LinkedIn is the most effective social media platform when it comes to business. However, it is no longer just a social network for professionals. It’s also a highly efficient advertising and lead generation platform where you can increase brand awareness, create relevant engagements, and attract a valuable workforce.
Many companies investing in social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have turned their attention to LinkedIn lately, and it seems like this increase will continue throughout 2020. Today, more than 30M companies are represented on LinkedIn. This huge number is an important indicator of success. It is clearly the favourite of actors in the B2B market (with a rate of 93%); it also provides very serious traffic, with up to 64% in corporate website visitors.
LinkedIn has more than 675M members across 200 countries, and professionals around the world are signing up to join LinkedIn at a rate of more than two new members per second.
So what kind of strategy should you follow for LinkedIn’s professional network regarding your own brand that could raise your standing to that of a thought leadership position? Let’s go through all the stages together step by step.
The number of active users on LinkedIn is impressive. If you want those users from around the world to see your business and job opportunities in your company, the first step would be creating your Company Page.
Company Pages can be described as the place to improve brand awareness, establish industry expertise, and drive business results, or more generally an HR landing page for companies. So here’s how you will build one:
First, visit the LinkedIn Marketing Solutions portal and click the “Create Your Company” button on the page.
Then you’ll select your page type which can be a Small Business, Medium to large Business, Showcase page, or Educational Institution.
The system will automatically guide you through and link you to the page on which you’ll need to upload all detailed company information from the logo, the website, or the tagline to the size and industry you are in.
Don’t forget, this step is essential as you’ll be creating your visual world and also determining the information you’ll share with visitors about your products and services. So you better try to stay focused.
The cover image will give a better understanding of your company to visitors. The cover image specs for LinkedIn Page are 1536 x 768 pixels. As LinkedIn is a professional networking medium, adding your logo as a profile picture would be more suitable. Don’t forget to use a square logo sized to 300 x 300 pixels.
As you go through and fill out the information about your company, you will also be able to view how your page is going to look like on the Page Preview section located on the right side of the page.
Once you’ve completed all the information, and are satisfied with the preview, you can simply click on the “Create Page” button and you are all set. Your page is now on LinkedIn ready to be promoted.
Managing a company profile on LinkedIn can be challenging sometimes. Especially if you try to deal with it alone. That’s why LinkedIn allows businesses to add extra admins to their pages.
Click on the “Me” icon on the top of your LinkedIn business page, choose your company under the “Manage” section. Then click “Admin Tools” and select “Page Admin.” Now you’re ready to add team members who can also manage the page. Click “Save” and you’re done.
Setting up your profile page is easy as you build it with the general information about your company. However, when it comes to creating brand awareness with a smart LinkedIn marketing strategy, you have to be more creative and act wisely.
The feed is where your content will be shown to your followers. As you can easily understand from the name, people are looking at this page because of the accurate, trendy, and informative content. 67% of LinkedIn users describe themselves as “news junkies.”So you’d better be aware of the different post types that you can benefit from and decide what you’ll share to create curiosity, draw attention, and be one step ahead of the competition.
In addition to what you are posting on your LinkedIn business profile, it is also very crucial to decide how often you’ll share something with your audience. Company Pages that share once a month have been shown to gain six times more followers. Thus, posting at least once a week would be great to feed your existing followers and gain new ones.
To make posting easy for you to track, you can use online scheduling programs like Buffer.
If you aim to grow fast by reaching out to accurate LinkedIn users who would be interested in your company, serving good content won’t be enough. Always remember that LinkedIn is a great medium for targeted marketing. You can use LinkedIn, LinkedIn ads or LinkedIn Matched Audiences.
LinkedIn Ads are the best tool to use if you want to boost your organic LinkedIn marketing efforts with some paid advertising. You can target specific job titles, industries, job functions, or company sizes with the LinkedIn PPC Ads, and you can reach people or organizations that would more likely be interested in your product or services.
You can use LinkedIn Matched Audiences Sponsored Content, Sponsored InMail, or any other LinkedIn advertising product format. By using LinkedIn Matched Audiences you can easily retarget your website visitors, reconnect with your customer database or get in touch with the decision-makers in your targeted businesses.
According to LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, employees have on average 10 times more first-degree connections than a company has followers, and companies with a strong employee advocacy program in place are 58% more likely to attract top talent and 20% more likely to keep them.
Always remember that each time an employee shares positive content about your company, it will spread out to their network as well, which would be one of the most relevant target audiences for your business.
LinkedIn Groups are also a great tool to reach other businesses and professionals related to your field. If you can manage to be an active group member, this will surely bring accurate Company Page review traffic to your business.
You can use the “search” feature which you can find at the top of your page or you can check the suggestions on your Groups page.
Today one of the most essential rules in social media marketing is being able to analyze your results. Setting up the Company Page perfectly and optimizing it and using the most relevant LinkedIn marketing tools to get in touch with your targeted audience is not enough. You should be tracking your marketing performance by using the key metrics. Here’s how:
In order for you to plan and track your social media activities (including LinkedIn) easily, take a look at our Social Media Marketing Planning Guide and learn how to create a social media marketing plan, the characteristics of the main social media channels, and some tactics for you to use in your social media marketing activities. Moreover, here’s our tool for Social Media Marketing Planning for you to practice and exercise on how to create new plans, execute them, and track them.
Here’s a wide range of Social Media Marketing tactics we have prepared for you to implement to your growth marketing activities. You can choose the tactics according to your main goals (Brand awareness + traffic generation, conversion, and retention) as well as the difficulty level (beginner, intermediate, advanced).
