LinkedIn isn’t new, and neither is the idea that every business needs a LinkedIn presence. LinkedIn, the professional social networking platform has been around longer than Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. The majority of its users are on it daily, which provides businesses and brands with a great platform for implementing a social media marketing strategy. 

Most times, the hardest part is getting started, but we’re here to provide you with 7 steps to get your LinkedIn marketing efforts off the ground.

Start with your profile

Have you ever considered the benefits of polishing your LinkedIn profile?

Most people in the professional world have a LinkedIn profile, but it usually is copied and pasted from a resume, or maybe half-done and hasn’t been active for months. Whether you’re a business expert or just getting started, having a prominent LinkedIn profile is a must to help you grow traffic and sales. Here’s why you should improve your LinkedIn profile today:

It has millions of members: With over 500 million members, LinkedIn is the world’s most fabulous professional network ever.

People are researching you: Who are these people? People who know you! People who want to know you! People who matter: Your manager, employees, competitors and clients. LinkedIn provides you with an opportunity to manage whatever they learn about your strengths and your brand. 

LinkedIn shows up at the top of Google searches: When someone googles you, your LinkedIn profile will likely show up on the first-page result. People search for you on all social media networks before meeting you for the first time, or when choosing whether to respond to your email or after reading an article that you were featured in.

The personal branding platform: It lets you stay connected to extensive networks of contacts.

It’s bound with valuable resources: LinkedIn helps you develop your success by offering significant connections and expertise. Need a service provider referral? Need to open doors with partners or clients?  LinkedIn arranges all of these assets at your fingertips.

You don’t know what you are missing on LinkedIn:  While you’re reading this, someone out there might be searching LinkedIn for the services you provide. And you need to make sure your profile is visible to that person.

You’ll remain connected: LinkedIn lets you update your status regularly, thus instantly letting everyone in your connection know where to find you and what’s new in your world.

Now that you’ve set up your LinkedIn profile and determined your success, it’s time to look at various options for marketing on LinkedIn.

Define your goals

The type of content you will publish and the path you use to share it on LinkedIn depends on your ultimate objective. That’s why it’s essential to sketch your goals at the very beginning of your LinkedIn marketing strategy.

Mostly, you may want to target one or more of these goals:

• Building brand awareness
• Generating qualified leads
• Selling your product or service
• Extending the brand reputation

Understand your audience

Understanding your audience is fundamental to any marketing strategy. If you don’t understand your audience well, you won’t even know what strategy or media to choose, or how to treat them. So how exactly do you get to know them?

Let’s take a glance at some of the actionable, efficient ways you can thoroughly understand your audience:

Do your research in advance:  The best way to understand your target audience is by conducting market research. You can gather data using tools like YouGov or Demographics pro. There are also options like researching social networks, creating a quantitative survey or conducting interviews.

Look at your competitors: You can study your competitors and evaluate their brand, their brand voice, the kinds of marketing strategies they use and the messaging they carry out in their advertising.

Create a customer persona: Identify all the personas you are targeting and write a detailed description of each persona. This will help you to understand your target and to know what would appeal to them most.

Share useful content

When marketing your business on LinkedIn, be determined to promote helpful content that adds value, builds your authority,  engages users and develops brand awareness. You can do this by creating LinkedIn-specific posts directly through the platform or by sharing your highest performing blog posts. 

“Writing posts just for LinkedIn is the fastest way to grow your brand and connections on Linkedin,” said Neil Patel.

Sponsor your content

When you know you have a great post that speaks to your audience, use sponsored posts to get even more engagement on it. This type of advertising is similar to Google Ads that you see at the top of a search result or Facebook ads that appear in the middle of a feed. They look like regular updates or posts, but you pay to get them in front of more users.

Pro Tip: When determining the content to sponsor, start with what’s already successful and popular, then narrow down your options depending on your goals.

Advertise to targeted customers

With LinkedIn, you’re targeting a group of quality audiences in a professional context. This is very similar to sponsored posts. LinkedIn’s advertising allows you to extend your reach beyond your followers and initial network. This option is more useful when you’re looking to create leads directly. There are a variety of advertising options as well, including Sponsored Content, Text Ads and Sponsored InMail.

Build your network

Commit to posting ideas to your newsfeed with helpful, engaging, and fun content that your network and prospects will love. If you have a productive talk/meeting with anyone interesting, connect with them on LinkedIn. The more supporters you have on your Company Page, the more connections you make and the broader you can reach. Some of the best network-building tips are to:

• Post interesting video content
• Monitor and respond to mentions & replies
• Ask good questions
• Master retweeting & tagging

While you may have a concept of how you want your company to succeed on LinkedIn, it often takes time to develop your marketing strategy.

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