How can you market your business on LinkedIn?

With more than 460 million members, LinkedIn represents a significant marketing opportunity for businesses looking to target professionals. From building business profile, through to attracting an audience and creating key strategic partnerships, there is a lot that any business can do to use LinkedIn as an effective marketing tool.

Start with your marketing goals

As with any marketing initiative, success will depend on well defined goals. Start by identifying the audience you’re aiming at – for example, HR professionals who would be in a position to make a decision about buying your HR software for their business. Then establish your key goals, such as raising brand awareness and generating x number of leads from those HR professionals.

You’ll need a company page…

A company page is a free tool that you can use to provide information about your business, deliver content and direct people to essential links. There are two key factors for a successful company page: ensuring that it is kept up to date and filling it with plenty of relevant information.

But it’s not just about the business…

One of the first things that most people do with a company page on LinkedIn is to view the personal pages of those connected to the business. So, you and your staff, will form the links in the chain that could lead to a key new business relationship, attracting the best talent or being a great investment prospect. The individual profiles associated with the business need to be accurate, complete, up to date and distinctive.

Search optimisation applies here too

Many businesses forget that LinkedIn pages are easily optimised for search. Incorporating organic keywords – i.e. those that a potential customer might naturally use to search for your product or company – is a simple way to optimise a business page. Add in links to your business website and share relevant content to your page as often as possible. Updates from your company page will also appear on your public page and get indexed by Google, pushing your company page up the search results.

Make it a priority to create content

The more interesting and shareable content you create, the better brand awareness you can build. Content could be thought leadership, focused on problem solving for your customers or tackling topics that embody the vision of your business. Promote and share your own content, as well as the content of others on LinkedIn to build a base of followers for your company page. And don’t forget to include visual content, such as photos, video or a presentation slide – posts with visuals generate six times the amount of engagement as text posts.

Promoting content and ads

• Sponsored content – target your content specifically at the news feeds of the professionals that you want to reach to build profile and generate followers and leads.
• LinkedIn ads – there are two ways to advertise your business on LinkedIn: self-service ads and managed campaigns. The right choice will depend on your size and the extensiveness of your marketing campaign.

Don’t forget to track performance of your page and/or ads via sources like LinkedIn Company Page analytics and LinkedIn Campaign Manager.

At Iconic we understand how to help businesses use social platforms as effective marketing tools – contact us to find out how we could support you with your Social Media marketing.