Gain New Clients through successful LinkedIn marketing.
LinkedIn is regarded as the largest social network group of professionals and colleagues. By following simple best practices you can use this network to your own and your business’ advantage.
Like all social networks, it offers a great way to grow audiences and build communities so you can start to showcase your products, services, skills and industry expertise. It is like a “virtual business exhibition”, so as a rule of thumb, think about how you should behave in these environments when you are thinking about content and behaviour on LinkedIn. Media Boom.
5 Top Tips:
Type of content to post:
Social media content is all about who you want to reach and driving viewers down the marketing funnel, so consider these few points:
Clickable Content: Think about what you want your content to achieve. Are you hoping to collect data, entice enquiries, promote an offer or build yourself up as an expert in your field. Whatever the answer, there will be a web page that you can take your viewers to that supports this objective. This may be linking to case studies, client success, awards or blog pages or your website; linking to a bespoke landing page for an offer or contact information or linking to an email or phone number.
Audience: It sounds obvious, but think about the business exhibition scenario and produce audience-specific content. Check out your LinkedIn follower demographics too and make sure your assumptions about who is following you are right. You can do this on the Analytics Tab of your Company Page if you are an admin. If you need to target more relevant people to your page, then you can look at LinkedIn Sponsored Content.
Subject Matter: Ask the hard questions around your industry and show your awareness of the key issues – don’t be shy.
Industry Events: Talk about the industry events, the ones you are attending and those you are not. Show that you are active in your sector and if you are present at an event let people know where you are and what you are doing. This can work for dentists in London looking to promote themselves to new patients to top solicitor companies looking to present a big win.
Visually Appealing: Visual helps drive engagement, so make sure that your header image is attractive and says something about your business and not about the stock library. Try taking some shots with your phone or develop a graphic in Canva to add some spice to your page.
- Encourage Employees to Share Brand Content:
Your employees are your biggest brand ambassadors, so leverage them to push your brand on social networks. If they are reluctant to share, then be clear with them on what they can share and that you encourage it.
A study uncovered some of the main reasons for the this:
- 21.6% aren’t sure that their employers want them to share company-specific content
- 15.7% don’t know what to share
- 77.3% don’t feel encouraged to share company-related news
- Make use of LinkedIn Pulse in Your Content Strategy: LinkedIn’s Pulse allows you to target a more in-depth audience and while some folk are still uncertain about all the features there are compelling reasons to be on there. Some of the advantages are:
- Above and beyond audience targeting:
- Get more social shares: Top Pulse posts average 1,843 social shares within 48 hours so make use of this for timely events, offers, launches.
- SEO benefits: Pulse provides SEO benefits through its backlinks from LinkedIn and indexable content.
- Content tagging: Content can be tagged for increased traffic long after your publication, which means that you have lasting searchability much like a blog.
- Don’t go stale:
Having an outdated or unattended LinkedIn page will always do more harm than good, like with any other social network, so make sure you are present and engaging. Again, think about the business exhibition scenario with an outdated stand and a few bored staff members gazing at their phones rather than engaging with visitors.
Prevent your page from going stale by:
- Frequently posting – aim for a post every few days and include posts before and after standard work hours.
- Engage: reply, comment and ask questions of your audience and groups.
- Always update:
- Add videos:
- Post-career opportunities:
- Add some personality: Don’t be afraid of letting your company’s personality shine through, people still buy from people even in the B2B sphere so don’t get caught up in a stiff corporate tone if it is not your preference.
- Measurement
Check your LinkedIn stats regularly – i would recommend weekly or fortnightly. This will inform you on how to tweak content and messages to yield the best results for you.
This is what LinkedIn analytics can tell you:
- Visitor Demographics: Discover who reads your content, their industry, job title, seniority level, location, company size, employee vs non-employee, function and referral source.
- Page Views: The number of company page views during a specified date range.
- Unique Visitors: The number of users that viewed your company page, excluding multiple visits from a single user.
- Impressions: The number of times the post was shown to LinkedIn members.
- Engagements: The number of interactions divided by impressions.
- Clicks: The number of clicks on your content, company name, or logo.
- Followers Acquired: The number of new followers you gained from a sponsored update (non-organic on the native platform but available through Sprout Social).
- Audience: Shows if a post was sent to all your followers or a targeted group.
