Social media plays a crucial role in the growth and connections of a startup company. It introduces activities to companies that can help them penetrate their relative industry sector.
However, most startups use social media channels like Facebook and Instagram to reach their target audience. However, they still need to leverage the best features of LinkedIn to connect with their industry peers and grow accordingly.
As a small startup, rather than focusing on building relationships with the customers you would sell your products or services to, you should cultivate friendly and transactional relationships with your industry peers in order to stand out in the industry. Being a part of a thriving business community is critical to the success of your brand and connects you to an audience that may be interested in funding your business.
The point is, building relationships with your peers in the industry is just as meaningful as building relationships with your customers. You can't just follow their social media pages to show your solidarity for their business and expect them to do the same. However, you need to follow them on a professional platform like LinkedIn to become part of their inner circle.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
- Introduction
- Setting up your LinkedIn Company Profile
- Understanding the Algorithm of LinkedIn
- How Should You Advertise On Your LinkedIn Business Profile?
- Analyzing metrics on your LinkedIn Business Profile
- Role of LinkedIn in Improving the Marketability of your Business
- Conclusion
Introduction
Reid Hoffman founded LinkedIn in 2002 and it has become one of the most well-known online networking platforms. With more than 562 million users, LinkedIn focuses on building connections and networks between industry peers so companies can grow in their respective niches and industries. LinkedIn offers up to 20 languages for both local and international companies to explore their communities and network.
When you run a small business, everyone is willing to take measurements to take their business to the next level. Knowing everything is not the foundation of a business, however, should maintain connections with your peers to achieve favorable success. After all, it's not about what you know, it's about who you know in the industry.
The commercial use of LinkedIn is of great importance. It allows you to explore existing connections and enable the success and growth of your business through word of mouth. In addition, LinkedIn is a proven way to generate leads for your business.
Most companies don't invest much in their LinkedIn profiles and simply add unattractive and boring statements to their profiles, which doesn't seem favorable to their target audience. If you are serious about lead generation through your LinkedIn page, you should create a detailed company page and add the relevant information you need to know about your business. It would also help you grow your audience and get favorable business results.
Hootsuite has speculated that complete and clear company pages are likely to receive twice as many visitors compared to blank or incomplete profiles. Therefore, before joining LinkedIn, make sure your company profile is error-free and easy to read.
In this ultimate marketing guide, you'll learn how to create a business profile for your LinkedIn account and leverage the networking platform's critical lead generation features. We'll also discuss how to develop an infallible LinkedIn strategy for your business.
Setting up your LinkedIn Company Profile
Preparing a company profile or company page is a first step in creating your LinkedIn profile. This way, your followers and visitors can learn more about your company, your job opportunities, your team members, your brand, and even your subsidiaries.
Creating professional company pages is a proven way to venture into a technical field and allows you to differentiate your strengths from your weaknesses. Also, make sure that your company profile is not the same as the information normally found on the "About" page of your website.
It would only defeat the purpose of having a LinkedIn profile. Therefore, you should work with a strategist to develop content for your company profile.
When creating a company profile, make sure to use bullet points frequently to capture your company's strengths and core values. Don't use filler words to describe your business; use a formal tone to speak directly about your company.
Read on to learn how to set up a LinkedIn company profile. You can register / sign up using your regular email address. However, if you have your company's email address, it is recommended that you use it to create a profile instead.
You will receive business-related leads and notifications via the email address used for registration. Follow the given steps to create a profile on LinkedIn:
Step-1: Add your company
Adding your company to your profile is one of the main requirements. You can use the LinkedIn Marketing Solutions portal to activate the company page. Click on "Create company page" to start the process.
Enter your company's official name and type your company's URL into LinkedIn's search bar.
Remember that this URL will be used to promote your business, so it cannot be swapped or replaced later in the future. So don't be in a hurry to choose a suitable URL for your company's profile. Then click on "Create page" and you're ready to go.
You will proceed to the next stage of the process where you can start adding your company details to the profile field. Now click on "First steps" to make the necessary changes to your profile.
Step-2: Add a logo and cover image to your profile
Make sure your profile includes your company's logo and vision to represent your business profile. It also indicates that your profile is authentic and legitimate.
Choosing a cover image will give your profile a professional touch by making your profile look partially complete. The size of the cover image should be approximately 1536 x 768 pixels.
If you use LinkedIn to network professionally with your industry peers, consider adding your company's logo to the profile picture area instead of using your picture.
