Before we discuss the advantages of having a marketing strategy on LinkedIn, let us first understand why we even need LinkedIn to create a presence in the world of online and offline market.
Since its launch in 2003, LinkedIn has successfully transformed its image from being a professional networking platform to an effective marketing tool. It currently stands as the top lead generator and maximum content engagement achiever. From CEOs, Founders to Bloggers, everyone uses this platform to highlight their skills, achievements, and product and company performance.
So you and your company must remain competitive on this social media site. Your pro-activeness and marketing strategy will help to improve your brand image and increase brand awareness among LinkedIn members.
Now, let us understand factors that should be included in a business marketing strategy on the world’s best marketing tool – LinkedIn:
- Create an impressive Company Page: It is necessary and the foremost step in your marketing strategy on LinkedIn. Build an excellent and attractive Company Page to start displaying what your company, brand or products are doing and what it has in it for the prospects.
- Define Goal: You must have a well-defined SMART goal for the page and your responsibilities on the company page. SMART helps you to decide specific target, which is measurable and achievable. You cannot have a goal which is vague and just a random wish. It has to be relevant for your audience, prospects and customers. It has to have a time limit, and it cannot go on and on. Your content planning to every update on the company page should adhere to the set goal.
- Understand the Crowd: Identify who is your target, who is your prospect and your existing customers. Posts should be relevant to each individual who follows your page and who would follow later. Create buyer personas and personalize contents to be delivered to your audience.
- Feed Relevant Keywords: Your company page and websites must have keywords that your target audience use to search your products and services. Update company overview in the About Us section to include such words. Use these keywords in your contents and posts.
- Publish creative and video-rich posts: Your contents cannot be just texts anymore. It’s the world of creativity. Today’s audience loves to see short and crisp content on images and videos. Video posts on LinkedIn get 3X more engagement and likely to get 5X more comments than text-only posts. Native Video feature on LinkedIn helps to generate 30% VTR (View-Through Rates).
- Perform Competitor Analysis: Always try to optimize the company page by comparing it with your competitor’s page. Use LinkedIn’s “Companies to Track” feature to find companies similar to yours. Then use LinkedIn Analytics and metrics to check the status of their pages such as follower counts, growth and engagement. It will help you to understand what is helping them get more visibility than yours and later optimize your company page accordingly.
- Get Employees Follow the Page: Employees are the first source of free marketing. If they believe in your goals and products that you offer, they will share words among their network. You need them to follow the company page. Encourage them to keep sharing company posts so that their circle finds out the existence of your company and products that meet their requirements. You will find an increase in followers list and also word-of-mouth working effectively.
- Multi-Language Page Set-Up: LinkedIn allows you to change the language preference from settings to set-up the company page for your audience in foreign countries.
- Have Consistency in Posts: Featured Groups and Homepage must have posts going consistently. It helps the audience keep track of your post timings and days. They interact and engage more when they know when you are going to post next. Deciding the frequency is one of the primary aspects of content planning.
- Company Page Promotion: Use LinkedIn’s incorporated promotion options to reach out to the audience that you can filter out from its colossal network database. Extract target companies and individuals based on professional interests, skills and group affinity. Use any of the desired paid ad placement options for promotion of your company page, such as Sponsored Content (single image, carousel or videos ads), Text Ads and Sponsored InMail (message ads).
LinkedIn has plenty of options to set the target with a goal that has to be defined by you and your organization. The objective of having a company page should be defined first. Continuous optimization and updates would help you to achieve the set target. Competitor analysis would help to fill in gaps and get better results. Use LinkedIn’s in-built tools and features to get more visibility and engagement on published contents and promotions.
