As businesses face ever-tightening marketing constraints, they are always looking for ways to get the most out of budgets and time investment. The media is full of success stories of how social media is revolutionizing lead generation and sales, but if your company doesn’t have a dedicated social media team, how can you make the most out of limited resources?
LinkedIn is often overlooked as a network for marketing purposes, but with over 135 million members in 200 countries or territories, the majority of whom are professionals, LinkedIn is far more than a resume upload site. For businesses looking to connect with particular industries or specific business demographics the powerful search facilities and networking opportunities can mean that a limited marketing budget can work harder than you might think.
There is more to LinkedIn than creating a company profile and waiting for inbound traffic to soar. The following tips will help you focus on the network’s potential.
1/ Listen to your market
LinkedIn Groups can essentially provide you with free market research if you spend time browsing in the right places. Once you have identified your target market, you can search for the groups where they are discussing the sorts of problems or challenges they are facing, or learn more about how they would like to do business. For example, how do they prefer to connect to potential partners and what are they looking for? Once you have a better handle on this, you can meet them half way.
2/ Maximize your profile
Make the most of your company profile by filling in all the sections, including the keywords, which will help others to find you. Be sure to keep all links current and customize what you can. For instance, you can change the URL to be your company name, rather than a string of numbers and letters. You can also upgrade your account to allow you to do more, such as using the InMail service to contact members, get introductions to companies, and see more information on potential contacts.
3/ Make the most of what you already have
If you already feel too thinly spread on your social media platforms, don’t let that prevent you from making the most of what LinkedIn has to offer. You can use LinkedIn apps to link your blog, portfolio and other content directly into your LinkedIn feed, as well as uploading You Tube videos, Slideshare presentations and other media. You can also set your Twitter or Facebook updates to post automatically to LinkedIn, although if you do this beware of how you would like your business persona to come across: frivolous Twitter remarks may seem out of place on LinkedIn.
4/ Use LinkedIn Ads
LinkedIn Ads can offer a low-cost alternative to traditional advertising, with a potentially wider and more targeted reach, including traditionally hard-to-reach groups such as CEOs or senior decision makers. Because of the detail in LinkedIn accounts, LinkedIn Ads can specifically target your demographic by industry, geographic location, seniority, age, or by LinkedIn Group.
5/ LinkedIn Recommendations
One of the best ways to build your business’s reputation on LinkedIn is to ask for recommendations from customers, clients or business partners. Recommendations from others will show up in their profile, meaning that their own network will see it, which gives you a much wider reach than your own network. You can also use LinkedIn’s Recommendation Ads to have your recommendations placed strategically on your customers’ profiles. In LinkedIn’s words: helping your customers bring you more customers.
6/ Make the most of LinkedIn’s searches
LinkedIn has detailed search criteria in their Advanced Search, which can help you search for potential connections or other networking opportunities. As well as keywords, names, location and company, you can also search industries, groups, seniority, experience, function, company size and several other categories to allow you to target your efforts and reach contacts in a more focused way than some of the more traditional approaches.
7/ Manage your goals
It is important to realize that, as with any social network, LinkedIn is a tool for connecting, but is only as good as the way you use it. You can maximize your effort by having clear goals of what you want to achieve, whether it is numbers of client connections, hits to your website, recommendation targets, or an increased exposure with a particular demographic. Keeping your goals in mind can help you focus on where to concentrate your resources and help to create a more successful outcome.
Originally posted in AmericanExpress Open Forum
LinkedIn is a tool for connecting, but is only as good as the way you use it. Click To Tweet There is more to LinkedIn than creating a company profile and waiting for inbound traffic to soar. Click To Tweet