Introduction
LinkedIn can be best described as a social network with features designed to benefit the business community as a whole. The main goal of this social network is to connect its members on a professional level.
Just like any other social networking site, LinkedIn allows people to join for free and to create a social profile. Whereas other social networks are mostly designed as billboards for people’s interests, hobbies, everyday moments and thoughts, LinkedIn is designed to highlight career related information.
LinkedIn profiles emphasize information such as professional or labor skills, employment history and education. Also, unlike common social networking sites, social contacts are not called followers or friends, but “connections”, as to establish a professional tone to interactions made by people on the platform.
These connections allow members to connect with people with whom they have worked, gone to school with, or with people that they know on a professional level, whether online or offline.
The big advantage that LinkedIn offers to its regular users is that it allows them to be discovered by companies looking for employees thanks to the massive amount of data that LinkedIn users provide the platform with, including job titles, geographical locations, skillsets, industry information and much more.
On a purely practical level, this means that users looking for new career options as well as for ways to expand their professional reach can use LinkedIn as a great platform to boost their efforts because it is a powerful way to connect with employers as well as with other people that might help them to learn a lot more about their own career path.
And much like on Facebook, users can customize their LinkedIn accounts so they are served only the best career related info, including personalized job listings.
Also, a LinkedIn profile is currently valued like a well-crafted resume, and lots of people have had success in using the platform to find their dream jobs!
LinkedIn can also be used as a great educational resource, as lots of famous business people have LinkedIn profiles that any user can follow to find helpful tips from the most seasoned of professionals from around the world.
So now you know that LinkedIn is a great platform to kick start a professional career and to find the perfect job without ever leaving your house, but what if you are already running your own company? How can LinkedIn help you grow your business? We are glad you asked, because we are going to give you the answer in our next chapter!
What can LinkedIn do for your Business?
Ok, so it is obvious by now that LinkedIn represents a major shift in what the social media revolution offered to the public because it showed people that it was completely possible to create a social marketing platform that could be as user friendly as it was serious.
Not only because it got away with the “trivial” nature of every other social media platform and allowed people to use their social profiles as online resumes for free, because it also allowed companies to establish an online presence that didn’t have anything to do with entertaining their social audience.
And you can thank this to the fact that, perhaps inadvertently, LinkedIn slowly became a sort of data rich environment, a place containing the type of information about the modern job market that companies would have paid millions to just peek at.
And that is perhaps why, in 2016, Microsoft paid almost $27 billion for it. What does it say about its potential to drive business then? Let us provide you a few reasons why we think that your business will benefit from being on LinkedIn.
You can use LinkedIn to hire the best talent on the net
LinkedIn is a great place for job seekers to find their dream job precisely because it is also a great place for businesses and companies of all sizes to attract the best talent and to recruit the best employees from the world’s largest talent pool.
Businesses can access recruiting tools that will allow them to post jobs to target the right candidates for the job offered, to find and source active as well as passive talent and to seize the collection of skills offered by these talents to further build their brands.
You can use LinkedIn as a marketing platform
And best of all, as a marketing platform to reach the largest professional audience in the world. You can easily reach the best fit for your business so you can further develop your brand, increase your visibility and make new business connections possible.
Marketing options on LinkedIn are pretty varied, and they include powerful promotional tools such as sponsored content that can reach people on any device, dynamic ads to market to professionals on the go, and display ads for those doing their job at the office, among others.
You can use LinkedIn to Sell
LinkedIn can increase your commercial potential by providing you with a platform that is designed to drive social selling efforts with real time sales intelligence. And what this means is that LinkedIn is backing an entire platform with non-intrusive sales solutions.
You can use LinkedIn as a learning platform
LinkedIn is a professionally oriented platform, which makes education its second nature. As such, you can use LinkedIn to keep your team’s skillset up to date with current educational and developmental trends.
The workplace learning tools offered by LinkedIn will help your team to develop two of the most valued skills in the current and future industries: people management and soft skills, which include creativity and communication.
LinkedIn learning tools will also help your company to close the gap between soft and technical skills, which will help your company to become a business of the future! With over 10,000 online training and development courses available, LinkedIn is the perfect platform for ongoing professional development.
What else can your business benefit from by being on LinkedIn?
- You can create shareable content that can help you connect with a wide professional audience.