You can also link the URL of your professional LinkedIn profile to your company's LinkedIn profile. However, you should avoid using your image in your company profile. The size of the profile picture should be approximately 300 x 300 pixels.
You should not skip this step at any cost. Regardless of how intriguing your company's profile is, not having a cover image and logo can be unprofessional.
Adding an image to the empty areas is guaranteed to increase your profile's traffic by six times.
Step-3: Create a description for your company
With LinkedIn, you don't have enough characters / words to talk about your business. Instead, you should be able to write down all the points in 2,000 characters, which is 500-550 words.
Your business profile should not say everything about your business, but should highlight the key features of your business and send a message to your potential followers and audience.
Don't write boring lines in your profile, but you should consider working with a team of professionals to create a professional and impressive message for your profile.
Make sure you use your profile's meta description carefully, as it appears in Google Preview when someone searches for your LinkedIn profile through a search engine.
A meta description can contain up to 156 characters and should be enough to convince someone to open your LinkedIn profile without a second thought.
To diversify the description of your business, you can add specialties that describe your business to your potential audience. You can add up to 20 specialties to the profile and use them as keywords or tags to get profitable results.
While many people consider eliminating this step, you should add up to 3-5 specialties to your profile.
Step-4: Add your company's miscellaneous details
A recent survey shows that nearly 72% of LinkedIn users are likely to skip reading a LinkedIn company profile if the page lacks certain elements. A well-written company profile may mean nothing if you don't include important company details in your profile.
The majority of LinkedIn users have admitted to reviewing every detail of a company profile, and they do not consider learning more about a company if it does not contain different information.
Start by entering your company website URL in the sections provided. It should ensure the visitor visits your website to learn more about your company. Also, potential leads on LinkedIn can visit your website to increase traffic and conversion.
Maneuver the drop-down menu on LinkedIn to specify your company in terms of size, type, and industry, and don't forget to include the year your company was founded.
In addition, you need to add a location for your business. If you have multiple locations, you should include all of your locations or include a hyperlink that directs your audience to your company's location page.
Step-5: Publish your profile
Once you have entered the relevant data in your profile, go back and proofread everything on your page. A grammatical error in your company's profile is unacceptable and may cause your audience to view your brand as unprofessional, which you don't want.
However, if everything in your profile is perfect and to the point, it's time for you to publish your profile. As soon as you click on the "Publish" button, your company page will be displayed as live.
If you are not satisfied with your profile or feel that something is missing on your page, you can click on "Switch to member view" to get an idea of how your company profile would appeal to other people.
If you are not satisfied with your page, you can make changes to your page by clicking on "Manage page". This should help you to make the recommended changes.
Step-6: Setup page administrators
Hire a social media team to take care of your LinkedIn profile. It takes care of your profile's insights and can optimize it at the right time.
You can add team members to your profile so that they can monitor and make changes to your profile.
Click on the "Me" icon and proceed to the "Manage" section where you will find the option to add members to your profile.
Click on "Admin Tool" and select "Page Admin" to add your team members to the profile. You can change the setting of the profile / page administrator according to your wishes.
Step-7: Optimize your page
Last but not least, it's time for you to optimize your page. Hire a team of SEO specialists to optimize your page and make sure it contains the right kind of short-tail and long-tail keywords needed to publish and optimize your profile.
Understanding the Algorithm of LinkedIn
Understanding LinkedIn's algorithm is critical for you to optimize your LinkedIn profile online. Most companies create and optimize profiles. However, if you don't know the algorithm, it can seriously affect your page's ranking. In this short section, we will help you get familiar with LinkedIn's algorithm and its involvement in improving your page's ranking.
If you're concerned that your company profile isn't showing up in the LinkedIn news feed, it may be related to LinkedIn's algorithm or the lack of organic content on your profile. Similar to major social media and networking platforms, LinkedIn's algorithm likely prioritizes content that is relevant or has higher engagement rates.
From a general point of view, content is displayed in LinkedIn's newsfeed depending on the relevance and reputation of your account. Let's take a look at how it works:
When you post something to your profile, LinkedIn's feed algorithm is calibrated to determine its quality or authenticity. If your post doesn't meet the criteria, it may be marked as spam, which you don't want for your company profile.
Then, when you are ready to publish your post, it is temporarily displayed in the news feed. During this temporary time, the algorithm monitors the engagement on your post. If it's below the criteria, it's removed. However, if your audience engages with your content, your post stays in the newsfeed for some time.
