How Small Businesses Can Get the Best Out of LinkedIn Marketing?

Developing a business takes a lot of skills and effort but most importantly it needs connections; connections in the form of customers, mentors, employees, and peers who can assist you through your business development journey. And what better platform to build such connections than LinkedIn. According to statistics as of June 2019; 630 million people use LinkedIn throughout the world.

This makes LinkedIn one of the most popular places where businessmen and professionals connect with each other and share ideas. In this post, we will go over some essential LinkedIn Marketing Strategies that can help your business grow and expand.

1. Brand building using LinkedIn –

Brand building is an important part of any marketing strategy. LinkedIn is the perfect platform for you to showcase and display your expertise so that the target customers can know, trust and connect with your brand. As a small business, you must create a personal profile as well as a company page on LinkedIn. This will showcase your business in a professional light when someone finds you on LinkedIn or through Google Search.

You must keep in mind that your personal profile and company page are created in such a manner that profile visitors can quickly understand who you aim to serve and what you are offering. To further increase the credibility of your profile and skills you must aim to get Recommendations and Skill Endorsements from your connections. In fact, as a small business, you must aim to increase your number of LinkedIn recommendations to at least five.

2. Establishing a presence on LinkedIn

For your small business to connect and develop relations on LinkedIn it is important that people trust and believe in your business. Such trust and reputation can only be developed by showcasing your skills and talents and making sure that the customers know that. You must thus curate and post relevant content that establishes your problem-solving abilities and highlights all the salient features of your business. You can also post status updates or long-form articles via LinkedIn Publisher. Your content should be 100% client-focused and should be updated regularly.

In fact, if it fits your marketing budget you must use sponsored updates to target the specific industry and companies that form your target audience. This will allow you to ensure that your target audience is aware of your presence and will boost your LinkedIn Marketing efforts.

3. Generating new Prospects and Clients –

For every business, their foremost objective is getting more business and generating greater sales. After you have secured a presence on LinkedIn, you can now start searching for opportunities to generate new connections and possibly convert them into clients. Start this process by searching for the job titles of your ideal clients (i.e., Sales Manager, Creative Director, Graphic Designer, etc.) in LinkedIn’s Advanced Search. Surf through the lists and search for genuine results. Once you point a prospect it is now time to determine how to connect with them.

If you have any mutual connections then your best bet would be to get this connection to introduce you to the prospect. With you sharing mutual connection there is a five times greater chance of you engaging this prospect. On the other hand, if there are no mutual connections you can directly contact the prospect. Remember such conversation should be extremely to the point and formal and must answer the prospect’s curiosity.

4. Building your Network –

One of the LinkedIn marketing strategies that people miss out on is the chance to communicate with other businesses having similar target audiences and/or complementary products and services. LinkedIn is the best place to connect with such strategic partners and enhance our co-operation with them. You can start out by reaching out to people you know or have worked with and soon you will be able to make a wide network of connections.

You can search for potential partners using LinkedIn’s Advanced Search option. When you find an interesting match, send them a connection request, and start a conversation by showing interest in their business. You can also follow different hashtags that are relevant to your business and connect in various Groups in order to establish and develop your network.

5. Keeping up with the Latest Trends-

It can be challenging to keep pace with the latest trends and news that affect your business. On LinkedIn there are numerous ways you can keep track of industry changes, some of them are:

• Read your News Feed – You can get all the latest news about your concerned business in the news feed. In fact, you can filter it according to ‘top’ and ‘recent’ results.
• Follow thought Leaders and Influencers – Following industry leaders is also a good way of keeping up with how the industry is transforming and how it’s going to affect you.
• Follow Companies and Organizations – following large and popular organizations give you an insight into the latest news. ​
• Follow #Hashtags – Following hashtags most commonly used by individuals, companies, and organizations in your industry on LinkedIn will populate your news stream with such topics for you.

Conclusion-

Running small businesses is a challenging task but with the right tools and strategies, you can develop and gain a competitive advantage over your peers. This is where LinkedIn comes in.

From networking to placements, LinkedIn is an extremely valuable resource that can transform the way you do business and with whom you do business. To know more about LinkedIn Marketing Strategies Contact us on [email protected]. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

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