- You can create content with the potential to add value to people’s professional lives, which can easily create engagement and foster a following for your company on the platform.
- LinkedIn offers you multiple ways to feed information to its members by allowing you to post content using slide shares for business presentations, blog posts, infographics, webinars, podcasts and videos. You will just have to choose which ones are the best fits for your audience.
- LinkedIn will not hinder your efforts to provide your audience with relevant content, and you will be able to post as many times as your content allows you to. In fact, LinkedIn encourages businesses to release quality content as much as possible!
- You can use your company profile to drive more sales for products and services that your company develops. You will just have to tell your potential customers about their benefits!
- You can use your business profile to differentiate yourself from your competition. Sharing news and information about your company culture on a regular basis can easily help you to establish a company
- Your employees can use their LinkedIn profiles to enhance your company’s visibility, as engaged and satisfied employees are a great way to communicate healthy social proof!
LinkedIn Marketing Facts to Consider
We live in a world that is becoming more and more interconnected with each passing day. New technologies and ways to implement it are now the norm, and they’re changing people’s lives in a way that was simply unthinkable of in previous years.
One of those technologies is social media, which allowed people from all around the globe to connect on a very personal basis regardless of distance, and the best part is that the implementation of social media in everyday life is pretty much multidimensional.
And you can thank this to the fact that social media was not monopolized by neither of the social networking companies in the market because each one of them plays on a different field, and each one offers its users a different set of features.
But the good news for marketers and company owners like you and us is that each platform is designed to drive business quite efficiently, which is more practical when you consider that LinkedIn is a business oriented platform. Here are some LinkedIn marketing facts to start your day!
- A whopping 70% of LinkedIn users are from outside the US. You wouldn’t think that this number could be relevant until you consider that such a large number of demographics from outside the United States can allow you reach a global minded, international audience that can help you to understand overseas
- 41% of millionaires from around the world use LinkedIn, which means that the next investor to inject some financial aid to your business can be just around the corner!
- 79% of business to business marketers consider that social media, especially LinkedIn, is an effective marketing channel for any type of business.
- In fact, nowadays 80% of business to business leads are generated on LinkedIn
- 43% of marketers have said that they have sourced customers from LinkedIn, which is a really big number when you take into account that LinkedIn is mostly geared towards employers and job
- A cool 49% of the traffic going to company websites comes from LinkedIn, which is a significant portion considering how many social networks are sharing the market with LinkedIn. This also means that 49% of traffic going to company websites is already qualified for doing business!
- 94% of business to business marketers use LinkedIn to distribute content, and on average, 10 pieces of that content are consumed by users before they make a purchasing decision, which means that your content has to be relevant enough as to break the 10 piece mark!
- 39% of LinkedIn users pay for a premium subscription, which means that almost 40% of users are willing to pay for exclusive content and connections.
- Men are statistically more likely to use LinkedIn than women, with 32% of LinkedIn members being men against 21% of female members, which means that you should be wise when designing your marketing campaigns
- This fact should come as a no brainer, but it bears relevance nonetheless, and it is worthy of being shared: While social networks such as Facebook and twitter are mostly used to share topics like sports and celebrity news, LinkedIn is strictly used to share two specific types of news: business and professional news.
What does this means for your business? That while you can easily attract traffic by sharing entertaining news on other social networks, there is simply no point in sharing similar news on LinkedIn. Instead, your marketing has to focus on content that is relevant to industries and business activities.
- Only 23% of LinkedIn members use the site on a daily basis, with over 50% of members using it on a weekly basis, sometimes less. This might be because of the professionally focused, busy nature of most LinkedIn users, but regardless of the cause you have to plan your LinkedIn marketing around non-daily reactions.
- LinkedIn is the largest professional database on the planet, with way more business information than any other site on the planet! That is because LinkedIn is home to over 3 million company pages and 300 million professional
The best part is that you will only need to use the search function to make use of this information, which can save your business a small fortune on data analysis and research.
- There are over 200 conversations per minute occurring on LinkedIn groups at any given time, which means that whatever your business goal is, you have to leverage this reach through your business.
LinkedIn Walkthrough
Ok, so you are now realizing that LinkedIn is an amazingly designed social media platform that is perfect for professionals, business owners and decision makers across any industry, and you’re convinced about the benefits of getting yourself a LinkedIn profile.
