It was only a few years ago that the Wall Street Journal called LinkedIn “the ugly duckling of social media,” but today it’s hard to imagine what the business world would be like without the site, which has become the world’s largest professional network with over 433 million members in hundreds of countries.
Yet, many still continue to view the site primarily as a tool for job-seekers and young professionals to post their resumes, overlooking the valuable services which LinkedIn provides for businesses looking to step up their marketing.
But using LinkedIn as a business is a different experience with different goals and best-practices from using it as an independent professional. Getting the hang of LinkedIn to not only make use of it, but to get the most out of it, can be a challenging task for the uninitiated, and continues to be so even for experienced users as the site keeps growing and developing in new ways.
To help you get the most out of LinkedIn when leveraging it as part of your own business’s internet marketing strategy, here are some tips to guide you along.
Optimize Your LinkedIn Presence
If you’re here reading this, you almost certainly know the importance of search engine optimization for your business’s website and have taken steps to implement the industry’s current best practices on your site. But you should also realize that SEO is just as important across the rest of your organization’s online presence as it is on your company website. This, of course, includes your LinkedIn page.
LinkedIn has grown to me one of the primary routes that professionals from within the business community will use to research your company, so it’s important that the branding you do on your LinkedIn is able to actually reach the audiences searching for the services you provide.
Those same keywords that you use on your site to attract potential clients should be included throughout the copy on your business profile to attract potential business partners and connections. Your page should also have links to your website and other social media accounts to drive traffic from LinkedIn to your main site, and including your location for local SEO helps as well. These basic considerations are good first steps to bringing you more viewers interested in the services you provide.
Form Media Connections
Surveys have shown that upwards of 94% of journalists and editors use LinkedIn and more than half prefer it as their primary professional networking tool. This presents a lot of opportunities for your business.
We all know that media exposure is a powerful tool in advancing the market presence of your business. However, hiring a PR company to run media campaigns for you is a time-consuming and expensive venture that doesn’t always produce the results you want. Likewise, drafting and sending out unsolicited press releases yourself can also seem like an exercise in futility as your releases receive just as little attention as they did when simply posted to your website.
What you need is a network full of media connections.
LinkedIn provides the perfect avenue for connecting with media professionals in your industry. Professionals in the journalism industry live on information, and they’re always looking for more contacts to broaden their pool of potential resources. A successful reporter is a well-connected reporter, and if you can expand their collection of experts, making the connection should be a simple matter.
With some time and effort, you can soon compile an extensive network of editors and reporters. From there, you can build actual relationships with them, and at any given time you already have a host of media personnel whom you can reach out to with your press releases. Share your expertise with them enough, and they may even start reaching out to you for interviews and mentioning you elsewhere, giving your business valuable exposure without a dollar spent.
Consider LinkedIn’s Paid Promotions
Sometimes though, whether to get you started or to take you to the next level, you need a boost, something that’ll amplify your marketing game and get you in front of more sets of eyes. For such situations, LinkedIn provides the option of paid promotions. These advertisements come with flexible terms and payment plans, letting you control how much you invest in this advertising method, and are an indispensable tool for getting more traction in LinkedIn’s business community.
The beauty in LinkedIn’s paid promotions is the degree of control you get over your methods and targeting. You can create ads that target either very broad demographics, or ones which are shown to very specific profiles. You can market to users within a particular industry, within a particular company or company of a specific size, with a particular job title or function and with a chosen degree of seniority, in a particular region, or any combination of these.
Once you’ve chosen which users to target, you get a range of options for your ad, including sponsored content, text ads, and image ads. Payment is flexible too, with both pay-per-click or pay-per-impression options available, and you can take your ad down at any time with no long-term commitment.
A key to success with these ads is variance. LinkedIn makes it easy to alter your ads at any time, and you should take full advantage of this do some experimentation. Periodically tinkering with different targeting options, imagery, ad copy, and bids will help you figure out what works and what doesn’t. Doing so will help you get the most bang for your buck, as even minor revisions to the ads can result in big changes in clicks and conversions.
These are only a handful of the many tactics you can use to incorporate LinkedIn into your overall internet marketing strategy. With some time, research, and proper planning, you can build your business’s LinkedIn profile into a secondary site to advertise your business and complement your company website, as well as a network of business partners and media connections with whom you can build positive relationships.
If you’re interested in learning more about how to use LinkedIn for your business and get the most out of your internet marketing strategy, Frontier Marketing LLC has the expertise you need. Simply give us a call at (847) 254-0837 and we’ll help you start getting you the dynamic online presence your business needs and deserves.