LinkedIn is an often-overlooked treasure trove of opportunities, ready for a savvy marketer to utilize. Optimizing your approach with best practices in LinkedIn marketing will make this social media haven outshine most of the others you might already be using. Following these LinkedIn marketing secrets will push your brand to the top.
Below are several ways to leverage LinkedIn to your advantage:
1. Set Your Goals
You can establish simple goals at first, like scheduling 10 minutes per day on LinkedIn. Follow people, like posts from connections, message people you are already connected to, and reach out to connections you can offer value to. As you are able to prioritize these activities, you can get more sophisticated with your goals.
2. Learn Everything You Can About Your Audience
If you don’t know who your audience is, you can’t give them what they want. And then they won’t give you what you want (their business). Who are you trying to connect with? Single moms, Millennial, or CEOs? You need to be specific in order to best engage them. Carry out your research, and base your facts on data.
Get clear about your current customers, too, so you can find and make new ones with the same traits. Focus your marketing efforts by knowing your ideal customer’s age, what languages they speak, where they live, how much they spend, what they buy, how much they earn, etc. What are their biggest concerns? How can you best help them?
3. Listen For Mentions of Your Brand
Know what people are saying about your company on LinkedIn. If you do, you can respond, track, and analyze those conversations, you will be missing out on your business’ valuable insights if you don’t. Social selling is a two-step process:
- You need to monitor LinkedIn to capture the mentions of your product, brand, competitors, and relevant keywords.
- Then you should analyze what is mentioned to identify your next course of action.
4. Establish Yourself as an Expert
Be the helpful guru on the other end of the “answers” feature. Post-value-added articles in the directory and have strong e-reports waiting for download on the other end of the call to action links you close them with. The more helpful you are, the more memorable you become – and it’s a lasting kind of memorable. People remember a brand representative who knows what they’re talking about.
Pro Tip: Update your profile picture, Header, and Title to reflect how you are able to solve a primary problem your target market has.
5. Lead Generation
The ideal campaign for lead generation will create leads exclusively to your business. Leads are generated only for your business and you own the leads to follow up within any way you wish. Watch out for providers that resell data as part of their provisions. If the leads sell multiple times, their value to the buyer will diminish.
6. Develop an Integrated Communications Plan
An integrated communications plan is essential to the success of any Business to Business Marketing. Aim to touch each member of your target market a minimum of 5 times by dripping useful and relevant content to the audience to maintain the interest in your product. LinkedIn is a fantastic way for engaging with your audience and has the added bonus of raising awareness of your product.
These best practices in LinkedIn marketing may seem like common sense to a shrewd marketer, but not everyone realizes LinkedIn’s capabilities. You can rise above your competition with this gem of a business network by engaging several of these approaches.