Having an established brand on LinkedIn is important and the need of the hour. In recent times, LinkedIn has quickly emerged as a professional social media platform where a user can make new connections, grow their network, exhibit their skills and share professional experiences. Branding on LinkedIn becomes a necessity. Many individuals thoroughly use LinkedIn for job hunting and building a diverse network. But the use of LinkedIn is not just restricted to these.
Many brands and businesses have started leveraging LinkedIn as a means to grow their business. With a wide array of new features such as interactive polls, articles, and LinkedIn Live, that LinkedIn has come up with in the last couple of years, it has morphed into a platform that boosts brand growth.
Studies report that more than 80% of leads generated from various social platforms come from LinkedIn. This result is proof of the tremendous opportunities that LinkedIn provides to businesses, aiding them in their growth.
In this article, we shall provide you with the benefits of using LinkedIn as a means to grow your business. We will also discuss how you can leverage LinkedIn and optimize its features in order to expand your brand.
Benefits of Using LinkedIn for Growing Your Business
1. Allows You to Connect With Other Brands
One of the primary utilization of LinkedIn is connecting with other professionals and growing your network. And this utility expands to brands as well. As a brand, you can post content that draws the attention of other brands from your niche. You can also connect with other brands via groups on LinkedIn.
Connecting with different brands opens the pathway to new business ventures. If you are fortunate enough, you may also come across a large corporation that is interested in your brand. You can then strike out an exceptional deal with them that will benefit your brand largely.
2. Expand Your E-mail Marketing List
Another advantage of connecting with others on LinkedIn is that it allows you to collect their e-mails. By scrutinizing your audience or following on LinkedIn, you can discover prospects that may be interested in your brand. Then you can collect their e-mails and add them to your e-mail marketing list.
Doing so will expand the list of people to whom you can market your new products or services. And with the additional information that LinkedIn provides about an individual’s profession, you can curate personalized e-mails for each one of them. This will increase their interest in your brand even further and help you drive them through the sales funnel effectively.
3. Launching Your New Products
LinkedIn is a great platform to launch your new products or services. With the interactive features that LinkedIn provides, you can create engaging and creative content about your new product. You can also take into account the reactions and feedback of your target audience through LinkedIn’s Reactions and Poll features.
Apart from these, you can also advertise your new product or service using LinkedIn Ads.
All these make LinkedIn an excellent platform for growing your brand through marketing and business opportunities
Tips to Leveraging the Benefits of LinkedIn
Marketing on LinkedIn is quite different from marketing on any other social media platform. This is mainly because LinkedIn is a platform with working professionals as its user and most content published on LinkedIn is related to the professional careers of people in one way or the other. Therefore, it is crucial to take a different approach to grow your brand on LinkedIn. With the tips provided below, you will be able to effectively market and build your brand on LinkedIn.
1. Create an Amazing Company Page
The first and foremost step for ensuring rapid growth of your brand via LinkedIn is to create an amazing page for your company. Your company page should include all the important details you want to make your target audience aware of. Write an engrossing ‘About’ bio that speaks about the vision and the mission of your brand. It should convey the message about how your brand helps people.
The bio should also include information that is relevant to your target audience. For example, if you are looking for new recruits, you should include the benefits that employees receive, the hiring policies, and team-building activities in your company. This will attract the target audience and make them interested in your brand. While writing about your brand, you should also add relevant keywords in order to improve your in-app visibility.
Another important task is to add captivating images for your profile picture and your cover page. Visual branding is a crucial aspect in the effective marketing of a brand as visuals are the first thing that anyone who views your profile first notices. A great profile picture and the cover page will assist in profile viewers remembering your brand owing to the aesthetics that they present.
2. Considering LinkedIn Analytics
The LinkedIn homepage is mostly packed with activities of your connections. Scrolling through this feed will give you insights into what type of content your connections are engaging with. This will help you figure out the type of content that your target audience will find interesting. Once you have an idea about this, you can post content accordingly that will interest your target audience and boost their engagement with your brand.
