Social media plays a crucial role in enabling the growth and connections of a startup business. It introduces activities to ventures that can help them penetrate their relative industrial sector.
However, most startup businesses maximize on social media channels, such as Facebook and Instagram to reach their audience; nonetheless, they need to utilize the best features of LinkedIn to connect with their industry peers and grow accordingly.
As a small startup business, your focus should not be on building relationships with your customers that you would sell your products or services to but, you should maintain amicable and transactional relationships with your industry peers to stand out in the industry. Being a part of a thriving business community is crucial for your brand’s success, and it connects you to an audience that might be potentially interested in funding your business.
The point is—building relationships with your industrial peers is as meaningful as building relationships with your customers. You cannot only follow their social media pages to show your solidarity for their business and expect them to do the same. However, you need to follow them on a professional platform, such as LinkedIn, to become a part of their inner circle.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
- Introduction
- Setting up your LinkedIn Company Profile
- Understanding the Algorithm of LinkedIn
- How Should You Advertise On Your LinkedIn Business Profile?
- Analyzing metrics on your LinkedIn Business Profile
- Role of LinkedIn in Improving the Marketability of your Business
- Conclusion
Introduction
Reid Hoffman founded LinkedIn in 2002, and it has grown to become one of the most prominent networking platforms online. With more than 562 million users, LinkedIn focuses on building connections and networks among industrial peers, which allows businesses to grow in their respective niches and industries. LinkedIn features up to 20 languages that will enable local companies as well as international businesses to explore and network within their communities.
When running a small business, anyone would be ready to take measurements to take their businesses to the next heights. However, knowing everything isn’t the fundamental of a company but, they should maintain connections with their peers to gain favorable success—after all, it’s not about what you know but, it’s about who you know in the industry.
The commercial use of LinkedIn is impactful—it allows you to explore existing connections and enable the success and growth of your business through ‘word-of-mouth’ strategy. Additionally, LinkedIn is a proven way to generate leads for your business.
Most businesses don’t invest heavily in their LinkedIn profiles, and they simply add unappealing and dull statements on their profiles, which doesn’t look favorable to their target audience. If you are serious about lead generation through your LinkedIn page, then, you should prepare a detailed company page and add the relevant information that one needs to know about your business. It would also help you with growing your audience and driving favorable business outcomes.
Hootsuite has speculated that complete and articulate company pages are likely to receive twice as many visitors in comparison to empty or incomplete profiles. Therefore, before you jump on the bandwagon of LinkedIn, make sure that your company profile is error-free and easy to read.
In this ultimate marketing guide, you will learn how to prepare a company profile for your LinkedIn account as well as utilize the crucial features of the networking platform for lead generation. We will also discuss how to develop an infallible LinkedIn strategy for your business.
Setting up your LinkedIn Company Profile
Preparing a company profile or company page is a step-one of making your LinkedIn profile, and it allows your followers and visitors to learn about your business, job opportunities, team members, brand, and even your subsidiary businesses.
Creating professional company pages is a proven way to venture into a technical scope, and it allows you to differentiate your strengths from your weaknesses. Also, make sure that your company profile doesn’t look same the same information that one would usually find on your website’s “About” page.
It would merely defeat the objective of having a LinkedIn profile; therefore, you should work with a strategist to develop content for your company profile.
When creating a company profile, make sure to use bullet points frequently to enlist your company’s strengths and core values—don’t use filler words to describe your company but, use a formal tone to be direct about your company.
Read on to learn how to set up a LinkedIn company profile. You can register/signup using your regular email address; however, if you have your business’ email address, it is recommendable to use it instead to create a profile.
You will receive business-related leads and notifications on the email address used for registration. Follow the given steps to create a profile on LinkedIn:
Step-1: Add your company
Adding your company to your profile is one of the main prerequisites—you can use the LinkedIn Marketing Solutions portal for activating company page. Click on “Create a Company Page” to get started with the process.
