How to Use LinkedIn effectively as a Business Owner?

LinkedIn is the world’s largest and most prominent professional networking platform. It is an extremely influential social media network with millions of members and many potential contacts. You will find professionals using this site for keeping in touch with business associates, customers, and co-workers.

In addition to the multiple benefits that LinkedIn offers, it can do a lot more too. It boosts your profile, builds awareness of your brand, and also helps you in recruiting the right people. If you are running a business then LinkedIn can be an asset for building relationships with like-minded professionals, staying up to data and uncovering new leads.

LinkedIn has turned into a sales and marketing platform coupled with an excellent hiring tool that it is. If you want to make sure that your business realizes its maximum potential then it is time for you to join in. This post is an effort to guide you on using LinkedIn effectively and your business.

What is LinkedIn Marketing?

To begin with, LinkedIn is not just a tool for professionals who are seeking jobs. Yes, millions of business professionals use LinkedIn each day to grow their networks, but it can also be used for growing a business. The tool exposes you and your business to millions of connections that can be used to build relationships with people and other companies for boosting the brand.

At the very centre, LinkedIn works as a professional social network. It is a place that has been designed for professional connecting, career development, industry discussions, and many other business-related activities. Many customers, employees and even partners can be found on LinkedIn.

Without an inch of second thoughts, you can use LinkedIn for building your connections and other networking opportunities. It provides an excellent ability to build and promote your brand.

Importance of a LinkedIn Marketing Strategy

Let’s make this clear from the beginning. LinkedIn is not so much about marketing or selling your business as compared to other social media platforms. Things such as promoting your business extensively, spamming and hard selling can be highly frowned upon. For this reason, designing and implementing a marketing strategy is important for LinkedIn.

The network consists of an entirely different audience and the LinkedIn marketing requires a different approach for getting the results that you want. That said, the business marketing efforts done while being confined in the dos and don’ts of LinkedIn do bear excellent results.

Surveyed B2B marketers also say that LinkedIn is responsible for most of the social media leads. When used properly, LinkedIn is an effective marketing tool that takes your business to the next level. It is necessary to keep in mind that a sales pitch and aggressive advertising do not work well on LinkedIn. There must be a specific plan for LinkedIn for giving you the consumer reach and results that you want while appealing to your connections and other businesses.

Tips to Use LinkedIn Effectively for Your Business

1. Complete Your Company and Personal Profile

Just because your business is small, it does not mean that it does not need a profile page on LinkedIn. The company profiles on LinkedIn are referred to as Company Pages and the purpose of creating them is to get them to rank higher in search results.

Hence, having a LinkedIn profile that lists basic information about your business is extremely useful. As a bonus, LinkedIn offers data on Company Pages including demographic information about your followers and metrics on all updates that you post. This helps in understanding your customers a lot better.

Other than this, there is also great value in creating a personal profile as well. You can show prospective customers that there are qualified professionals behind the profile while giving them more reasons to think of you as an expert in your field.

Make sure that you create an inspiring headline, upload a professional picture, and show your company’s ethos with a strong and well-articulated biography. You can also add a Slideshare presentation, some content, videos, and infographics if you want. It can be a great idea to include the keywords related to your business on both the company page and personal profile.

2. Connect More With Your Prospective Customers

LinkedIn’s target is unparalleled when it comes to digital advertising. Businesses can focus on the specific industry type, company size, and job role that they know would purchase their products and services.

LinkedIn is a remarkable platform for networking with people and professional organizations within your industry. It is also a good method to stay updated with the latest developments while sharing information with others in your field.

You can seriously invite anyone you want to connect with, but they should have their own LinkedIn account for using the platform. LinkedIn saves connections that you make in a consolidated list called My Network.

Each time you make a new connection, you can gain easy access to a person’s profile and their publicly available connections as well. They can become your second-degree connections. This creates a lot more networking opportunities as you can invite them to connect directly with you.

What’s more, you can also introduce two LinkedIn connections who can possibly benefit from one another. You connect the two connections and see how they can benefit from getting in touch with each other.