And as with any other social networking site that you join, you’ll have to go beyond your profile if you really want to learn anything that you can use it for. In this video we are going to show you everything that you will find on LinkedIn while signed into your account.
The first thing that you will be greeted with when you log into your LinkedIn account is your LinkedIn feed, which also serves as the “home” section of your LinkedIn account, as clicking on the “home” button on the dashboard menu from any other section will take you here.
Linkedin Business Solutions
Talent Solutions
LinkedIn is, as you might have seen by now, a platform that takes great pride in the way that it allows companies and businesses of all sizes to get in touch with the type of talent that represents the greatest fit for proper organizational development.
So one of the greatest reasons why your business will greatly benefit from having a presence on the largest professional networking platform is because it can provide you with the best variety of recruiting tools that will allow you to meet your next hire.
LinkedIn talent solutions offer talent seekers three types of solutions. You can start with job postings that target the right type of candidate for any job and then to find qualified applicants that can accelerate your hiring efforts.
You can post jobs by simply signing up to use LinkedIn as an employer, and you can hire up to two hires a year with a free account, but if you plan to hire more than three hires a year you can contact LinkedIn to request the feature that will allow you to swap more than three job slots at a time!
Marketing Solutions
LinkedIn is a great platform when it comes to nurturing a very important marketing factor known as outreach. Outreach, is the marketing practice of looking for individuals and organizations that can be interested in what a marketer or business has to offer, be it a product, a service or a business idea.
Doing marketing outreach on social media has become commonplace because social networking platforms make it easier for people and companies to reach people where they are most likely to hang out the most, and social media offers marketers the benefit of narrowing lead qualifying criteria thanks to targeted placements such as groups and company pages.
And because you are using LinkedIn for outreach, it might be a little easier to find the right prospects and clients simply because you already know what people are looking for. Yet this organic approach to outreach has its own inherent limitations, and LinkedIn offers you the right type of marketing solutions that will help you to avoid being hindered by limitations.
And what we mean by this is that LinkedIn gives you access to the right tools that will help you to easily direct your marketing to who matters the most so you can reach your ideal customers right on the largest professional network in the world.
Sales Solutions
LinkedIn is a place where anything that is business related comes and goes, and sales are no different. Because, in the end, what really matters is to use LinkedIn as a platform to close: to close connections, to close deals, to close a hiring interview, or to close sales.
That is why LinkedIn has made a great, significant effort into creating a sales solution for its more business oriented users, one which will allow them to get started in the world of social selling through a series of powerful ways to engage with potential buyers on the platform.
But before looking at the product offered as LinkedIn’s sales solution, the following questions are worth answering: what is social selling and why is it important to integrate into your marketing plan?
Social selling is the act of using social media to drive sales by interacting directly with prospects on their preferred communication channel, which in our case is LinkedIn. And social marketing is important because it allows salespeople to drive 45% more business opportunities, it makes them 51% more likely to reach their sales quota and it also makes them 78% more successful than sellers that do not use social media.
Learning Solutions
Becoming a professional takes years of education, but a university title alone won’t be enough once you enter the workforce because what makes a dedicated professional is real world expertise acquired from ongoing, continuous learning.
That is why LinkedIn has devised a series of Learning Solutions that can be accessed through its platform and through third party efforts that have transformed the world of online education over the past decades.
The benefits obtained by businesses using LinkedIn’s on demand learning solutions include soft and people management skills training that will allow them to develop managers and leaders among their talent, the merging of soft and technical skills on a practical level and a boost of employee productivity of up to 50%!
These learning solutions are available for businesses that want to develop improved leadership positions on their teams, including the development of managers and leaders at all levels, to adapt to the job market of the future by up-skilling their entire workforce through education, to keep their employees more productive by teaching them to be comfortable around digital tools and to accelerate career development among their employees.
Marketing on LinkedIn
LinkedIn Company Pages
LinkedIn might be a pretty different social networking site targeted at a pretty specific audience and with a very specific set of features as well, but at its very core it’s still a social networking site nonetheless. This means that it still shares some social features with the rest of social networking sites.