Enter the official name of your company and enter your business’ URL on LinkedIn’s search bar.
Remember that this URL will be used to advertise your business, so it cannot be interchanged or exchanged later in the future, so you shouldn’t haste into choosing an appropriate URL for your business’ profile. Next, click on “Create Page”, and you are good to go.
You will proceed to the next stage of the process, where you can start to add your business’ details in the profile box. Now, click on “Get Started” to make the required changes to your profile.
Step-2: Add a logo and cover image to your profile
Make sure that your profile features your company’s logo and vision as a way to represent your business profile. It also indicates that your profile is authentic and legitimate.
Choosing a cover image adds a professional touch to your profile, as it makes your profile look partially complete. The size of the cover image should be approximately 1536 x 768 pixels.
If you are using LinkedIn to network professionally with your industry peers, you should consider adding your business’ logo to the profile picture space, instead of using your image.
Feel free to link your professional LinkedIn profile’s URL to your business’ LinkedIn profile, but you should steer clear from using your image on your business profile. The size of the profile picture should be up to 300 x 300 pixels approximately.
You shouldn’t skip this step at all cost. No matter how intriguing your business’ profile is, not having a cover image and logo may look unprofessional.
Also, adding an image to the blank sections is guaranteed to boost your profile’s traffic by six times.
Step-3: Create a description for your company
With LinkedIn, you do not have enough character/word count to talk about your company but, instead, you should be able to jot down all the points in 2,000 characters, which is equivalent to 500-550 words.
Your company profile shouldn’t say it all about your business, but instead, it should highlight the top characteristics of your business, and it should depict a message to your prospective followers and audience.
Don’t flex on writing boring lines on your profile but, you should consider working with a team of professionals for crafting a professional and impressive message for your profile.
Make sure that you utilize the meta description of your profile carefully, as it would appear in Google preview if someone is looking for your LinkedIn profile through a search engine.
A meta description can contain up to 156 characters, and it should be enough to convince someone to open your LinkedIn profile without a second thought.
To diversify your company’s description, you can add specialities that describe your business to your prospective audience. You can add up to 20 specialities to the profile, and you can utilize them as keywords or tags to generate profitable outcomes.
While many people may consider eliminating this step, you should add up to 3-5 specialities to your profile.
Step-4: Add your company’s miscellaneous details
A recent survey shows that nearly 72% of LinkedIn users are likely to skip reading a LinkedIn business profile if the page lacks certain elements. Having a well-written company profile may mean nothing if you haven’t integrated important company details to your profile.
Majorities of the LinkedIn users have admitted to scrutinizing every detail on a business profile, and they do not consider learning more about a business if it doesn’t contain miscellaneous information.
Start with entering your business website URL in the given sections—it should assure the visitor to visit your website to learn more about your business, as well as it enables your potential leads on LinkedIn to visit your website to drive traffic and conversion to it.
Maneuver the drop-down menu on LinkedIn to specify your company in terms of its size, type, and industry, and don’t forget to mention the year your business was brought into existence.
Additionally, you will be required to add a location for your business. If you are operating in multiple locations then, you should mention all of your locations or, you can include a hyperlink that directs your audience to your business’ locations page.
Step-5: Publish your profile
Once you have filled the relevant data on your profile, go back and proofread everything on your page. Having a grammatical error on your company’s profile is unacceptable, and it may provoke your audience to think of your brand as unprofessional, which is something that you wouldn’t want.
However, if everything on your profile is perfect and to-the-point, it is time for you to publish your profile. Once you click on the “publish” button, your company page will be displayed as live.
If you aren’t satisfied with your profile or, you think that something is missing on your page then, you can click on “Go to member view”, just to get an idea of how your business profile would appeal to other people.
If you aren’t appeased with your page, you can make changes to your page by clicking on “Manage Page”, and it should help you with making the recommendable changes.
Step-6: Setup page administrators
Hire a social media team to look after your LinkedIn profile—they will take care of your profile’s insights as well as they will manage to optimize it according to the right time.
