These days, LinkedIn is a lot more than just “Facebook for business”. Used in the right way, this social media platform becomes an asset to your business and its ongoing success.
If you’re wondering whether you should be including LinkedIn in your business’s social marketing strategy, there’s a few things you need to work out beforehand.
Firstly, ask yourself: “What are the goals for your business?”, “Is LinkedIn a place that your clients, customers, and competitors tend to occupy?”
If the answer is yes, then incorporating LinkedIn into your social media marketing strategy can have numerous benefits for you and your business. It’s a great platform for building both your company’s profile and your own personal brand.
Why is LinkedIn important for your marketing strategy?
Launched in 2003, LinkedIn has changed massively over the years, and has become a brilliant resource for social listening, building your network of professional connections and creating a digital following for your business.
The statistics speak for themselves:
- Engagement with posts has led to brands seeing a 33% increase in purchase intent generated from LinkedIn ads.
- In 4 out of 5 cases, LinkedIn users are driving business decisions – which means LinkedIn is a great place for B2B marketers to reach the people who are actually making buying decisions.
- Companies who are active on LinkedIn are likely to see 5 times the number of views on their company page compared to a company that isn’t active on LinkedIn. Having a complete, up-to-date LinkedIn page for your business increases engagement and helps people trust your brand.
How to grow a following for your business
So, you’ve come to the conclusion that LinkedIn absolutely must be a part of your business’s social marketing strategy – what now?
Growing a following for your business might sound like a daunting task (and it won’t happen overnight), but by focusing on a few key elements you can make your life much easier. The important thing is to remember to keep active and not lose momentum once you’ve started to build your following.
A few key things to remember when getting started:
- Share your wins
- Encourage engagement
- Showcase your company culture, values and people
- Be authentic
With these points in mind, here are a few examples of how you can successfully include LinkedIn in your social marketing strategy.
1. Don’t hard sell
Being pushy and salesy won’t get you very far on LinkedIn. In fact, by hard selling you run the risk of putting people’s backs up and potentially losing out on future business – the opposite of your goal.
Instead, use it as a place to highlight the added value your business brings, whether that’s through your brand and culture, your commitment to sustainability and inclusivity, and more. LinkedIn isn’t a place for shouting, “Buy, buy, buy” – it’s a place for shouting about what your business brings to the table, why people should take notice, and why you’re proud of it.
2. Encourage people to follow your page
People will often thoroughly check a business’s social media before considering investing money into their goods or services. Therefore, it’s important to make your business look trustworthy and reputable on LinkedIn.
Encouraging customers, clients, or people interested in what your business does to follow your LinkedIn page will help boost your image, and verify the quality of your business to any prospective customer visiting your page for the first time.
3. Post content your audience will be interested in
Making your business page people led and highlighting the people who work for your business is vital for promoting engagement and starting conversations.
You should also focus on posting content your audience will find interesting and want to engage with. News from your industry, updates to your business offering, personal wins for your staff – all this and more will pepper your LinkedIn page with interesting, relevant content.
4. Social listening and social monitoring
Get the most out of LinkedIn by using social listening and social monitoring. Social listening is tracking social media platforms for mentions and conversations related to your brand, your competitors, and any keywords important to your business. You can then analyse these insights and discover new opportunities to act on.
Social monitoring is all about collecting data. It allows you to look back at online mentions relevant to your brand, using metrics such as:
- Brand mentions
- Relevant hashtags
- Competitor mentions
- Industry trends
Social monitoring is especially useful for being reactive on LinkedIn, by quickly responding to any issues that may arise, or trends that are happening. When coupled with social listening – which gives you a far more rounded overview of conversations surrounding your brand and competitors – you can develop a highly refined marketing strategy.
5. Use LinkedIn ads to target your audience directly
A simple way to ensure that your social media marketing actually reaches the people you need it to (i.e. your target audience) is through paid ads.
There are several types of ad to choose from, each with their own advantages, but the common ones are:
- Sponsored Content
- Sponsored Messaging
- Text Ads
- Video Ads
- Single Image Ads
Consider your social marketing strategy carefully to work out which types of LinkedIn ad best suit your business’s goals.
Attaching Lead Gen Forms to LinkedIn ads is a simple way for your business to collect quality leads from users actively engaging with your digital marketing.
6. Keep your marketing message and tone of voice consistent
Often cited as the pioneers of a memorable brand tone of voice, Innocent are a great example fof developing a tone of voice that goes beyond the normal and will stick in people’s minds.
Here’s some great LinkedIn examples that we love:
Use LinkedIn to showcase your personal brand
LinkedIn isn’t just a great asset for your business – it’s also a great place to show off your personal brand too. You can do this through following others, growing your personal network, showcasing your expertise, and engaging with pages. The most important thing is to be authentic from the get-go, and let the number of connections rise naturally.
It can feel daunting setting out on your LinkedIn journey, but by engaging with your network and other pages, you’ll gradually build a compelling profile.
Here’s some key things to bear in mind when building your personal brand on LinkedIn:
- Support your colleagues and other members of your network by engaging with their content.
- Remember to connect with people after networking events and meetings.
- Add articles to your profile about topics relevant to your expertise.
- Utilise your business’s page by sharing their posts with your own comments.
- If you generate a lot of content, you can switch your account to creator mode, which will give you access to lots of content creation tools.
- Social listening and monitoring are also a big part of using LinkedIn for personal branding.
If you need support with LinkedIn, we can help
Whether you need help starting your business’s LinkedIn profile from scratch, or you want to build LinkedIn into a wider marketing strategy, Cognique have the expertise to help you.
