Whether your business is relatively new or has been around for years, marketing is crucial to increasing brand awareness, growing your customer base and achieving your business goals. Digital marketing – specifically social media marketing – is an important component of your overall marketing strategy. While there are a variety of social media platforms to choose from, (each with their own pros and cons, depending on your goals), let’s take a look at LinkedIn and how you can utilize it for business success.

What is LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is a social media platform focused on connecting the world’s professionals. In fact, it’s the largest professional network in the world. People can create pages to highlight their work experience, education, accomplishments and more.

Businesses can have pages as well, enabling them to share information about the company, post job openings, and more. By allowing people as well as companies to post and comment on content, LinkedIn provides a great opportunity to network and join conversations.

Why use LinkedIn for marketing?

LinkedIn supports companies in achieving their marketing and business goals by providing tools to help them connect and engage with professionals in their target audience.

A study shows that in 2017, there were 630 million professionals on LinkedIn and four out of five members drive business decisions. Another study found that LinkedIn is the No. 1 platform for lead generation.

The platform provides ample opportunity for building brand awareness, generating leads, and driving traffic to your website.

linkedin Best Practices

Tell people about your company

First things first: you’ll want to create a company page and fill in the different sections with key information about your business. According to LinkedIn, pages get 30% more weekly views when they have complete information. Use the Overview section to describe what your company’s all about, and make sure to include relevant keywords and phrases.

You can also share details about the company size, industry, location, website address and more. Be sure to also include visual elements like your organization’s logo and a cover image.

Communicate with other members

LinkedIn helps you join the conversation through content, hashtags, mentions and targeting. To start, make sure you’re posting quality content on a regular basis. If you want to get more eyes on your content and more engagement in your comments section, try including an image or video in your post. According to LinkedIn, posts with images typically see twice the comment rate, video gets 5x the engagement on the platform, and Live Video receives 24x more engagement. You can also upload PDF documents and PowerPoint presentations.

 Additionally, remember that social media is meant to be social! If your post mentions another company or person, tag them so they can see and share. Similarly, use your page’s Activity tab to see when people like and comment on your posts or mention you in their own posts, then go interact with them. Use three to five hashtags in your posts to highlight relevant topics and help your content reach a wider audience. You can also target your posts to better reach a specific audience, which you can define by demographics like region, job function, industry, and more.

 Expand your audience

LinkedIn offers some handy tools to help grow your audience, so make sure to make use of them! For example, you can add a “Follow” button on your website to make it easy for visitors to click over to your LinkedIn page.

You can also invite your connections to follow your page. LinkedIn’s page analytics offers a behind-the-scenes look at how your posts are performing as well as the professional traits of your page visitors.

LinkedIn Ads

Now, let’s talk about how to promote your page using ads on LinkedIn. This will help you reach even more people than you normally would by using free resources or strategies alone.  

Sponsored Content

Sponsored content are native ads that appear in viewers’ feeds on desktop and mobile. They’re designed to look similar to normal posts that a user might see in their feed, helping to make the ads not seem so immediately obvious that they’re advertisements. (The ad will, however, include the word “Promoted.”)

Sponsored content can be in the form of single image ads, video ads, or carousel ads, giving you a variety of options for how to most effectively get your message out.

Message Ads

With message ads, you can send direct messages to prospects, encouraging immediate interaction without having to worry about character limits. Since messages are delivered in an uncluttered environment, they may be more effective at driving engagement and responses from readers – LinkedIn says that more than half of prospects open up a message ad. You can also gauge your message ad’s impact using the platform’s demographic reporting. 

Text Ads

Text ads is another way you can reach your target audience, generate leads, and drive traffic to your website. With text ads, you can choose your professional audience, track leads, and create your own ads.

Since LinkedIn allows you to set up text ads using pay per click (PPC) or cost per impression (CPM) pricing options, you’re in charge of how much money is spent and you don’t have to agree to any long-term commitments.

Dynamic Ads

If you want to personalize the ads your prospects see, dynamic ads are a great option. Dynamic ads help capture viewers’ attention by including their own profile data in the ad. Automatically and individually populated ads make it quick and simple to launch campaigns, and you can adjust your ads based on your marketing objectives.

Campaign Manager

If you’re worried about how you’ll keep track of all your ads, don’t be! LinkedIn also features the Campaign Manager, a handy dashboard where you can create and track your campaigns in one place. 

Marketing is crucial when it comes to growing your business. With millions of users and a variety of ways to share information as well as target and engage with your prospects, LinkedIn marketing is a strategy that shouldn’t be overlooked.

If you’re feeling a little overwhelmed or social media marketing just isn’t your thing – no worries. The Healthy Dash of Social team is here to help you out with your marketing needs.

Click here to learn about our services and book a call with us!