You can add team members to your profile, and it would allow them to monitor your profile and make changes to it.
Click on the “Me” icon and proceed to the “Manage” section, where you will find the option to add members to your profile.
Click on “Admin Tool” and select “Page Admin” to add your team members to the profile. You can change the setting of profile/page administrator as per your preferences.
Step-7: Optimize your page
Last but not least, it is time for you to optimize your page. Hire a team of SEO specialists to optimize your page, and make sure that it contains the right type of short-tail and long-tail keywords required for publishing and optimizing your profile.
Understanding the Algorithm of LinkedIn
Understanding the algorithm of LinkedIn is crucial for you to optimize your LinkedIn profile online. Most businesses create and optimize profiles; however, not knowing the algorithm could seriously influence the ranking of your page. In this short section, we will help you familiarize yourself with the algorithm of LinkedIn, and its involvement in boosting the ranking of your page.
If you are worried that your company profile isn’t appearing on LinkedIn newsfeed then, it may be correlated with the algorithm of LinkedIn or, the lack of organic content on your profile. Similar to major social media and networking platforms, the algorithm of LinkedIn is likely to prioritize the content that is relevant or has higher engagement rates.
Speaking from a general point of view, the content is displayed on LinkedIn’s newsfeed depending on the relevance and reputation of your account. Let’s have a look at how it works:
If you were to post something on your profile, the feed algorithm of LinkedIn is calibrated to determine its quality or, its authenticity. If your post doesn’t meet the criteria, it might be marked as spam, which is something that you wouldn’t want for your company profile.
If you are able to publish your post then, it would appear temporarily on the newsfeed. During this temporary time, the algorithm monitors the engagement on your post. If it is below the criteria, then, it will be removed. However, if your audience is engaging on your content, then, your post will remain on the newsfeed for some time.
Improving the visibility of your posts on LinkedIn’s Newsfeed
As mentioned previously, the engagement and relevance of your post will determine whether your post stays or leaves from the newsfeed; however, as long as your post is receiving engagement and clicks, it will remain on the newsfeed. Over the years, the LinkedIn algorithm has been subjected to a number of changes, and it requires a post to garner a significant percentage of engagement to ensure that it is visible to the audience. You can follow the given three tips to boost your profile’s visibility and relevance on LinkedIn feed:
- Optimize your posts/profile frequently
Most people make the blunder of not optimizing their posts—then, they wonder why their posts aren’t receiving any engagement from their prospective audience. Hire a team of experts to make sure that your LinkedIn profile is optimized on time, and they should remove the factors that could potentially lower the optimization/reach of your LinkedIn profile. Follow the given rules to make sure that your profile is optimized correctly:
- The tone of the voice
Professionals certainly catch up on a professional and formal tone; therefore, if you are directing your profile to professionals or, your industrial peers then, make sure to use a formal tone. Or, you can make your posts sound engaging and interesting, and it would garner similar outcomes.
- Mobile-friendly
Nearly 60% of the LinkedIn users use their mobile phones to browse the company’s profiles, so make sure that your posts/profiles are mobile-friendly to boost your engagement online.
- Diversify your content
Don’t stick to written/text content to direct your audience; instead, you can make the best use out of images, videos, and links to diversify your content to optimize it.
Learn about the interests/preferences of your audience
The point of LinkedIn’s algorithm is based on the content that it wants to show on its newsfeed. For starter, the professional networking site requires you to address your audience to make your posts more approachable and visible on its newsfeed. You can follow the given tips to your advantage:
- Make sure that your content is relevant to your brand, core values, and audience
- Provide professional career tips to your followers
- Earn industry relevance by following your industrial peers
- Conduct surveys on your audience’s preferences.
- Grow your network
You are on LinkedIn for a reason, and if you are noticing an engagement on your posts—you should use the gain and insights to your leverage to grow your network. Connect to people that want to explore their professional systems and provide them tips on making it big in the industry.
