Guide to Marketing on Linkedin

If you consider how social media has come to affect business and marketing you would be a fool to not jump at the opportunity the first chance you get. Sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are at the forefront of growing businesses in various areas especially when it comes to marketing. It has become a norm to see an advertisement as you browse through your Facebook timeline, or as you reply to your friend’s messages on LinkedIn. Despite how social media channels have fascinated billions of people across the globe, its worth in business was not given its due importance until recently.

Products as well as company pages can be advertised via various social networking sites including Linkedin which gives customers an opportunity to follow updates, happenings and news from online sites. The ability to shop online has added more gist to this enterprise with easy payment methods such as mobile money, PayPal, American Express among others. So now more than ever, business owners are seeing the need to go online so as to give their businesses the boost they need in terms of scope when targeting a customer base.

In this article, we’re going to look into the basics of how to set up your company page on LinkedIn and how this can make your business grow more. Basically, the page works well in letting others know about your business, its brand as well as other products and services that you deal in. It is sort of an online statement of your presence. LinkedIn additionally can also be used to advertise jobs and opportunities within your enterprise.

There are many who use LinkedIn as a potentially rich repository for generating leads. For instance, Lewis Howes has earned over $1.5 million in revenue with Linke-dIn. He leveraged the platform to pull of this feat in 3 short years.

According to Lewis Linkedin is a goldmine for generating leads.

“This is how I generate all these leads, this one thing and it’s my opinion that this is the best resource on all social networking sites. It’s your own LinkedIn group because if you can send an announcement with just a link on here for your webinar, some copy and some compelling calls to action… you’re going to get a lot of people opting into your webinars or to your sales pages or wherever you want to drive them to, it’s ridiculous.”
– Lewis Howes

Here are some stats about LinkedIn that you might find interesting:
Linkedin has more than 500 million members.
People with more than twenty connections are thirty-four times more likely to be approached with a job opportunity than people with less than five.
All 500 of the Fortune 500 are represented in LinkedIn. In fact, 499 of them are represented by director-level and above employees.

How to Get started on Linkedin?

These are the most important items that can make or break your profile on LinkedIn.

Your Name – Use your real name on LinkedIn. It is against Linkedin’s policies to   use anything other than one’s real name when creating a personal profile. So avoid business names, company names, keywords etc. It’s not the right place to optimize for search engine traffic.

Your Profile Picture – Take some time to get a clean and clear headshot. Hire a professional for this. This gives you an additional advantage of being able to use the same headshot across all other social profiles as well.

Your Headline –A very good place to optimize your profile. This is where the keywords come in. Increase your chances of being found by people in your industry by writing a proper headline.

 

For example in the above image, did you notice this line “Content Marketing Strategist and Editor at Crazy Egg”. Not only does Kathryn optimize the headline well she also uses the name of a company that’s well known for conversion rate optimization and UX.

Let’s look at  one more example. This is the profile of Tommy Walker, previously editor at ConversionXL.

Your Current and Past Experience – Job titles and keyword optimized job listings indicate past experience and also bring a lot of search traffic. Tommy once again hits the nail on head with his perfect descriptions that are dripping with exact details.

Your Education – List your education degrees in this section.

For example, before joining Kissmetrics as a marketer Sean Work (who was my editor) was a structural engineer who also worked with NASA.

Now, NASA has nothing to do with SEO( they generally send missions to Mars) but listing that bit of information creates a halo effect.

According to Wikipedia, “The halo effect is a cognitive bias in which an observer’s overall impression     of a person, company, brand, or product influences the observer’s feelings and thoughts about that entity’s character or properties.”

Which may lead to the belief that if someone is good enough for NASA he might as well be good enough for managing the marketing of my company.

It isn’t a bad thing considering that Sean does a very good job.

Recommendations

For others to believe in your skills, the most important thing on your page are recommendations. Recommendations are testimonials given by others on your professional profile.

 

Content marketing

LinkedIn is an awesome platform for content marketing.

On LinkedIn, if some engage with your post by liking, sharing or commenting there’s every good chance that they will continue to see all your posts for a very long time.

Likes on LinkedIn, are much more powerful than likes on Facebook, Instagram or any other channel. And the need for quality content is compounded by the fact that there aren’t many people creating great content on the platform as much as LinkedIn would have liked.

Social media sites run on people publishing content on a daily basis. And LinkedIn in its zeal for getting more creators on the boat has upended everything to reward creators.

As such the bar for quality content is much lower. Someone liking one of your posts once is enough to make him see the rest of your posts for a very long time. Something that never happens on Facebook.

How to create great content?

Use keyword research tools to discover search intent for a particular idea and then craft posts that satisfy this search intent.

With competitor intelligence tools you can get to the bottom of keywords your competitors rank for and use the same keywords for content on LinkedIn.

With the massive domain authority LinkedIn you should find yourself in the first few spots of Google with a decent article.

 

 

In the above screenshot which are the terms that NextWeb ranks for you can see that the audience wants to know about bitconnect. These are informational queries that can satisfy top of the funnel searchers.

Concluding thoughts

LinkedIn is an unexplored goldmine compared to the likes of Facebook and Instagram that has an overwhelming number of users creating great content.

The iron’s hot and now is the time to strike. Do not while it away.