Marketing?

LinkedIn Marketing is a great way to reach the target audience and one of the best places to meet professionals and connect with them.

It’s the finest platforms for sourcing professionally relevant content with the growing content marketing trend on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network over 500 million users, operating a multi-sided model platform.

LinkedIn was founded in December 2002 and launched in May 2003. It saw a slow start with 6k sign-ups in the first month and it grew to 37k users in six months.

LinkedIn launched LinkedIn Jobs in 2005 to make money. Microsoft acquired LinkedIn in 2016.

LinkedIn was created with businesses and professionals. It allows you to reach and presence to extend further via your online community.

LinkedIn users are increasing their social interaction while maintaining a professional, business-oriented presence. It’s a hotspot for referrals and resources.

LinkedIn marketing is better toward B2B, while other social channels are ideal for B2C marketing. It allows you to identify key decision makers at companies and make connections purposefully and deliberately.

LinkedIn marketing is the best option for lead generation.

Lead Generation via LinkedIn Advertising –

• Turn your page into a lead generation page
• Make the page presentable and the content readable
• Use relevant and catchy images
• Use a separate header and landing page
• Incorporate engaging content
• Keep the content fresh and unique

# Customer Segments – LinkedIn customers are individual professionals and representatives from companies and agencies.

In other words, LinkedIn’s marketing mission and vision represent the value that the company activities to create for its users. The consumer group consists of recruiters, advertisers and marketers, developers and professionals.

# Value Proposition – LinkedIn’s mission is to connect the world’s professionals to make them productive and successful.

It has the vision to create economic opportunity for every professional in the world. LinkedIn allows its users to manage a professional online identity.

Strategy Tips for LinkedIn Marketing  –

# Set up Your Company Page – A powerful LinkedIn presence starts with the company page. Successful marketers utilize company pages as lead-generation tools.

Effective LinkedIn marketing requires frequent and consistent content updates on the company page and show up in followers’ feeds.

The company page is a first step to set up the position of your organization. It’s a place where you can put details about the nature of your business.

The page set up can lead to a conversion action which can be a click-through to your company website description. You must work on a header image to grab the visitors’ attention.

The first two lines of your company description must be compelling for a lead generation. You should do recent updates in the form of blog posts or link to infographics by keeping in mind that your target audience.

It’s a Powerful Tool for B2B LinkedIn Marketing. It allows you to post updates about your company, job openings, and industry related news and education.

LinkedIn company pages show up in LinkedIn search as well as when people search Google and other search engines. LinkedIn users can join your company page by clicking the follow button.

Your followers can see your page updates, and content on the page in the newsfeeds.

##### Follow and Comment on Company Pages – It’ll show updates in your newsfeed when you follow other companies pages.

It’s a great way to keep on top of what’s happening in your industry. It shows your prospects the latest news about their company.

You can comment on the updates shared on company pages. The owner of the page will be notified when you leave a comment.

##### Ask For Recommendations – It’s a powerful way to add additional credibility to your profile when prospects visit.

When someone writes a recommendation for you through LinkedIn and you approve the recommendation, it’ll show on your profile.

You can also ask for product recommendations if you’ve filled out the products section of your company pages.

LinkedIn Company pages are designed to cater to the requirement of businesses. Business can use company pages to obtain customer recommendations, showcase videos and target their market with little research.

# Create Showcase Pages – LinkedIn Showcase Pages are additional subpages that can show off additional brands or divisions with your company to draw attention.

You can consider adding a LinkedIn Showcase Page for different brands, initiatives or sub-businesses. You can use keywords and select relevant categories.

LinkedIn always indexes the Showcase Pages into their search function. You should select a category accurately that describe the page and be related to what your target audience trying to find.

You can present different products or parts of the business in a new light and share specific updates with audiences with Showcase Pages.

This marketing strategy works best when you want to represent a business unit, brand or company initiative to a specific audience.

This advertising helps in developing a long-term relationship with a specific segment.

You company showcase page must include places to link back to your company, larger header image, above the fold update posts, simple and relatable words and short page name.

LinkedIn marketing strategy works better than any other social media network.

# Build Following – When your company updated similar to Facebook other people and businesses can follow you. Your followers will get updates on career opportunities, new blog posts, and new products.

You can be active by joining groups, comment on posts, send messages, and network to increase your following.

# Publishes Your Content Regularly – You can reflect your brand and company personality. You’ll find more success if you’re providing well-rounded content and talk bit about your company.

If you’re looking to hire employees, it can be a great way to recruit. You’ll see a Share an Update section at the top of your company page.

Here, you can write, link to your online store, share e-commerce product videos or anything else. You must definitely explore LinkedIn publishing platform as your LinkedIn marketing strategy.

In the updates section of your company page analytics, you can collect rich data on click-through-rate (CTR), social actions, impressions, engagement, etc.

You can gain information about the demographics of your followers under the Followers section of your analytics.

# Long-Form Content in LinkedIn Posts – Article marketing is a booming trend and it focuses on the length of articles as well. Now, long-form content works best for your SEO and also enhances user experience.

When you create and publish your own original content on LinkedIn Pulse, you can invite yourself in the competition of building a relevant network.

Long-form content performs well and gathers traffic over time. You can create an extensive social media schedule to reach a wide audience to make long-form posts.

# Call-to-action (CTA) in LinkedIn Posts – Call-to-action is a tool for an effective B2B lead generation. LinkedIn marketing is a social media marketing platform try to include calls-to-action in your posts wherever logical and possible.

It’s the best place to add call-to-action in your blogs. There is no hard and fast rule on the type of CTA. However, you can include CTA in your posts in the form of:-

• Engage image that conveys what they will get by clicking on it.
• URL to your customized landing page.