But because this is LinkedIn we are talking about, we can expect to see a significant spin on how these features are presented and on the way that they serve the platform’s members. Such is the case with the feature called “company pages” which is LinkedIn’s version of social media fan pages.
Company pages are designed beyond the scope of simply sharing what you like with others and as such they work specifically to help you grow your company’s presence on LinkedIn and in turn on the internet landscape overall. The good news is that getting started with company pages on LinkedIn is an easy, straightforward process packed with a lot of benefits for your business.
It all starts with you creating a free company page on LinkedIn, and the only requirements is that you have a LinkedIn account and a valid email address so LinkedIn can verify that you are apt to create a company page for your business.
Secondly you’ll have to customize your company profile to give it its proper professional look and feel. LinkedIn recommends you to start by giving your company page a cover image and a logo to bring it to life. The logo that you use on your company page will appear on search results when people search for your company, and will also appear on the profile of your employees for an improved corporate presence.
Once your company page is ready you will be ready to start attracting followers by adding links to promote your LinkedIn company page by linking it through your emails, blogs, websites, and through any other source and placement that you use to bring online traffic to your business.
LinkedIn Groups
One of the most recognizable things about any social media platform is groups. Groups are the way that social media users employ to share their common interest in a more direct way because it allows them to post any type of content for other like minded individuals in a single place.
Groups on LinkedIn are no different, and they are all about allowing like minded professionals to share the highlights of their trades, and these groups are of special interest to LinkedIn members because they are places where all kinds of career and business related information is shared in a more personal way.
LinkedIn members can access groups and group oriented features by going to the “work” tab on the LinkedIn account dashboard and clicking on the “groups” button. There they will find their group’s feed, which is aptly called the group’s highlights section.
Advertise on LinkedIn
One of the things that makes LinkedIn an awesomely unique social media platform is its targeted approach at making itself useful for a very specific audience, this audience being made up of professionals and business managers from all locations and demographics.
This is especially good news for marketers, and while it might be true that organic reach on LinkedIn is amazing as it already is, there is also a very large degree of truth to the fact that paid advertising can play a huge part on widening your reach on the platform.
The good news is that LinkedIn offers its own native advertising solutions. That said, by advertising on LinkedIn, you will be able to reach your ideal customers on the largest professional network on the planet.
Smart Ways to Get Leads on LinkedIn
Building a healthy pipeline of quality leads can be quite hard to achieve no matter where you are doing your marketing. But generating a good number of leads and referrals from any source doesn’t have to be a daunting task, especially when you are doing it the right way.
That is why we have decided to show you the best ways to generate lots of leads to your business on LinkedIn, and we are going to do so in this video, where you will learn how to find, target and engage leads on the largest social platform for professionals.
Use the LinkedIn search function to identify qualifying leads
You don’t generate leads by simply getting likes and comments, you get leads by connecting with the right audience. On LinkedIn, this means targeting the members the right way using the type of filters that will allow you to identify the best prospective individuals.
These filters include job titles, company roles, industry, and locations. Identifying the best prospects through these attributes will help you to only target those professionals that are more likely to understand the benefits offered by your product, service or business model.
Use LinkedIn to Connect with Qualifying Website Visitors
One of the greatest ways to tell when a lead can become a qualifying customer is when you can identify them through their browsing behavior. Specifically, you should be looking for people that visit your website as a sign of leads interested in your business.
Luckily, LinkedIn allows you to use a pixel code that you can add to your website, and you can use it to identify people that click through your website link from your profile or company page, which can help you to directly get in touch with these already qualifying leads. You can find this code and track your visitors from the “see who’s viewed my profile” section.
How to do Affiliate Marketing on LinkedIn
If you are among those that doesn’t do affiliate marketing or, god forbid, still doesn’t know what affiliate marketing is all about, please keep watching this video, because we are going to blow your mind with what we are about to show you.
Affiliate marketing, is marketing that is done to promote a product or service that you as a marketer don’t stock on a retail level, but that you market to get a share of the profits made when the product sells through your own promotional efforts.
Affiliate marketing has become one of the favorite marketing methods of online marketers because it allows them to use their preferred outreach channels to offer prospective buyers stuff that is hard to resist.
And sometimes, just sometimes, affiliate marketing doesn’t work for some people, and it is all because of their approach at promoting a product the wrong way, on the wrong channel. One such channel is social media, and in this chapter we are going to give you a leg up and help you to do affiliate marketing the right way on the LinkedIn platform!