Improving the visibility of your posts on LinkedIn's Newsfeed
As mentioned earlier, the engagement and relevance of your post determine whether your post stays in the newsfeed or not. However, as long as your post gets engagement and clicks, it stays in the newsfeed. Over the years, the LinkedIn algorithm has undergone a number of changes, and it takes a post to gain a significant percentage of engagement and ensure that it is visible to the audience. You can follow the three given tips to improve the visibility and relevance of your profile in the LinkedIn feed:
- Optimize your posts/profile frequently
Most people make the mistake of not optimizing their posts - then wonder why their posts aren't getting engagement from their potential audience. Hire a team of experts to ensure that your LinkedIn profile is optimized in a timely manner and remove the factors that could potentially reduce the optimization / reach of your LinkedIn profile. Follow the given rules to ensure that your profile is optimized correctly:
- The tone of the voice
Professionals certainly pick up a professional and formal tone; therefore, if you are targeting your profile to professionals or your industry peers, make sure you use a formal tone. Or, you can make your posts sound engaging and interesting and get similar results.
- Mobile-friendly
Nearly 60% of LinkedIn users use their cell phones to browse company profiles. So, make sure your posts / profiles are mobile-friendly to boost your online engagement.
- Diversify your content
Don't stick to written / text content to guide your audience. Instead, make the most of images, videos, and links to diversify and optimize your content.
Learn about the interests/preferences of your audience
The purpose of LinkedIn's algorithm is based on the content it wants to display in its newsfeed. For starters, the professional networking site requires you to reach out to your audience to make your posts more accessible and visible in their newsfeed. You can follow the given tips to your advantage:
- Make sure that your content is relevant to your brand, core values, and audience
- Provide professional career tips to your followers
- Earn industry relevance by following your industrial peers
- Conduct surveys on your audience's preferences.
- Grow your network
You're on LinkedIn for a reason, and if you're noticing engagement in your posts, you should use the gain and insights for leverage to grow your network. Connect with people who want to explore their professional systems and give them tips on how to succeed in the industry.
Make sure you follow your industry peers online, and don't forget to add links to your social media platform. The more you invest in growing your LinkedIn profile, the better results you would get in the long run.
How to make LinkedIn's algorithm work for you?
It's no wonder that LinkedIn's algorithm has been subjected to irrational changes and policies. Regardless of how much you invest in growing your profile, the algorithm can affect your professional growth. Again, it's all about achieving the right volume of relevance for your post and ensuring that your posts are shareable and accessible to both general and professional audiences.
You should share content and articles that connect with your followers. Start optimizing your posts and make sure you monitor your analytics regularly. Connect with your followers and encourage them to show engagement in your posts. You'll be growing on LinkedIn in no time.
How Should You Advertise On Your LinkedIn Business Profile?
A large percentage of people maximize LinkedIn features to promote their business and generate leads for their business. However, LinkedIn has proven to be a valuable social media / networking tool for marketing. Most business people believe that LinkedIn offers limited features, which is not true at all. The more you learn about advanced LinkedIn features, the better you can generate leads for your business. For example, the networking platform offers LinkedIn Matched Audiences and LinkedIn Ads, which allow you to target your marketing and advertising efforts to your audience.
LinkedIn Matched Audience plays a critical role in helping retarget your website visitors, searching your client's database to keep your marketing programs up to date. The option is available for all LinkedIn advertising products that are likely to include sponsored content as well as various ad formats. There are three types of targeting features here as well:
- Account targeting: Utilizing account targeting allows you to reach your decision-makers via your target accounts
- Website retargeting: This option enables you to market your efforts to registered LinkedIn members that might have visited your website through your profile.
- Contact Targeting: Contact targeting helps you with uploading or optimizing your contact list to creating a specific audience-oriented visitor for your business.
No advertising efforts should be abandoned without extensive testing. Therefore, you should hire an expert responsible for conducting split tests to measure audience response. Alternatively referred to as A / B testing, split testing is an effective way to measure the optimization rate of your LinkedIn sponsored content. The focus on analysis is based on iterations that allow you to keep your advertising efforts on track. Most advertisers are advised to run the test up to a two-week mark for optimal results. You should test one variable at a time to measure the effectiveness of the test.
What are the long-term benefits of using LinkedIn ads?