# Grow Your Network Connections – The LinkedIn purpose is networking. Many LinkedIn marketing articles will suggest only to network with the right people.

But you can keep a healthy connection with all your contacts. You can actively engage with certain people or companies by using LinkedIn’s advanced search feature.

If you sign up for a Premium LinkedIn account, you’ll get access to some powerful networking features, such as response guaranteed InMail, expanded profiles and can see who viewed your profile.

It’s an incredible way to get more eyeballs on your brand and generate more leads. You can figure out the best possible customers or target demographic.

LinkedIn is a place with lots of relevant opportunities for professionals. You may have quality connections for the following reasons:-

• It’s powerful to identify other potential customers and getting an introduction from your existing contact. You can see who they are connected to when you connect to someone.
• It makes it easier for them to find you when others connect with people that you are connected.
• You can see the changes your connections make to their profile and other content and updates. It’s easier to keep up to date on what’s happening with your current and potential customers.
• Your connections also can see the changes you make to your profile and updates. It helps to keep your business top of mind with your network.

# Leverage Groups and Communities – LinkedIn for business comes with a number of beneficial features. Your primary aim should be to participate in a group related to your niche.

You should select highly active, medium-size and relevant groups. You can narrow down your search in accordance with factors like category, relationship level, and language, etc.

There are over 2 million groups on LinkedIn that cover a variety of topics. LinkedIn allows you to join 100 of them, so there is enough ground for you to cover.

LinkedIn groups are a great way to casually network with prospects and even partners. You can share knowledge and interact with others in your industry.

You might find out that your product/service has a solution that will address one of their needs.

Groups will contribute to your business by boosting the traffic of your company and will offer better visibility to your business. You can share your ideas with them to get back related information in return.

# LinkedIn Pulse – LinkedIn Pulse is a great place to publish original and engaging pieces of content. It can position your company as a thought leader, drive new traffic to your website and generate more sales.

It’s an important part of your content strategy. It’s the best place for publishing and promoting your articles or blogs. It’s an effective way to drive traffic to your website and boost brand awareness.

• Profile Photo – It’s one of the most important pieces of the page. It should be a headshot of you that came from a professional camera. The profiles with a professional headshot get 21x more views.
• Profile Summary – This information will appear at the top of your LinkedIn profile and it includes your current and previous positions, education, and the current city.
• Background Summary – It gives you a chance to provide context for your previous work, jobs, and contributors. Here, anyone can share a professional summary of their career.

# Share Knowledge with SlideShare – LinkedIn marketing has a viable solution in the form of SlideShare. SlideShare provides another way to share knowledge on LinkedIn and acquire customers in the process.

Here, users have shared over 20 million pieces of content and most of the visitors find the content from targeted search.

You can get chances of getting noticed you. You can create your company’s page on SlideShare and link it to your LinkedIn company page.

Whenever you create a new presentation on SlideShare, it’ll automatically appear as an update on your LinkedIn Page.

• Get Free Branding – SlideShare is a great way to get your own brand free mentions if you produce great content.

# Target Your Customer with LinkedIn Ads – LinkedIn offers three types of ads:

Sponsored Content (appear in the LinkedIn feed directly),

Sponsored InMail (deliver personalized content via LinkedIn Messenger), and

Text Ads/CPM/CPC (appear on the side in LinkedIn).

LinkedIn released a matched audience feature in which you can better target your ads on this platform.

You can upload a CSV with the names of companies to reach, upload a list of customers or people connected to and retarget users existing visitors of your website.

Each ads format serves a different purpose and they appear in front of your potential customers in a variety of ways.

##### Sponsored Content – These ads appear as posts natively in user feeds. These posts will say Promoted or Sponsored in the upper left-hand corner. These ads can move the needle for businesses.

##### Sponsored InMail – These ads allow you to deliver messages and graphics directly to the InMail accounts of your potential customers. You can run sponsored InMail campaign to target prospective customers.

##### Text Ads – These ads appear in a bar at the top of all LinkedIn pages. It’s a great way to drive traffic to specific landing pages for your business.

You should include your business name to run effective text ads. It’s great brand recognition for your company even if someone doesn’t click on your ad. It allows 25 characters for a headline and 75 characters for a description.

# Generate Leads with LinkedIn Sales Navigator – It’s a tool to improve and encourage customer relationships.

In LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you can use the lead builder tool to source prospects and convert them into customers.

You can apply twenty filters to your searches in advance search function. You can search by title, keywords, location, company size, industry, and more.

You can save your findings as a lead list that you can see. LinkedIn Sales Navigator could be a secret weapon to drastically increase your sales.

# Analytics – LinkedIn has a very useful analytics feature with monitoring and tracking progress. In the Page Statistics section, you can see month-by-month page views. It can segment the viewers by demographics.

There are three broad categories:

Visitors,

Updated, and

Followers.

Your visitor demographics will show how many people visited the website over a set period of time and through which medium.

You can also see their jobs function and sort through other visitor demographics including country, region, seniority and company size.

Your updated analytics will show information regarding how many posts and updates are performing on your company page.

You can use this information to assess which types of counter and topics your audience is responding.

LinkedIn Analytics helps you track your follower growth about which posts brought the most followers, did any campaigns cause a spike in your followers base?.

You can see how your audience is responding to your post frequency and content.

# Adds a LinkedIn Plugin to Your Website – You can generate a Follow Company button for your website to direct traffic back to your LinkedIn company page in order to increase your following.

Conclusion – LinkedIn is an important social media website that you need to leverage in your marketing strategy. You can effectively market to your potential customer and increase sales by understanding how to use the platform. LinkedIn for business offers tremendous opportunities. It’s high time to start using LinkedIn marketing by implementing proper strategies.