It’s quite tempting to lug LinkedIn’s marketing strategy with the rest of the common social media platforms’ strategies and call it a day. Unfortunately, that would be a big mistake. 80% of B2B leads come from LinkedIn, with Twitter coming in at 13% and Facebook at 7%. These are the stats you don’t want to miss out on.
The thing about LinkedIn is that it’s a professional social network. It’s not like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, where you’re talking directly with your consumers. It takes more nuance than that to put a successful LinkedIn marketing strategy in place.
For small businesses, figuring out how to use LinkedIn to their advantage can take some time. However, there are common best practices that can put you on the right path.
Keep on reading for the top seven LinkedIn marketing strategies that can elevate your small business’ standing in the eyes of your customers.
#1 LinkedIn Marketing Strategy 101: Find Your Customers
What’s great about LinkedIn’s targeting is the ability to hone in on your exact industry, including the company sizes and job roles of your customers.
You can start by taking a look at ad targeting’s best practices, and then evolve to create your own unique set of targeting parameters.
Here’s an example. You’re a small business in the SaaS industry, and you’d like to target other small businesses in the U.S. You can easily set you targeting to show ads to businesses with 100 employees or less, located in the U.S., as well as their exact industry.
In addition, you can choose to aim for specific employees in your targeted companies. For example, you can elect to only show your ads only to executives with a customer-support title. Even with an amazing Instagram advertising strategy in place, these targeting parameters are unique to LinkedIn.
#2 Build Your Email Marketing List
It can look daunting at first. But, once you’ve set up a protocol on how to connect with potential customers on LinkedIn, you’re good to do.
The first step would be writing a good thank you letter that can be sent to your customers, once they’ve accepted your invite.
After you’re connected, you can invite them to be part of your email marketing list. As it were, you can message up to 50 people at a time on LinkedIn. Therefore, make sure you acknowledge the lack of personalization in your message, and include a direct link for the email signup.
The trick here is establishing rapport by informing your potential customers what they’ll get out of signing up for your email list, in addition to offering to look at something of theirs. It builds a foundation of equality and helps with garnering goodwill.
#3 Use Sponsored Updates to Get Decent Reach
Sponsored updates work by pushing your post to your targeted audience’s LinkedIn feed. It, intentionally, cuts through the noise of people’s feed. It follows the same social media platform set up of either Pay-Per-Click (PPC) or Pay-Per-1,000 impressions.
While LinkedIn has the ability to target specific demographics (like Facebook and Twitter), it can also target interested industries without having to compete against the flow of ads from irrelevant companies.
Furthermore, you can use a sponsored update to promote leadership-based content with a strong Call-to-Action (CTA). It’s a great way of increasing the reach of your content in a compelling way that has a higher probability of generating sales leads.
#4 Join Industry-Specific Groups
There is nothing more valuable than hearing your audience’s authentic voices, and figuring out their interests and wants. Joining LinkedIn groups that are relevant to your target demographic and industry allows you to listen in on what your audience is talking about.
In addition, it creates organic opportunities for you to interact with your audience, add value to their discussions, and showcase your experience by offering advice. Moreover, it allows you to message members of the groups that you’re in, even if you’re not connected to these individuals. It’s —basically— a free way to build authentic relationships with potential customers.
#5 Publish High-Quality Content
Great content is content that adds value to your customers by solving a problem or improving the work process for them. It is also content that is consistent in quality and is regularly posted.
Building your content via these three elements will establish you as a thought leader in this industry or field. Once you’re seen as a thought leader, your clients will be banging on your doorstep, and you won’t even need to go looking for them.
The reason why great content leads to more business is that it follows basic psychology. You provide real value, and you get real results in turn.
#6 Go Viral
That’s a tricky one because you’ll need a bit of luck sprinkled on your content for it to truly go viral. However, LinkedIn makes it way more probable for your content to go viral than on any other social media platform.
If your post starts gaining momentum on its own, LinkedIn will put a spotlight on it and place it in one of their categories. Once it’s placed in a category, there will be an avalanche of readers (numbering in the tens of thousands) reading your post. It’s a brilliant —and free— way to turbo-boost your visibility.
#7 Humanize Your Employees
LinkedIn is a rather professional platform, yet, that shouldn’t stop you from giving a face to your employees and potential customers.
You can do so by having your employees create —and complete— their profiles on LinkedIn. LinkedIn profiles should have photos, relevant job histories, and professional connections. Moreover, you can always ease the process by setting up a photography day where you can have a professional photographer take profile photos for your employees.
This way your potential customers can have a well-curated view into who works for you, as well as an idea about your business culture.
LinkedIn Marketing: Unlocked
For small businesses, it can be a bit difficult setting up their LinkedIn marketing strategy for success. But, armed with these top seven marketing strategies that are focused on LinkedIn’s unique aspects, you’re ready to add LinkedIn to your marketing portfolio.
However, no matter how amazing your LinkedIn strategy is, it won’t give you the results you deserve if your website is in dire need of a redesign. These precious B2B leads won’t get converted if your potential clients don’t follow through.
Therefore, make sure to contact our media team and they’ll get you all sorted.