Make sure that you follow your industrial peers online, and don’t forget to include links to your social media platform. The more you are invested in growing your LinkedIn profile, the better outcomes you would garner in the long run.
How to make LinkedIn’s algorithm work for you?
It is no wonder that LinkedIn’s algorithm has been subjected to irrational changes and policies; and no matter how much you are invested in growing your profile, the algorithm may push back your professional growth. Again, it is about gaining the right volume of relevance on your post and make sure that your posts are sharable and approachable by a general audience as well as a professional audience.
You should share content and articles that connect with your followers. Start with optimizing your posts, and make sure that you are regularly monitoring your analytics. Engage with your followers and encourage them to show the engagement on your posts, and you will grow on LinkedIn within no time.
How Should You Advertise On Your LinkedIn Business Profile?
A majority of the people maximize LinkedIn features to promote their business and to generate leads for their business; however, LinkedIn has proven itself to be a valuable social media/networking tool for marketing. Most business people think that LinkedIn offers limited features, which isn’t true at all. The more you learn about advanced LinkedIn features, the more it would help you with generating leads for your business. For instance, the networking platform offers LinkedIn Matched Audiences and LinkedIn ads that allow you to direct your marketing and advertisement efforts to your target audience.
LinkedIn Matched Audience plays a crucial role in assisting you with retargeting your website visitors, and it scours through your customer’s database to shake up your marketing programs. The option is available for all LinkedIn advertising products, which is likely to include sponsored content, along with miscellaneous ad formats. Again, there are three types of targeting capabilities that are:
- Account targeting: Utilizing account targeting allows you to reach your decision-makers via your target accounts
- Website retargeting: This option enables you to market your efforts to registered LinkedIn members that might have visited your website through your profile.
- Contact Targeting: Contact targeting helps you with uploading or optimizing your contact list to creating a specific audience-oriented visitor for your business.
No advertisement efforts should be let go without making elaborate test; therefore, you should hire an expert that would be responsible for conducting split tests to measure the response of the audience. Alternatively known as A/B testing, a split test is an effective way to measure the optimization rate of your LinkedIn sponsored content. The focus on analysis is based on iterating that helps with keeping your advertisement efforts on the track. Most advertisers are advised to run the test up to a two-week mark to garner optimal outcomes, and they should test one variable at a time to measure the efficiency of the test.
What are the long-term benefits of using LinkedIn ads?
LinkedIn ads have proven crucial for benefiting small-to-medium size enterprises; however, businesses should enable the “company size” filter on their profiles to target the audience that is most likely to make a purchase from their offerings. While, this feature has incurred many benefits; one of the recurring challenges to this problem is that small-size businesses with a team of 50 members, has not set up a page on LinkedIn, and it may keep them from utilizing the benefits of the service.
However, LinkedIn is integrated with advanced features that allow you to tap into the power of ads to help retarget visitors to your website, which implies that you are targeting the audience that has shown likeness for your products and services. Alternatively, you can choose lead generation forms to connect with your qualified leads, and it would boost your chances to grow your business’ network in the long run.
Analyzing metrics on your LinkedIn Business Profile
Let’s say that you have invested all of your efforts into creating your business’ LinkedIn profile, and you have optimized your page as per the modern practices but, in what way can you guarantee that your efforts are fruitful in some way? The answer is simple—you simply need to analyze the metrics on your LinkedIn business’ profile, and it would open the newest business ventures for you.
Not analyzing your advertisement and marketing efforts on LinkedIn is a massive mistake, and you’d be simply ditching your efforts into hot water, and it is unacceptable when you have come so far. Instead, you should hire a team of experts that is familiar with analyzing metrics on your business profile. You can categorize the insights and metrics as follows:
- Start with creating an audit spreadsheet
- Identify the techniques that would help you with garnering maximum outcomes, and remove the steps that are unable to generate any outcome for your efforts
Track the data of your followers—use the built-in analytics tool on LinkedIn to assess the performance of your company’s page, rather than counting the number of followers on your profile. Use this number as a benchmark to determine the growth of your profile.