LinkedIn ads have proven to be crucial in helping small and medium-sized businesses. However, businesses should enable the "company size" filter on their profiles to target the audience most likely to make a purchase from their listings. While this feature has brought many benefits. One of the recurring challenges to this problem is that small businesses with a team of 50 members do not have a page set up on LinkedIn and may not be able to take advantage of the service.
However, LinkedIn is integrated with advanced features that let you leverage the power of ads to retarget visitors to your website. This means targeting audiences that have similarities to your products and services. Alternatively, you can select lead generation forms to connect with your qualified leads. This would increase your chances of expanding your company's network in the long run.
Analyzing metrics on your LinkedIn Business Profile
Let's assume that you have invested all your efforts in creating your company's LinkedIn profile and optimized your page according to modern practices. However, how can you guarantee that your efforts will be fruitful in any way? The answer is simple: you just need to analyze the metrics in your LinkedIn company profile and it would open up the latest business ventures for you.
It's a serious mistake not to analyze your advertising and marketing efforts on LinkedIn, and you'd just be throwing your efforts into hot water, and it's unacceptable if you've gotten this far. Instead, hire a team of experts who are familiar with analyzing metrics on your company profile. You can categorize insights and metrics as follows:
- Start with creating an audit spreadsheet
- Identify the techniques that would help you with garnering maximum outcomes, and remove the steps that are unable to generate any outcome for your efforts
Track your followers' data. Use the built-in analytics tool on LinkedIn to evaluate the performance of your company's page, rather than counting the number of followers on your profile. Use this number as a benchmark to determine the growth of your profile.
Examine the engagement data in your profile. Measure your LinkedIn analytics to determine the number of likes, comments, and reach for a specific time period.
Measure referral traffic on your page
Generate business leads through your company profile on LinkedIn:
The main goal of LinkedIn is to connect you with your business contacts to help grow your business and increase your team / company size by searching for potential candidates on LinkedIn. However, if you are doing everything on LinkedIn instead of generating leads for your business, you are wasting your time. The point here is to invest your efforts in LinkedIn - generating leads and converting them into potential clients / customers. Below are the best practices for generating leads for your business.
- Start with creating a LinkedIn summary that explains your values to your audience.
- Create a to-the-point company summary to resonate with your prospects-you should be able to convince them that you are the right choice for them. Make them believe in your skills and services to build rapport with them.
- Leverage LinkedIn newsfeed's to your advantage to improve your reach.
- Post-high-quality content to win the attention of your prospects.
- Monitor special events, such as work anniversaries, birthdays, and similar occasions to build a connection with your prospects/leads.
- LinkedIn also plays a crucial role in improving your reach to connect with your leads, and once you have established a connection with your audience, you should continue furthering the conversation by taking the following measurements:
Nurture your relationship with your audience
Then, once you have successfully acquired a lead, you should focus on nurturing your connection with them. Make sure the connections are updated and relevant, and that you build a trusting professional relationship with them. You should use native prompts to initiate a conversation with them.
Join the LinkedIn ProFinder Network
If you are employed as a freelancer or self-employed, you should consider joining the LinkedIn ProFinder network. Here you can connect with the audience looking for freelance services and it would be a great opportunity for you to connect with your audience.
The more relevant you are to your leads, the more inclined they are to visit your website and potentially make a purchase from your business. However, don't give up if you're not able to sift through leads right away. As long as you use the right techniques, you should be able to acquire leads in no time.
Role of LinkedIn in Improving the Marketability of your Business
The use of LinkedIn is not limited to job seekers and professional business people. However, the majority of people optimize the use of LinkedIn to grow their professional networks for their industry sectors. In addition, LinkedIn plays an important role in growing your business by connecting you with the right kind of leads and target audience. By integrating LinkedIn into your digital marketing strategy, you can create brand awareness, build partnerships with your customers, and make a name for yourself in the industry.
LinkedIn is classified as a core professional social network and is essentially focused on career development and building relationships with an audience. It allows them to maintain their B2B relationships as compared to regular social media channels like Facebook and Instagram where they connect with their B2C customers. Maintaining a relationship with your industry peers is just as important as enabling a relationship with your buying customers. An emerging professional relationship provides you with the opportunity to effortlessly promote your company name.
In addition, experts are exploring the advantageous benefits of LinkedIn and have discovered numerous findings that can potentially improve the marketability of brands and businesses in the long run. Don't treat your LinkedIn profile as mundane for your business. However, you should invest abundantly in it to leverage it for your best results.