Join Affiliate Marketing Groups
Using groups on LinkedIn is one of the best strategies if what you want is to achieve success with anything that you do on LinkedIn, and affiliate marketing is no exception!
Groups are great for making information exchange easier, and this includes information that can help you to land some sweet affiliate deals.
Start by looking for affiliate marketing groups, which is easy to do, as you would only need to use affiliate related keywords or niche keywords. Affiliate marketing groups are a great source of knowledge because they’re a home to experienced affiliate marketers, and affiliate posts don’t look like spam in these groups.
Using the LinkedIn Feed for Market Research
LinkedIn is not only a platform to do marketing but also a place to find information about doing your marketing. Just like on any other social media platform, LinkedIn can give you access to a powerful depository of market information through its content discovery channels.
And just like on basically any other social networking site, this content discovery channel can be found right after you sign into your account, in the form of the updates feed. On LinkedIn, this feed follows a different approach because, while it might be used to share updates from the platform and its members, it does so only with serious, relevant content.
Small business resources to help you get more out of LinkedIn
Everybody knows that, besides hard work and something great to offer, having the right type of relationships is the real key to business success, and LinkedIn has the right set of resources that can help any type of small business to get started.
After all, both small and normal sized businesses can use LinkedIn to build a brand that connects with the right type of people. A strong brand is what will help you to find and to be found by the best prospects.
The good news is that building a solid branding strategy that can attract more business opportunities on LinkedIn is as easy as creating a profile that can show others that you are an expert, which will get you noticed.
Then you will just have to expand your network and connect with business contacts that can help you to be more successful by creating new contacts and relationships that will take you further into your ventures.
Going Premium with LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a great platform for business, no doubt about that. You can use it to maximize your chances of succeeding in your career or to find prospective clients, or to find funding for that awesome new business project of yours, one that you are sure will make headlines someday soon!
Everything that we just said is not praise that comes out of thin air because you already saw that you can achieve all of that stuff by simply creating a LinkedIn account and doing your homework. But can you improve on that? Yeah! You totally can by going premium, which you can do by clicking on the “Try Premium for free” link on your dashboard menu.
Now, when you go Premium you will be able to access LinkedIn features the same way that you would be able to on your normal, non-premium account, but with each one of them turned up to eleven and on turbo mode.
Additional Tips to consider
Do’s and Don’ts
As with any business venture that you decide to partake in, LinkedIn marketing and doing business on LinkedIn has its recommended practices and its things to avoid. Most marketers have to learn all of them the hard way through trial and error, but we have created this video so you can get it right from the get go!
Do’s
Do keep your profiles and company pages professional. Remember that both are crucial because they are designed to foster a community around your business, your products, and your services, and they’re also the very first thing that people will find when they are looking for your brand.
Do optimize your company pages for search engines. The company pages not only have to be tidy and professional looking, they also have to be functional, so remember to use your targeted keywords in the “about” section of your page, as this section is indexed by search engines.
Do participate on LinkedIn groups and discussions. This will not only help you to engage with your audience, but it will also help you to learn what is being said about your brand, your niche, your products, services, and about your competition.
Do make use of rich media to share your content. Professionals not only love it when relevant content is served through videos, presentations and well-crafted articles, it also helps them to perceive the messenger as an authority in the subject matter, so make sure to create relevant content that is well presented.
Don’ts
Don’t focus your LinkedIn marketing efforts on selling, ever. LinkedIn is a platform where people go to establish professional connections, and any sales approach will immediately put them off. If you want to sell on LinkedIn, focus on offering value first!
Don’t join just any LinkedIn group just because you can. Doing this will not only detract your time and effort from where they should be focused on, it will also make your company look like a scam. Focus instead only on groups that are specific to your industry.
Don’t forget to be proactive. What happens after you join a group on LinkedIn? You become an authority, that’s what. But you have to put in the effort by participating constantly, in a natural way. This will do wonders for your marketing efforts because people will gravitate to your brand thanks to its vocal, interactive nature.
Premium tools and Services to consider
LinkedIn in itself can be considered one of the most powerful marketing tools available in recent memory because it allows you to smoothly run your promotional campaigns on the very first social network targeted at professionals, which can immensely widen the reach of your business by the very nature of the audience that you’ll be able to serve content to on the platform.
