Since its first launch in 2003, LinkedIn has become a networking hub for businesses globally and has skyrocketed in popularity with currently over 610 million members. It is now an integral part of the business world and not having an established account on the platform can be detrimental to your company’s success. It creates trust that you are who you say you are and gives a consumer a chance to learn more about you and your business with ease and without having to commit to anything at an early stage. If your account is impressive and you’ve implemented a LinkedIn marketing strategy, you could convert someone from ‘just looking’ into a fully-fledged customer. So, how would you do this?
To implement a LinkedIn marketing strategy, you first must know what it is. Put simply, it is a plan put in place to reach specific digital marketing objectives and goals through LinkedIn. This can include building brand awareness in order for your business to be more visible and established within the industry or recruiting desirable candidates. Tactics such as these may often be overlooked due to them seeming initially small in impact. However, in the long term, these tactics can prove incredibly valuable and can even make or break a business.
Algorithm can be an intimidating sounding word, but it is essentially a set of instructions for solving a problem or accomplishing a task. Unlike other platforms, LinkedIn has been fairly open about how theirs works:
Why use LinkedIn for digital marketing? Firstly, you’ll be implementing a digital marketing strategy where there might not have been one before, potentially saving your business. It’ll bring in new customers and give your business a voice and digital footprint that can prove invaluable. This will give you an edge over competitors who aren’t prioritising their social media, their SEO or even just keeping their website up to date and user friendly. A good website or social media account such as LinkedIn can be all it takes for a consumer to decide to bring their business your way. If your account appears active and engaging, the account demonstrates that your company is also active, engaging, and feels more trustworthy than an account with minimal posts, low rates of engagement and has little information available. This is why LinkedIn should definitely be a part of your digital marketing strategy.
LinkedIn has put in a huge amount of effort to allow users to gain the majority of their information straight from their platform. LinkedIn supplies you with all the own analytics and statistics required to analyse important areas of your page including engagement in the page and posts, CTR, demographics of the people interacting, your organic following, and so much more. It’s your one-stop-shop to all the analytic data required to make informed decisions about the activity of your LinkedIn page.
You will also have, on the left side of your business page, statistics on hashtag following. This is a great way to see what’s popular and current, what people are talking about and what you should be posting about in order to be seen and heard by the widest audience.
One tool we recommend that isn’t internally produced by LinkedIn itself, is a scheduling tool. There are various options to go for with this kind of tool, however at Cariad Marketing we use Sprout Social (with some adhoc posting where necessary). This tool can be fundamental to your LinkedIn content strategy as well as helping you create a flourishing business account as it not only schedules the posts you create for a particular time, it also explicitly tells you when the optimum timing for posting would be. It will give a star rating based on when the most engagement is acquired, and therefore when is best for you to post.
This is all there is to know regarding a LinkedIn marketing strategy, bar one key element. How can you create a comprehensive digital marketing strategy for LinkedIn? Let’s start from the top and ensure we first know how to create a business page on LinkedIn:
Once your page is set up and looking good, you can then turn your attention to the digital marketing strategy. Set yourself some goals and objectives you want to meet by a certain time frame. This will ensure that your strategy stays focused.
Then turn your attention to your target audience. Who would you like to see your posts? Ideally, who would your customers be? What demographics do your current customers fall into? The answer to these questions is who you should be writing your posts and content for. This will assist in getting the best engagement on your page, so make sure your posts are relevant and engaging for your target audience.
Now you have established who you’re aiming your digital marketing efforts at, you can begin to expand the strategy with some straightforward methods. Some of the best methods to include are:
With your new-found knowledge in LinkedIn digital marketing, go out into the digital world and put it into action. You will be surprised how much optimising this wonderful platform can do for your business. If it all feels too much but you believe it would be helpful for you, get in contact with Cariad Marketing today and we will promise to get your LinkedIn profile looking professional and full of your brand’s signature character!