The Essentials of a LinkedIn Marketing Strategy

LinkedIn can be a valuable social media platform for your business. If you are in the B2B sector, having an effective LinkedIn marketing strategy a must.

Link Up Your Business

Is LinkedIn more than “Connecting the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful”? That’s their slogan and there is a lot to it. It’s a social media platform that has benefited greatly from its acquisition by Microsoft.

When you use your individual account, it’s the new resume, useful for creating a personal, professional brand, and a way to make valuable connections in the B2B space.

Using a LinkedIn company page, it’s another avenue for discovery via search and a way to show credibility, authenticity, and trustworthiness.

But how can you profit from LinkedIn as a small business? Like any platform, it will depend on your firm and your industry. If used appropriately and strategically, there are two general ways a LinkedIn marketing strategy can benefit your company.

They are social selling and thought leadership.

Social Selling

We covered this in detail in an earlier post, but, here’s a quick reminder of the definition of social selling from Hubspot:

Social selling is when salespeople use social media to interact directly with their prospects. Salespeople will provide value by answering prospect questions and offering thoughtful content until the prospect is ready to buy.

You and your sales team use your content or targeted content curation to move prospects through your buying cycle towards a deal.

Participating in group conversations is a good strategy. Ask questions and answer those from other group members. This technique builds your employees and company’s credibility. It also leads us to thought leadership.

Thought Leadership

Thought leadership is where you publish original content and share curated content to demonstrate your company’s competence, expertise, and trustworthiness.

You have to prove your value to a prospect before you ask for an in-person conversation much less a sale. They want to find someone who is an expert and can solve their problem. They want to stop searching and start buying. Your content makes them select you.

Besides publishing great content on your blog, you can publish it on LinkedIn Publisher (“publish a post”) and “share an update” on LinkedIn.

Publisher is an effective way to repurpose content from your blog. Updates could be original or curated. Always include an engaging image and don’t forget to include your link. 😉

When you are publishing on LinkedIn, you are are blogging. So use the same techniques and strategies covered in this earlier post. The home of these long-form articles (Publisher) or updates is your company page.

And by the way, don’t publish crap!

Setting up your LinkedIn Company Page

• fill out your entire profile.
• use appropriate keywords and phrases.
• make sure your logo and banner images are the appropriate size and are compelling.
• have informative information in your company description.
• choose the groups you are a member of and want to promote.
• list the appropriate specialties for your business.
• be sure to list all your locations.

Schedule your Posts

Use LinkedIn Showcase Pages

LinkedIn’s Showcase Pages are an extension of your company page you can use to promote your product lines. Like your company page, LinkedIn members can follow your showcase pages. And you can share status updates relating to your products on them.

Advertise with Sponsored Posts and Inmails

Sponsored Updates are where you pay to promote your Publisher articles on potential client’s feeds. You use LinkedIn Campaign Manager to target the audience that is most likely to become a customer. Being effective with this approach is important because LinkedIn social advertising is some of the most expensive out there. It also has the potential to be the most profitable.

Sponsored updates are native advertising, so they look like an organic post in the feed of the audience you are targeting. You can use them to promote the best evergreen content on your site, upcoming company events, industry conferences you will have a presence at, or to introduce new products. Think soft sell, not a hard sell.

You can also send Sponsored Inmails as a form of email marketing. If you want to succeed, be sure to make them useful not a bastardized form of cold calling.

What will stay essential

Conclusion

Glossary – Definitions for terms

Chain image courtesy of John Pierre courtesy of creative commons license.