Examine engagement data on your profile. Measure your LinkedIn analytics to determine the number of likes, comments, and reach for a certain time period.
Measure referral traffic on your page
Generating business leads through your business profile on LinkedIn:
The main goal of LinkedIn is to connect you to your business leads to enable the growth of your business, as well as grow your team/company size by looking for potential candidates on LinkedIn. However, if you are doing everything on LinkedIn rather than generating leads for your business then, you are wasting your time. Here is the whole point of investing your efforts into LinkedIn—to generate leads and convert them into potential customers/clients. The following are the proven ways to generate leads for your business.
- Start with creating a LinkedIn summary that explains your values to your audience.
- Create a to-the-point company summary to resonate with your prospects—you should be able to convince them that you are the right choice for them. Make them believe in your skills and services to build rapport with them.
- Leverage LinkedIn newsfeed’s to your advantage to improve your reach.
- Post-high-quality content to win the attention of your prospects.
- Monitor special events, such as work anniversaries, birthdays, and similar occasions to build a connection with your prospects/leads.
- LinkedIn also plays a crucial role in improving your reach to connect with your leads, and once you have established a connection with your audience, you should continue furthering the conversation by taking the following measurements:
Nurture your relationship with your audience
If you have acquired a lead successfully then, you should focus on nurturing your connection with them. Make sure that the connects are updated and relevant, and that you are building a trust-based professional relationship with them. You should use native prompts to spark a conversation with them.
Join the LinkedIn ProFinder Network
If you are employed as a freelance or self-employed individual, you should consider joining the LinkedIn ProFinder network. Here, you can connect with the audience looking for freelancing services, and it would make an excellent opportunity for you to connect with your audience.
The more relevant you are to your leads, the more they will be inclined to visit your website, and perhaps make a purchase from your business. However, don’t give up if you are unable to scour leads right away—as long as you are using proper techniques then, you should be able to acquire leads within no time.
Role of LinkedIn in Improving the Marketability of your Business
The use of LinkedIn isn’t limited to job seekers and professional businesspeople; however, majorities of the people optimize the use of LinkedIn to grow their professional networks pertinent to their industrial sectors. Additionally, LinkedIn plays a vast role in growing your business profusely by connecting you to the right type of leads and audience. Integrating LinkedIn to your digital marketing strategy helps you with creating brand awareness and establish partnerships with your clients as well as it helps with making you a prominent name in the industry.
LinkedIn is categorized as a professional social network as its core, and it fundamentally focuses on career development and building relationships with an audience. It allows them to maintain their B2B relationships, in comparison to using regular social media channels, such as Facebook and Instagram, where they will be in contact with their B2C customers. Maintaining a relationship with your industrial peers is as crucial as enabling a relationship with your buying customers, and having a sprouting professional relationship gives you a leverage to promote your business name effortlessly.
Moreover, the experts are looking into the advantageous benefits of LinkedIn and they have discovered numerous outcomes that may potentially boost the marketability of brands and businesses in the long run. Don’t treat your LinkedIn profile as mundane for your business; however, you should invest copiously in it to use it to your leverage to garner optimal outcomes.
Are you using LinkedIn to boost your business’ marketability? Here are some useful tips that are proven to help you find new connections and contacts that are crucial for supporting the growth of your business:
Search for highly targeted connections and customers
Targeting your prospects on LinkedIn is incomparable in terms of digital marketing and advertising—however, if you are not pushing your buttons right, there is no way that you wouldn’t connect with your audience right away. Know your purpose of using LinkedIn and have a goal in mind that would set you apart from your competitors on the market.
Remember that your potential leads are likely to scroll through your profile, and if they don’t find anything interesting on your profile then, they might be inclined to move on to business, offering similar services as yours. Hire a team of social media managers that are proficient in identifying a team of highly targeted leads and connections, and quadruple your marketing and advertising efforts on LinkedIn accordingly.
