LinkedIn is one of the top social networks today, it has over 660 million users globally.
Now it’s up to you, how you utilize it for improving your brand awareness, building your network, boost leads and conversions, and many more.
So, here is a guide on how you can fully utilize LinkedIn and learn how to grow your business.
What is LinkedIn marketing?
It’s the process of using LinkedIn to make connections, brand awareness, generate leads and conversions, drive traffic to your website, and many more.
Using LinkedIn to market your business gives you access to useful features related to analytics, connections, and brand building, just to name a few.
How to use LinkedIn & Some LinkedIn Marketing Strategies
1. Customize your public profile URL
You need to make your profile look more professional, easy to share, and you can do all these things by customizing your public profile URL.
Instead of having a URL with confusing numbers and the end, make a custom URL that looks good and more professional.
2. Add a LinkedIn background photo
In 2014, LinkedIn also started giving the option for a background photo. Having a background photo gives your profile a personality of your own. Just remember that LinkedIn is a professional social network so upload a photo according to that.
Recommended resolution for a background pic in LinkedIn is 1584 x 396 pixels, which must be under 8 MB, and should have JPG, PNG, and GIF format.
3. Add a ProFinder Badge to your profile
ProFinder Badge is used to find freelancers in LinkedIn ProFinder. This service matches contractors with project managers who are seeking help.
Freelancers can put their ProFinder Badge on their profiles to show clients their skills, expertise, and recommendations.
LinkedIn offers 2 themes for the badge.
4. Add Blog and Website links on your LinkedIn profile
You can add links to your website or your blogs on your profile, so when people visit your profile they can check out your website or blog. This feature can be used to draw greater attention to specific areas of your page to drive traffic elsewhere.
5. Search engine optimize your LinkedIn profile
SEO isn’t limited to blogging. You can also use SEO to optimize your profile so that when someone searches for a service that is related to you, your name is the first one that shows to them.
Optimizing your profile makes your profile easily discoverable.
6. Use saved searches and search alerts in the Recruiter
If you are marketing job opportunities on LinkedIn, you can use LinkedIn Recruiter and use Saved Searches to save your search criteria. This is a very helpful tool.
With this feature you can save your time on searching, LinkedIn will automatically alert you if any new candidate meets your requirements.
7. Take advantage of LinkedIn Endorsements
With this feature, you can recognize the skills of the people you work with. You can promote and endorse the skills of the people you work closest with to help them refer for work.
You can show your support and can make their profile look more impressive.
8. Check your network updates
Network Updates in LinkedIn are similar to Facebook’s News Feed. By checking this feed periodically you can learn what your connections, customers, and others are up to and sharing. You can share your details as well like details about your products and services.
You may sort your feed by “Top Updates” or “Recent Updates” as per your preferences.
9. Be identifiable
People who visit your LinkedIn profile should recognize it as soon as they look at it. And best way to do that is by making your profile easily identifiable and on-brand with your other marketing content is by ensuring your profile’s name, headline, and other simple identifiers are easily viewable to any visitor.
10. Join LinkedIn groups
Joining a LinkedIn group is a great way to make connections with people who are interested in your industry. Groups act as a hub for you to grow your connections and overall grow your business, you can establish yourself as an expert in the field, and can boost brand awareness.
You can view the complete profile of other people who are in a group with you and you can send up to 15 free 1:1 messages per month without having any connection with your fellow group members.
11. Create your own LinkedIn group
You can create a group of your own. It’ll let you establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry, generate new marketing content ideas, promote brand awareness, and generate new leads.
12. Leverage @mentions in your status updates
If you want other LinkedIn users or companies to see your status updates then you can use tag – or @mention that user or companies in your status just like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
All you have to do is include user’s/company name after @. And the user/company will be alerted that you have mentioned them in your update.
This is a great way to get engagement and interaction on your content and improves your brand awareness as well.
13. Check out LinkedIn’s content marketing score & trending content resources
Your Content Marketing score tells your impact on LinkedIn by measuring overall audience engagement on your content.
Trending Content tells you which content you are posting and with what specific users is it resonating with, which allows you to optimize your content for greater impact.
With a Content Marketing score and Trending Content resources, you can learn how impactful your organic and paid LinkedIn marketing content is.
14. Experiment with LinkedIn sponsored content and Native ads
One of the biggest benefits of LinkedIn ads is targeting options, you can show your ads to the targeted audience. You can use LinkedIn marketing as a complement to the organic growth of your company.
LinkedIn’s PPC ads let you target specific industries, job titles, company size, to name a few. You know who is your target audience is, you can target them with vast options available on LinkedIn.
15. Analyze your LinkedIn marketing performance
In the end, you need to analyze all your efforts so that you can make the necessary adjustments for your success on the platform.
LinkedIn gives you in-depth page analytics as well as reporting tools for business with which you can evaluate overall performance. There are specific data about how effective your status updates, content, and reach are.
And how well your page’s engagement is, you can know all this by LinkedIn’s Page analytics.