3. Make Yourself Seen

You know the kind of customers that can make high-quality professional associations for your business. Make sure that you search LinkedIn for people who fit the criteria that you are looking for in a client and then introduce yourself.

You can stay in touch with the people who have expressed their interest in your business by using LinkedIn actively. The idea is to stay on their feed. You can do everyday status updates and weekly or biweekly blog posts for keeping your name in front of the client’s network.

Other than this, you can also send monthly emails that share information about the kinds of problems that your business can solve for your customers. You can also make offers including inviting people to a webinar or offering a whitepaper. The overall result is simple, systematic, and inexpensive for lead generation with all the work done through LinkedIn.

4. Develop Your Email Marketing List

Your business can create a well-crafted letter that expresses your gratitude for being connected on LinkedIn. In this letter, you can also invite your customers to be a part of the email marketing list.

LinkedIn does not let you add more than 50 people at a time when you use this. This can be an excellent method to add people to your email list. Remember to include a direct link to sign up in the email. It is important to have reciprocity in the message.

Communicate the benefits that your customer will receive by signing up for the email list and also offer to look at something of theirs. This is a reasonably non-committal method to attract goodwill.

5. Use Sponsored Updates

By using sponsored updates, businesses pay to promote their posts on someone’s LinkedIn feeds. This is a feature that provides demographics similar to other prominent social media platforms including gender, age, and location. A key differentiation is the ability to customize your company name, job function, skills, schools, and groups.

Users can focus on the interesting industries without compromising on the hassles created by irrelevant companies and their messages. A sponsored update is one of the best ways to promote thought leadership content useful to the target audience with a strong call to action.

Most people have lost all interest in seeing pure advertising anymore and they want something useful for free. When you promote a firm’s content by a LinkedIn Sponsored Update, you can target a niche audience, increase website visitors and also generate sales leads.

6. Post Quality Content

Creating and posting good quality content can be a targeted way to accomplish goals. It teaches others how to solve a problem and do their job better. In addition, it also does a fine job of establishing you as a thought leader in the industry.

All these aspects naturally lead to more business incase you are capable of offering real value. This is simple psychology but it works every time. Posting on LinkedIn is a powerful method that is available today.

When a post starts gaining good momentum, the spotlight is put behind one of the categories that can bring tens of thousands of reads more and more. This is one of the best ways to improve your visibility while also reaching out to readers in a method that would not have been possible on your own website or blog.

7. Give and Get Recommendations and Endorsements

The connections you have on LinkedIn can write recommendations for your profile and also endorse your skills. You can do the same for them in return. Recommendations act as testimonials that do a good job of emphasizing your professional abilities.

Your aim should be to collect a handful of five to ten recommendations by asking people that you have worked with. You can ask them to highlight some attributes or achievements that have impressed them as opposed to making general comments.

Remember that endorsements are simple notifications confirming that you have a specific skill. These endorsements might lack the impact of custom recommendations but if a connection endorses you for your leadership skills, it can also help you stand out from the crowd.

8. Join Industry Groups

All LinkedIn members can either set up or join groups for discussing ideas and sharing industry news. This is one of the best ways to develop your professional network.

You can also consider using the search bar at the top of your profile if you are looking for interesting groups to join. Moreover, you can also find the new groups through the ones that you have already joined.

After you become a group member successfully, you can easily join conversations, ask more questions, and send messages to other members. LinkedIn groups are a valuable source of information, ideas, and support. If you share more knowledge with the people of your group, their response will be kinder.

Conclusion

In case you have not been using LinkedIn actively for business development then you are missing out on a lot. No matter which industry may be based in, you can find many prospective clients on LinkedIn.

More than anything, remember that social media is mostly about communicating with real people and forming real connections. Your goal is to not just sign up for LinkedIn because everyone else doing the same.

Your goal is to enable your business to reach its real potential and LinkedIn is an excellent tool to do the same. Make the most out of LinkedIn for establishing your credibility, building relationships, and generating more sales leads.

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