A Quick Guide on How to Use LinkedIn for Small Businesses as an Effective Promotion Tool
Contrary to popular belief, LinkedIn isn’t only for professionals and job seekers. Sure, millions of efficient, skilled professionals use this professional network to develop their networks and their careers, but did you know you can use LinkedIn to promote small businesses too?
At its foundation, it is a professional social network. It’s all about career development, making professional connections, getting involved in industry discussions and other types of business-related activities. And that’s what makes it better than other social media marketing platforms such as Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.
Do You Have A LinkedIn Account?
Please say yes, because over 380 million registered users in over 200 countries and territories already do! A little over four million companies are signed up with LinkedIn Company Pages, and more than two new members are signing up every second, making it world’s largest professional social network.
Marketing a small business on LinkedIn is relatively inexpensive and provides a lot of value in returns as well as reputation, when it is done in the right way. After all, you are trying to reach the market and LinkedIn is the perfect place to get in the game. You can go the DIY way or hire a specialist or virtual assistant to handle the marketing tasks for you.
A Word of Caution: LinkedIn marketing doesn’t work for every type of business, but it can work for the majority and should be given full deliberation if you want your small business to thrive using this network as a promotional tool.
Results will take some time, but again that depends on your definition of results. Using it to its full potential will help build your network and give your business more exposure online, and this will ultimately translate into a better bottom line for your brand. You could find that marketing on LinkedIn is a very smart thing to do, indeed!
Get Smarter Strategies on How to Use LinkedIn for Small Businesses
This network can be a valuable promotional tool to help you grow your business and catapult your career to the unimaginable heights. The following strategies will help you use this resource to produce highly rewarding results in your industry for sure.
Brand Your LinkedIn Address
When you create a profile on this network, the site automatically creates a web address, which is nothing more than a collection of jumbled up letters. The good news is that you can customize this address to create a branded address with your name. This is what Microsoft’s LinkedIn address looks like https://www.linkedin.com/company/microsoft. You can do the same for your small company to lay the first stone of success and branding.
Get in Touch with Sales Prospects
If you are looking for B2B opportunities, LinkedIn has your back! All of the users get access to InMail, a built in tool that is great for reaching out to the influencers. InMail allows you to message the contact prospects directly. This practice makes it an awesome ‘warm calling’ tool for sales professionals. If you have an active list of LinkedIn connections, you are presumably only two or three connections away from the prospect. It is also possible to use LinkedIn’s introduction features to ask one of your connections for an introduction.
Create Targeted LinkedIn Showcase Pages
Here is chance to separate all your company’s brands and products and give them the features of their own on LinkedIn. The LinkedIn Showcase Pages are niche pages that are simply an extension of the main Company’s Page. These allow you to promote specific products or cater the individual marketing personas for each brand, offering a more personalized experience for your Company Page visitors. The network allows you to create up to 10 Showcase Pages per each parent Company Page. If you want more information in this regard, I would suggest you to visit LinkedIn’s help section available at Showcase Pages – Frequently Asked Questions.
Use LinkedIn’s Content Marketing Score for Trending Content Resources
One of the features of this network will tell you how effective your Company Page is at using content resources. But you will have to sign up for LinkedIn Business Solutions as a customer to learn how impactful your organic and paid LinkedIn content is. This gives you access to the Content Marketing Score and Trending Content resources. You will get a detailed analysis of your Content Marketing Score that measures user engagement with Sponsored Updates, Company Pages, Groups, employee updates, and Influencer posts (if and when applicable). You will also get recommendations on ways to improve your score, and significantly enhance the effectiveness of your marketing content.
Generate Leads
We are talking about highest visitor-to-lead conversion rate than what you can typically achieve with Facebook and Twitter. To get the most out of LinkedIn for lead generation, promote and share links to your blog posts and landing pages in your Company Status Updates and in calls-to-action placed in posts you publish via LinkedIn.
The Wrap Up!
Most people only use LinkedIn as an online resume. But our recommendations shared in this can help take your LinkedIn presence to the next level which you can use as a very effective marketing tool.
Whether you want to connect with industry professionals, network, establish thought leadership, or generate leads, this professional network can be an integral part of your social media marketing strategy to promote your small business. I hope I have answered precisely and completely about how to use LinkedIn to promote small business.
Need help building a stellar social media strategy or need SEO for small business? Call us at 855-444-4777 to find out how we can help you establish your company with a stronger branding impact and increase you ROI.