But because LinkedIn is so good at allowing you to do that one single thing, to market to a professional audience, you would greatly benefit from integrating third party functionality to your LinkedIn marketing. The following is a list of premium tools and services that can help you to up the ante!
LinkedIn Dominator
The LinkedIn Dominator is a one of a kind automation tool for LinkedIn marketers, a tool that will allow you to easily build marketing lists with a very powerful and intuitive piece of software. In other words, it will allow you to reach the over 300 million registered users in the platform if that is your aim, the easy way.
LinkedInDominator is an efficient tool that you can use to manage and automate your LinkedIn marketing campaigns and efforts. For example, it can help you to gather data that can be essential to your social marketing campaigns on the LinkedIn platform. LinkedInDominator does this by simply scraping data from search URLs and with the use of filters.
LinkedInDominator can also add connections to your account on autopilot to increase your marketing success. It can easily send automated invitations either through email or through keyword searches.
LinkedInDominator can also help you to manage multiple accounts the right way by loading multiple accounts from within a single URL and by deleting or swapping inactive or irrelevant accounts from your inventory.
Also, as you might know, groups are vital to your marketing plans, and on account of this LinkedInDominator can automate your group status updates, to use filters to track and invite new members to your groups and to remove unwanted group members.
Case Studies
The following are the stories of some of the businesses and marketers that have successfully used LinkedIn as a platform to launch their online campaigns and have reached their goals in the process, even surpassing their initial expectations by a long shot. Use them as inspiration to keep growing!
Aspect
Aspect is a company specialized in customer satisfaction software. Their primary product is the delivery of great software based solutions that help companies of all sizes to deliver seamless, uncompromising customer experiences across any conversation and channel.
The company stated that their main objective was to promote thought leadership oriented content to decision makers in the IT and customer experience industries. They also wanted to attract more qualifying traffic to their company website and blog.
The Company made use of LinkedIn’s marketing platform to perform their duties by using Promoted Content advertising to promote white papers, webinars and infographics. They mainly targeted job titles, from IT managers and above.
The results were amazing to say the least, with an increase of over 322% in engagement on LinkedIn, a 290% increase in traffic to the company’s website and blog, and a 17% increase in the number of followers on their company page!
Bynder
Bynder is a software company focused on delivery only the highest quality when it comes to digital asset management, branding automation and marketing solutions. It offers companies the right tools to easily create, find and use the right type of content.
When Bynder launched their award winning digital asset management platform in 2013, they faced the challenge of having to compete with entities that were established, so their objective was to generate a healthy amount of sales leads amongst enterprise-level prospects.
Frequently Asked Questions
Awesome, so now you have completed the whole circle and have learned how to operate the LinkedIn for Business platform on your own, but it might happen that you will find yourself in need of a helping hand along the way on things that may only surface while you grow in the platform.
Thinking about that, we have designed a frequently asked questions video with a curated list of questions that are frequently asked even by advanced “LinkedIn for Business” users, so let’s take a look at some of the things that you can be prepared to solve the easy way some time in the future.
Is it a good idea to include contact information in the “Name” or in the headline information fields on LinkedIn? Will that increase your chances at getting more connections?
You can do that because it isn’t something that goes against LinkedIn’s terms of service, but you shouldn’t do it because, on one hand, it looks pretty unprofessional. In fact, doing that will make your profiles and company pages look like outright scams.
On the other hand, it reduces the space that you should be dedicating to keywords that can actually help your business to be found, and that can also help your pages to improve their search engine rankings.
Is it a good practice to include your contact information even when you have a company page for your business already populated with information about your business?
Yes, your contact information should be part of your profile. Remember that you are on LinkedIn to widen your business’ reach, and your contact information is a great way to organically market yourself as a representative of your business.
Of course, this contact information should be through your own business to further increase the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. To give you an example, the email address in your profile should be under the domain name of your business website and not under a generic email provider such as Gmail.
Another example is your phone number, which should be your work phone and not your personal phone number.
Including this information in your profile also increases your business’ visibility on search engines because it is indexed from your LinkedIn profile, from your Company pages and from your company website. This is organic marketing in its purest form!