LinkedIn also provides an analytics feature known as LinkedIn Analytics. LinkedIn Analytics provides you with a deeper understanding of your audience. It tells you who your existing audience is so that you can leverage this info and check if they align with your target audience or not. This again will let you figure out what type of content you should post to reach out more to your target audience.
Posting content that produces high engagement is overriding as the more engagement you churn out from your post, the more home feeds you will reach. This in turn will give you higher visibility among prospects.
3. Include Pictures and Videos in Your Posts
As mentioned earlier, visuals are what catches the eye before anything else. So, including an image or a video in your posts will attract your target audience. Also, the algorithm of LinkedIn prioritizes posts that contain visual content. As a result, posts with images or a video will appear higher in the homepage feed and also reach out to a wider audience.
Images and videos also help you in describing your brand to the audience. Unlike text, they do not give rise to imaginary perceptions regarding something. Images and videos have the efficacy to visualize a product or service. As a result, they do not cause any confusion or misguidance. They are also more interesting to look at than plain blocks of text. People often find it boring to go through longer posts that only have words written in them and bail out halfway through, disabling the post to convey its messaging. With visuals, this is not the case.
With the new document feature of LinkedIn, you can now even post an entire gallery of images if you feel like it. This will not only be eye-candy for your audience but will also allow you to show off the brilliance of your brand with little effort.
4. Use LinkedIn’s Engagement Driving Features
As stated before, LinkedIn has introduced a lot many new features. These features are meant to drive engagement and connect creators with their audience. Some of these new engagement-driving features of LinkedIn are:
· LinkedIn Live– This feature allows creators to go live and connect with their audiences in real-time. Reports show that live videos receive 24 times more comments and 7 times more reactions than normal videos on posts. Therefore, LinkedIn Live is a great way to depict what is going on in your brand at the moment and get a greater engagement with your audience at the same time.
· LinkedIn Stories– Just like Instagram, LinkedIn stories allow you to upload short content- whether images or short videos for a definite period of time. Stories allow you to regularly update your target audience with what is happening within your company. This hooks in the audience to your brand and keeps them interested in it.
· Polls– Polls are a great way to collect perceptions of your audience and understand them better. With polls, you can get insight into the minds of your audience and understand their needs and demands. These are valuable pieces of information as these will let you effectively shape your brand so that both your customers and employees are satisfied and happy.
· Reactions– Reactions have an effect similar to polls. They too, let you in the minds of your audience by letting you know what your audience thinks about your post. Many people do not prefer commenting their thoughts on posts as it takes time. But with reactions, they can quickly make the creator know about their reactions to the post. This makes Reactions a highly engaging feature of LinkedIn.
5. Add Hashtags to Your Posts
Adding hashtags to your posts increase your visibility, enabling you to reach out to a larger audience. The hashtags on LinkedIn are not as strong as the ones on Instagram as hashtags on LinkedIn are a relatively new feature. But there is a high probability that hashtags will be worked upon further and the LinkedIn algorithm will be prioritizing hashtags by a higher amount in the near future.
Therefore, it is a good idea to get into the hashtag game right away. Consider including a few hashtags related to your content in every post. Doing so will enable you to reach out to people with similar interests and services. You may also get to connect with other brands, opening the gateway to fresh business opportunities.
6. Join Groups
Joining groups is a very powerful benefit that LinkedIn provides. One can join groups on other social media platforms as well. But since LinkedIn comprises professional people, the groups on LinkedIn are much more insightful and engaging.
By joining suitable groups related to your industry, you can share knowledge and advice with other professionals from the same industry. The better advice you provide and the more actively you do it, the more you will be reputed as an industry leader. As such, your brand’s popularity will grow.
Also, you will be able to gain invaluable knowledge about your industry from the leading experts. You will learn a lot about growing your business and also get to know about the trends that are popular in your niche at the moment.
Conclusion
LinkedIn is hands down the best social media platform for professional use. With its immense popularity and power-packed features, it provides entrepreneurs and small businessmen with limitless opportunities for growth. If utilized effectively, one takes his or her company to new heights via LinkedIn.
In this article, we discussed the benefits that LinkedIn presents to building a brand name and popularity. We also provided a list of tips that will help you to succeed in leveraging LinkedIn to its full extent. I hope you found this article helpful.
