If you’ve ever had a job in the professional space, there’s a good chance you know what LinkedIn is. The website is designed to combine the connectivity and outreach of social media with the professionalism and formalities of an in-office meeting. However, LinkedIn’s landscape has grown over the past few years into a digital space where sellers and brands can reach out, sell products or jobs, and grow.
You could, in theory, reach out to anybody and cold-sell them a position or merchandise, but that process is slow and tedious. LinkedIn has been optimized in such a way that each person can add to their profile and shape the kind of person they are, and therefore help dictate the type of people who reach out to them for marketing (and vice versa). The platform is about marketing yourself, and that is exactly what this article is going to outline. But we don’t mean marketing yourself for others to find and sell to you, we mean making sure your content and marketing hit the right people.
Gathering Your Marketing Group
When you have a business on LinkedIn, you can create your own organization from the ground up; pulling together people from your company to form something powerful and real.
These people are your superpower.
Each employee or person you connect with inside your organization has a niche skillset that both broadens your organization’s total abilities and shows you have more specialist training as well. Additionally, every new person you add knows more people on LinkedIn, which means more potential connections to market to. Rather than sift through an immeasurable amount of people and hope their interests align with yours via 3rd-level connections, you now have a multitude of 2nd-level connections you can look at and study to see if they’re a better fit to receiving your marketing campaigns. Yes, it’s a numbers game, but it’s a refined numbers game.
How to Market These People
OK, great. We now have a relatively stable and growing audience to market to. Now what? “B2B advertisers have stated 80% of their online leads are connected to LinkedIn, so let’s start marketing!” Not so fast, my friend. While that is a high number, we need to make sure we are converting as many of those leads as possible. 80 out of 100 leads is great, but if you’re only converting 4 of them then we need to reassess our strategy.
The art of LinkedIn’s marketing is that it is different from ad campaigns on Youtube or Facebook. The marketing isn’t in your face or spamming anything, it is professional and well-vetted because that’s how people on LinkedIn expect to be perceived: well-vetted professionals treated as such. So how do we become professional and well-vetted?
Step 1: Make a Profile
Yes, it’s an obvious answer. But nothing can really happen until you do this. That said, once a profile is made, you can essentially do everything. Name, a brief description in the “About Us” area, and a profile picture for the company, and you’re already halfway there. Just add the industry, the size of your company, and a few extra points about what you stand for, who you as a company are, and your “featured gatherings”. This section is where you can highlight posts and showcase your connections as a company, further engraining your stance of “who you are” as a company.
That’s it. You’ve created your company profile page. Now for the fun part, connecting with people. Find your coworkers, tell them to tell your other coworkers to find your page and boom, the company is live online.
Step 2: Posting Content
Now there are a few rules here but generally speaking, this isn’t rocket science. You’ll want to post 1-2 times a day at different times of the day (don’t spam two posts back-to-back at 11 am and then 11:30). When you go to post, make sure you’re covering different bases with each post and cycle through them as you go. For example, if you’re a construction service, cycle through how long you’ve been doing the work, the quality of your business, showcase some of the specific tools or services you offer, do a specific job highlight with a testimonial, talk about the area you cover, etc. There is a lot to offer in marketing so cast your net wide and then on your actual page you can go into specifics and niche work. The marketing is for bringing people in, the profile is for specifics.
Step 3: Match your Audiences
Remember earlier when I talked about a refined numbers game? This is how you play it. LinkedIn offers services through their “Matched Audiences” feature that allows you to target guests of your site, add email contacts that can be focused on your LinkedIn campaigns, send specific messages through their “In-Mail” tool and transfer your records.
Additional Strategies
For LinkedIn company pages, there is a pile of free marketing options you can use to improve your presence on the platform. It goes without saying that these pages are incredibly important in engaging with your audience and to miss out on these tools would be folly. Here’s a list of what you can do:
Use LinkedIn Analytics
Yes, that’s right. LinkedIn has a built-in analytics feature. This allows you to track your posts, your page, and your guest analytics. From here you can see if your posts are getting good impressions, if your page is getting viewed well, or if you’re bringing in new traffic compared to engaging your current audience. These analytics can be cross-referenced with the type of posts being shared and the time of day they’re being posted to really make a difference in your engagement levels.
Optimize Your Profile
The first strategy was for your posts, this one is for where those posts lead your audience to. An optimized profile can be the deciding factor, the make-or-break point for a person your excellent content has brought them to. We need to make sure your “about us” is up to par and your accomplishments are well laid out so they know you are a reputable source to be working with.
When you optimize your profile, you need to make sure you’ve covered your featured content, your professional training, your outline, your slogan, your abilities and supports, and most importantly your foundation and profile pictures. Put together, these things can create a powerhouse of a profile. Make sure all of this is in order before expecting any significant turnover from your leads.
Promotional Content
The number 1 way you’re going to land clients is by promoting and sharing content. Engaging with the community leads to, you guessed it, community engagement. The best content you can put out there is the type people will want to discuss further and subsequently post themselves: opening you up to new circles to market in. Posting is free, posting is generally straightforward, and all it takes is a little time and some mouse clicks.
You can also garner more attention by adding portfolio connections and other, informal communities to your page, which will then grow your profile impressions, which should in turn generate more potential leads. It’s just a vicious cycle of leads and clicks and impressions.
Message Automation
Lastly, when you find yourself growing so quickly you need to optimize your lead generation, you can turn to message automation. This feature, as the name suggests, helps you automate your meet-ups and your post solicitations, and even create posts and messages that appear more human than AI-driven to help look more authentic in your interactions. There are more functions in this department but this is a starter guide, so this is more than enough for now.
We use Closely to automate our LinkedIn prospecting. It’s an all-in-one LinkedIn lead engagement platform that lets you set up and run multiple automated outreach campaigns. This is how the analytics dashboard looks like:
In the result, you grow your network on autopilot. The built-in Inbox lets you filter conversations by tags.
It’s super-convenient for salespeople, especially when you need to have details about prospects at your fingertips. Closely is superb in terms of price-quality ratio.
You can also add highly targeted lead lists. You can upload audiences from LinkedIn groups, events and comments from posts. When you reach out, you can add a post, group or event as something that’s common for you too to spark the conversation.
Putting It All Together
Your profile is set up and optimized, you know what and when to post, how to check and make sure you’re getting the right hits and engagement you want, and even know how to make sure the right audiences are being found and that those audiences are getting the top-notch treatment your company is known for. Is there anything more you can do?
There is always more that can be done, but it really boils down to “is it working for me?” If it isn’t, take a look at your industry rivals – what are they doing differently? Are there pieces of your profile that need to be refined? Are there pieces missing? Is your engagement high enough? If it is, then double down and plan a posting schedule, look up your most frequently asked questions and automate responses for that, dig deeper into the automation and engagement functions (they’re super cool) and see what more you can optimize. Or, if the numbers are making sense, see what can be done laterally to scale before doubling down.
Use LinkedIn automation to power up your strategies. Automation tools provide concise analytics to help you understand which message works best for you and where to improve targeting. Automation tools also save wealth of your time, taking over all the routine manual work for you. You can set up a campaign and forget about it. Leads will come to your Inbox. Consider Closely for automating your outreach, but of course, you can also look up other solutions.
The LinkedIn world is yours to wield how you please. Just make sure you’re welding it in a way that helps your business grow properly.