Social media marketing is not easy. Especially if you are not spending thousands on ads each month. Having said that, if there is one platform that provides some excellent promotional opportunities for free in 2021 – it has to be LinkedIn.
Marketers have described LinkedIn as being like “2012’s Facebook” in terms of the organic reach it affords its users. By “organic reach,” we mean the ability to reach people, including your target audience, by posting content for free. LinkedIn is said to be looking to increase its market share as a social media and content platform. For this reason, members who post regularly on the LinkedIn website or app can expect greater engagement and reach when compared to the likes of Facebook and Instagram.
LinkedIn Personal Profile
The top area – the profile picture, banner image and headline are crucial when it comes to optimizing your profile. If this area does not interest people, they won’t look at the rest of your profile and will click away.
If you want to stand out on LinkedIn, start with a good profile picture. There are nearly 600 million LinkedIn users. While that opens lots of networking and sales opportunities, it also means many people are competing for the same target audience’s attention.
Make sure that you are looking at the camera/directly ahead in your profile picture. You can head over to remove.bg to get rid of the background within the image. For the cover image for your profile, you can use a website such as Canva or fotor.com and customize one of the free LinkedIn banner templates.
Make sure your headline includes your job title, the company you own and a unique selling point. You can use pipes | or mid-dots ∙ to separate phrases or words. Look to include some keywords that will help people find you via the search function, but don’t spam them into the copy.
When you complete the “About” section, you should paint a picture of you and your business that will resonate and appeal to your target audience.
For example, include information regarding how and why you started your business. Try and make sure that your LinkedIn profile compliments any information about yourself on your website and other social media websites.
When your profile is completed, connect with LinkedIn users who are in your industry. You should also add users who are in your target audience. By adding people/connections who are in your industry, you can create a network that may help you out when it comes to generating leads. In addition, they are likely to resonate and engage with your posts, sometimes more readily than your target audience will. The more people engage with your posts; the more people will see your posts. This engagement and reach can help to establish you as an “authority” in your niche.
LinkedIn Company Page
While you can promote yourself and your business effectively using a personal profile, having a LinkedIn company profile page can be more efficient. It can often compliment the work that you do with your personal profile.
You will need a personal profile to create a company page. You will also want to have a professional-looking logo. If you don’t already have one, you can also use Canva or a freelancing website such as Fiverr or PeoplePerHour and search for “logo design.”
You will also require a banner or cover image. This cover image is a visual representation of your brand – similar to a banner advertisement. Make sure the image represents what your company does, and above all else, make sure it looks professional.
Choose your “button” carefully as well. At the time of writing, you can add a call to action button. The button appears right at the top of the company page, and you can choose from:
– Contact us
– Learn More
– Register
– Sign up
– Visit website
If you want potential clients to get in touch with you, it is usually best to choose “Contact us” instead of “Visit website” as the action is much more direct.
Creating a company page using your laptop or desktop computer is more straightforward than using a mobile phone. Log in to LinkedIn and then click “Work” near the top right-hand side of the navigation bar at the top of the screen. In the pop-up menu, click “Create a Company Page +.”
The process from there on, is straightforward, but here is a step-by-step YouTube tutorial that you can follow.
Having a company page allows you to promote your products and services. It also makes it a lot easier to run paid advertising campaigns on LinkedIn. You can also reach out to LinkedIn Advertising Agency to run your ads for you. You can also create “events” and engage with your followers.
Identify Your Target Audience
It is essential for any type of marketing; to know who your target audience and “ideal customer persona” are.
Before you go out and start researching, however, first identify what problem or problems your product or service is solving. For example, Moneypenny is a phone answering service provider that solves the problems of missed calls and unwanted interruptions.
Once you know how you can help people, you need to define your target audience’s age, gender, location, interests, characteristics, job roles, and income. If you’re in the business-to-business space, consider the companies you should be targeting, where they are located, how much their annual turnover is, etc.
If you are looking for companies of a specific size and annual profit, the best way to target them on LinkedIn would be to look at the employee numbers.
Identify the Issues & Pain Points
Once you know who you are targeting, you need to get inside their heads a little by looking at relevant groups and forums online. Find out where your target audience hangs out online, what LinkedIn groups, Facebook groups and Reddit forums.
Make a note of any recurring topics and themes. For example, if your target market is small business owners, many tend to ask questions about social media marketing and SEO.
When you identify the interests, issues and pain points that keep them up at night, it might be worthing heading over to Amazon. Add some keywords into the book section’s search bar and see what titles are the best sellers. You can also look at the reviews and see what type of feedback the books are getting. This will give you some ideas for content and posts to use on LinkedIn.
Post Content Regularly
Now that you know your target audience and their interests, you can create content and social media posts that resonate with them.
Create content including videos, copy and images that address your target audience’s pain points and promote your company’s value propositions and selling points.
Videos tend to do well on LinkedIn. There are fewer videos on the platform than images and text posts, so grabbing the user’s attention is easier. Be sure to add captions to your videos using an app such as Varicella. Be sure to upload your videos directly to the LinkedIn website or app, do not post links to YouTube. LinkedIn wants to keep people on their website and not on YouTube or any other external sites, so posting external links will reduce a post’s reach.
It can be best for each of your propositions to create a post that utilizes each possible format – a video, an image, a text post, and, if relevant, a document. You want to keep the adverts fresh and eye-catching. Incorporating different ad formats into your designs will help them grab the attention of LinkedIn users and prevent banner-blindness. If you have a small target audience or you are targeting employees of a specific company, then showing them the same ad, over and over, will tend to be less effective than mixing the ads up with different media formats.
Conclusion
Successfully using LinkedIn to build a small business’s brand and to generate leads takes a lot of work. However, the great thing about social media is that it can often have a cross-over with content marketing. For example, you can create a video and upload it to YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram. You can also edit the video and post smaller clips and soundbites, as well as GIFs, memes and images. These videos and images can then be used to provide the foundation for a post on your company blog.
Be sure to engage with other people and page’s LinkedIn posts and keep your content regular, interesting, inspirational and/or entertaining. Try not to constantly promote your business with every post – instead, make at least 70% of your posts helpful to your target audience.