Improve your email marketing list
It is no brainer that email marketing list is a proven way to connect to your prospects (leads); however, if you aren’t maximizing your email marketing efforts—the results will go nowhere. Instead, you should focus on improving your email marketing list by encouraging your audience to visit your LinkedIn profile to learn more about your business (or, for as long as your website is under construction).
Start with crafting a personalized letter and express your gratitude to your prospects, and make sure that you state the objective of your brand/business in your personalized emails. Use LinkedIn to connect with your leads; for instance, LinkedIn is calibrated to help you reach out to 50 people at a time, so you can create an extensive list, and reach out to your leads accordingly.
As you are familiar with the structure and purpose of email marketing, create a direct link that would encourage them to sign up to your email marketing campaign, and enlist the benefits that one might expect after signing up with you.
Use sponsored updates
If you are eager to bring your LinkedIn efforts into fruition, then, it is time for you to use sponsored content/sponsored updates on LinkedIn to boost your marketing efforts. It allows businesses to publish their post to its audience’s LinkedIn feed automatically. The pay-per-click option offered by LinkedIn allows users to target their leads strategically and demographically, which should make it easier for them to diversify their marketing and advertisement needs.
When using sponsored updates, one can differentiate its audience based on a company name, job title, job function, and similar merits to obtain profitable outcomes. The users can target a relevant audience without having to mingle with irrelevant industries and leads.
Sponsored updates are integrated with a strong call-to-action message, and it should be ideal for promoting useful and convincing content to the targeted audience. Additionally, paid content will save you from the hassle of going in tandems in terms of your marketing needs, and it will help you garner the recommendable outcomes proficiently. Ask your social media manager/account manager to manage your accounts, and it should help you with enabling the growth of your business.
Post-high-quality content
If you are pursuing your audience to visit your LinkedIn profile via sponsored or non-sponsored updates—you should make sure that their visit is worth their time. If they visit your LinkedIn profile to find bland or outdated content, there is no way that they would be interested in pursuing a professional relationship with your business. However, you should post high-quality content to win their approval, and it should keep them hooked to your brand, and eventually become your client/customer.
Posting high-quality content delivers the objective of your business/branding efforts, and it convinces the idea that you are in it for a long-term, and you are ready to maintain a long-term relationship with your audience. Hire a professional content creator to create persuasive content for your profile.
Stay active on groups
Creating a LinkedIn profile is one thing, and committing yourself to your profile is another thing. You cannot simply lure in your leads by creating a prolific profile, but, you should extend your marketing efforts on LinkedIn by staying active in groups.
Just imagine this- you are invited to a tradeshow or conference meeting to discuss and potentially promote your business? Would you rather stay idle in your booth or, would you make efforts to encourage people to visit your booth and keep them engaged? Of course, you would interact and engage with the crowd to convince them to attend your booth and potentially make a purchase from your business.
Similarly, if you are going all out with your LinkedIn marketing efforts—you need to maintain your momentum of connection by engaging with similar leads via groups. It allows you to stay updated on your prospects and leads; hence, you can figure out if they want to be your client, by assessing their performance and activity in groups.
Avoid hard selling
While leads want to work with a moving and convincing company—they certainly do not want to establish relationships with anyone that bluffs about their business but, gives them nothing in return. Hard selling will only diminish the reputation of your business, and it may provoke people to think that you are too desperate to sell out.
Make sure that your marketing efforts are genuine and realistic and you are posting updates in a real-time manner, rather than shoving them down regularly. Embrace authenticity then, you are absolutely good to go.
Ultimate LinkedIn Marketing Guide: Conclusion
LinkedIn is one of the top growing social networking sites, and using it properly can help you with connecting to your leads. The esteemed platform allows the business to market their advertisement efforts on the platform that is crucial to help them grow in the industry.
If you are planning to use LinkedIn to branch out your marketing efforts then, you should team up with an expert in LinkedIn and enjoy the perks!
