6 Ways to Build Your Local Business with LinkedIn

Local and Social Marketing

When people talk about social media marketing, the focus is usually on the vast number of potential prospects: 2+ billion people on Facebook, 500+ million people on LinkedIn, over 700+ million people on Twitter and Instagram.

That being said, businesses are usually successful because they focus on a particular market, niche, or location. Not on the vast majority. While it’s all well and good to have thousands of connections and millions of people in your network, the most successful business people using LinkedIn do so by creating real relationships with their target markets.

Even if local businesses offer their products and services globally, but they typically will have built their foundations on acquiring regional customers. If you run a local marketing company, it is far easier to meet potential clients when they are in close proximity to you. With the right strategy in place, it can be relatively easy to find leads open to your offers.

For most, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest come to mind when thinking about social media marketing to boost business potential, increase leads and conversions, or generate more traffic. Many business professionals and marketers do not truly understand the potential value to be gained from using LinkedIn as another tool in their marketing arsenal. This is primarily because LinkedIn is often viewed as a business directory filled with professional profiles and bios, rather than as one more social media channel to be used to increase your marketing power.

It is to your benefit to use as many social media marketing options as possible to gain visibility for your online content, as long as you are using each one appropriately. Marketing messages that have success on one social media network may fail on others because the user demographic varies widely from network to network. In most cases, LinkedIn marketing strategies should be tailored to appeal to white collar, professional, middle-aged demographics, and you can actually build your business and get thousands of followers or connections simply by managing your LinkedIn page effectively.

One: Optimize Your Professional Profile

The most important component of your LinkedIn page is your professional profile. In fact, your personal LinkedIn profile should be considered an essential aspect of your social media marketing strategies in general, and not just specific to LinkedIn marketing efforts. Never assume that it's sufficient to simply include your name, company name, email address, and contact number. Basic information is exactly that, basic, and you want your professional profile to be fully fleshed out, with as much information about what you've done, what you know, where you've been professionally, and what you can do as possible.

Your professional profile is the first impression that many people will have of you, and you want it to be outstanding and memorable. A few ways to create a profile that demands attention may include:

Make sure your profile headline isn't your run-of-the-mill descriptive with nothing more than your name and occupation. Use the headline to stand out and let people know what sets you apart from others in your occupation, industry, or field of expertise.

Optimize your profile for search engines. Include keywords in your profile, including long-tail or geographically specific ones, so you can be found not only with generalized searches but also those that are more refined and specific.

Always be detailed and specific when listing your accomplishments, future aspirations, skills, knowledge/education, past experience, and abilities. Try to stay away from generalizations whenever possible and remember, profiles that contain an industry, education, skills and a moderate-length summary are 10 times more likely to be viewed than those without.

Two: Share Geographically Based Content

LinkedIn allows you to share content – both as updates and as long-form Publisher posts. So you might as well share content relevant to your local market.

Updates are just like Tweets or Facebook updates that you share on your networks’ timeline. You can even tag locals in updates so that they are more likely to see your shared content.

You can also write long-form posts using LinkedIn Publisher. Again, by putting in locations as keywords, your post becomes searchable by those specific geographies and may be more visible to local prospects. Of course, you want to share content relevant to the locals you're trying to attract.

Three: Create Imagery that Focuses on Your Target Geography

LinkedIn has added a background feature that allows you to add what is essentially a banner on top of your profile. Create an image that is attractive to the local audience you want to attract. Even people who don't know you may feel a sense of kinship if they recognize the mountain range, Main Street, or Oceanview you put on your profile.

Four: Upload Media Interesting to Your Geographic Target Market

LinkedIn now makes it very easy to upload documents, images and share links to videos and slideshow presentations on your profile. Upload media that your local market will find interesting and engaging. It doesn't only make your profile more attractive, it makes sense to share helpful relevant content to increase the “KLT factor” (know, like and trust) with your target market.

Five: Search and Segment Local Prospects

You can further filter these results by sorting out your first level connections. These are people who have invited you or you have invited to connect. Sort by Geography and then by connection in the new search. You will have to use a 3rd party app like Dux-Soup Chrome Extension (free), Nimble ($15 a month), LinMailPro ($50) or the LinkedIn Sales Navigator membership ($79). Whichever method you choose, once you have tagged your best local connections, you can save and easily find them when you have new local content to share.

Six: Keep in Touch with the Locals

The great thing about first level connections is you can easily send them a message. (Like do you want to meet for coffee!) If you tag these connections (see above), you can also sort them and send them the occasional message. This will help you stay top of mind with them. They might not need you now, but when they do, if you keep in touch with them, they’ll remember you and might even be more likely to call upon you since you are local!

Speaking of Keeping in Touch!

I'll be doing a FREE webinar on this very topic on Friday Nov 17th at 3:00 ET. You can register by CLICKING HERE.

In conclusion

So there you have it! 6 steps and strategies you can use to market your business locally using LinkedIn. When you start to focus on your local markets using LinkedIn, you'll be amazed at just how many people you know, and how many opportunities are out there! I know I am always shocked to realize I know at least one – and sometimes more - gateway people at companies that I want to be working with. Or that the Influencers I want to align with happen to be local. And that I can still do local marketing even if I can't get to town as often as I used to.

By implementing even a few of these strategies you will be able to increase your local visibility exponentially. And all this is for free. With a little bit of time investment, you could substantially increase your bottom line! It's worth a try.

Who is Viveka von Rosen?

Viveka von Rosen founded one of the first LinkedIn training companies, Linked into Business in 2006 and in 2017 cofounded Vengreso, the largest full spectrum digital social selling provider in the world.

Known internationally as the “LinkedIn Expert”, she is author of the best-selling â€œLinkedIn Marketing: An Hour a Day” and “LinkedIn: 101 Ways to Rock Your Personal Brand!”

As a contributing “expert” to LinkedIn’s official Sales and Marketing blogs and their “Sophisticated Marketer’s” Guides, she is often called on to contribute to publications like Fast Company, Forbes, Money, Entrepreneur, The Social Media Examiner, etc.

Viveka takes the LinkedIn experience she has perfected over the past 10+ years and transforms it into engaging and informational training (having provided over 100K+ people) with the tools and strategies they need to succeed on LinkedIn.

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