Top Tips to using LinkedIn Marketing for Business Growth

What is LinkedIn Marketing?

LinkedIn isn’t just for professionals and jobseekers. Whilst your personal profile is essentially an online CV, and it was predominantly a platform for career networking in the past, today there is a lot more to LinkedIn that can be utilized to enable business growth.

This professional social network has over 740 million users worldwide, and 30 million companies have a presence on the platform. It creates exposure to millions of connections that can be used to build relationships and companies to boost your brand.

So how can it be used to help grow your business? The following top tips will help get you started.

1 - Grow your Page Followers

Connecting with people on your personal profile is simple. But getting those connections to follow your company page takes another step. You’ll naturally gain some page followers through publishing content and people actively seeking out your brand. But achieving a steady increase in follower numbers will help your brand exposure and potentially put you in front of future customers.

Increasing your number of followers can be done in a few ways:

Use the ‘follow’ button on your website or blog
Invite your personal profile connections to follow your company page
Encourage your employees to share company posts to increase exposure organically
Include links to your company page on email footers, newsletters and web articles.

2 - Add your Company Profile

Too many company pages on LinkedIn don’t have any information in the About section. This is your opportunity to really shout about what you do, and the services and products your business provides. With a 2000 character limit, there’s plenty of scope to cover a general business overview, as well as include details of your main offerings.

3 - Optimise your Company Page for Google

Google often features LinkedIn company pages in its search results so it’s worth taking the time to ensure your page is adequately optimized for this purpose.

Include relevant keyword search phrases in the About section.
Make sure your page features a link to your company website – you can change the button at the top of your page to ‘Visit Website’ and include your link there.
Include website links in your page updates.

4 - Share Relevant Content

You can increase engagement rates on your company page by publishing engaging content that your target audience will want to read. It can be tempting to use the platform to promote your products and services. Whilst for some brands this works well (for example when followers are there just for the Daily Deals), most businesses will turn followers off by constantly posting updates on their products or services. You can increase engagement rates on your company page by publishing engaging content that your target audience will want to read. It can be tempting to use the platform to promote your products and services. Whilst for some brands this works well (for example when followers are there just for the Daily Deals), most businesses will turn followers off by constantly posting updates on their products or services.

Sales-based content generally doesn’t have a good reception on LinkedIn, so mixing updates with content about the company, the people and links to insightful articles or blogs will keep followers engaged with your brand and provide an interesting content collection.

5 - Mix up Content Creation

On LinkedIn there’s many different ways to post content. Videos, images, infographics and slideshows are all ways to add rich media to your post updates. Mix those in with normal text posts and blog posts and you’ll create a good combination to keep followers interested in your company posts.

Posts with video or images generally perform better than text only posts. Make sure videos are no longer than two minutes, and always remember to include subtitles for those who watch with sound turned off.

6 - Use Sponsored Updates

To boost your LinkedIn marketing, you can utilise sponsored posts. Using sponsored updates pushes your content out further to those who aren’t yet engaged with your company. This paid advertising feature enables you to target people based on location, age and gender. But with LinkedIn you can go further and include parameters such as job titles, company name, skills and groups. Sponsored updates are a great way of sharing thought-leadership content. Sales-based posts are likely to turn people off, so sharing valuable content with a strong call to action can help increase page followers and website visitors.

7 - Get your Employees Engaged

Help your staff to complete their profiles, update their information and share company page updates. It may be a good idea to run a short LinkedIn training session to show staff how LinkedIn works, the benefits it can have for the company and help employees set up their accounts.

8 - Update your Company Page Images

Your company’s profile picture and banner are the first things people see when they open your page. Making sure these are good quality and relevant is vital. According to LinkedIn, small business pages that have high quality banners and profile pictures get up to 6 times more organic visitors than those without.

Often, just a good quality image of your company logo works well for the profile picture. For banners, there are several businesses who specialize on creating personalized page banners just for LinkedIn – a simple search on the platform will help you find and connect with some options.

9 - Market your Company Page elsewhere

Include links in your email footers, on your newsletters and on your website. If you’re dedicated to publishing regular content on LinkedIn, maybe some email marketing to your existing customer base will prompt them to connect with your page.

No time to manage your social media profiles and run your business? FWD Motion offers effective LinkedIn management services for your company. Contact us for more information on how we can help drive your engagement and boost your brand.