Are you using LinkedIn to improve your company's marketability? Here are some useful tips that have been proven to help you find new connections and contacts that are critical to growing your business:
Search for highly targeted connections and customers
Targeting your prospects on LinkedIn is unparalleled in terms of digital marketing and advertising. However, if you don't push your buttons properly, you won't be able to connect with your audience right away. Know your purpose for using LinkedIn and have a goal in mind that would set you apart from your competitors in the market.
Remember that your potential leads are probably scrolling through your profile. If they don't find anything interesting in your profile, they may be inclined to turn to business and offer services similar to yours. Hire a team of social media managers who are able to identify a team of targeted leads and connections, and quadruple your marketing and advertising efforts on LinkedIn accordingly.
Improve your email marketing list
It's a no-brainer that the email marketing list is a proven way to connect with your potential customers (leads). However, if you don't maximize your email marketing efforts, the results will go nowhere. Instead, you should focus on improving your email marketing list by encouraging your audience to visit your LinkedIn profile to learn more about your business (or while your website is under construction).
Start by creating a personalized letter thanking your potential customers. Make sure to include your brand/business objective in your personalized emails. Use LinkedIn to connect with your leads. For example, LinkedIn is calibrated to allow you to reach 50 people at a time, so you can build a comprehensive list and reach your leads accordingly.
If you are familiar with the structure and purpose of email marketing, create a direct link that encourages them to sign up to your email marketing campaign and take advantage of the benefits they can expect after signing up with you.
Use sponsored updates
If you want to make your LinkedIn efforts a reality, it's time to use sponsored content / sponsored updates on LinkedIn to boost your marketing efforts. Companies can automatically publish their post to their audience's LinkedIn feed. With the pay-per-click option offered by LinkedIn, users can target their leads strategically and demographically, which should make it easier for them to diversify their marketing and advertising needs.
When you use sponsored updates, you can distinguish the target audience based on the company name, job title, job function, and similar preferences to achieve profitable results. Users can target a relevant audience without having to mix with irrelevant industries and leads.
Sponsored updates are integrated with a strong call to action and should be ideal for promoting useful and compelling content to your target audience. In addition, paid content saves you the hassle of creating tandems in relation to your marketing needs and helps you achieve the recommended results efficiently. Ask your social media manager/account manager to manage your accounts. This should help you enable the growth of your business.
Post-high-quality content
If you're getting your audience to visit your LinkedIn profile via sponsored or non-sponsored updates, make sure the visit is worth their time. If they visit your LinkedIn profile to find boring or outdated content, they're definitely not interested in building a professional relationship with your company. However, you should post quality content to gain their approval, and they should stay engaged with your brand and eventually become your client/customer.
Posting quality content delivers the goal of your business / brand efforts and convinces the idea that you are in it for the long haul and are willing to maintain a long-term relationship with your audience. Hire a professional content creator to create compelling content for your profile.
Stay active on groups
Creating a LinkedIn profile is one thing, and setting your profile is another. You can't attract your leads simply by creating a productive profile. However, you should expand your marketing efforts on LinkedIn by staying active in groups.
Imagine this - you are invited to a trade show or conference meeting to discuss and possibly promote your business? Would you rather remain idle in your booth or would you like to encourage people to visit your booth and engage them? Of course, you would interact and engage with the crowd to convince them to attend your booth and possibly make a purchase from your company.
If you're going all out with your LinkedIn marketing efforts, you need to keep your connection momentum going by interacting with similar leads through groups. This way, you can keep up to date with your potential customers and prospects. Therefore, you can find out if they want to be your customer by rating their performance and activity in groups.
Avoid hard selling
While leads want to work with a moving and compelling company, they certainly don't want to build relationships with someone who bluffs about their business but gives them nothing in return. Hard sells only tarnish your company's reputation and can lead people to believe you're too desperate to sell to them.
Make sure your marketing efforts are genuine and real, and that you're posting updates in real time rather than pushing them out periodically. Embrace authenticity, and you're good to go.
Ultimate LinkedIn Marketing Guide: Conclusion
LinkedIn is one of the fastest growing social networking sites. If you use it properly, you can connect with your leads. The reputable platform allows the company to market its advertising efforts on the platform, which is crucial for growth in the industry.
If you plan to use LinkedIn to branch out your marketing efforts, partner with a LinkedIn expert and enjoy the benefits!
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