How to Market Your Business With LinkedIn

LinkedIn is not just limited to job seekers and professionals; nowadays, businesses also make use of this platform for their growth.

Using LinkedIn, you can generate leads by making connections, establishing partnerships and also for creating exceptional brand awareness.

LinkedIn is an expert professional social platform. Organizations have direct access to their customers where they can market with their status updates, pictures and other posts.

As the platform consists of an entirely different crowd, LinkedIn marketing requires an alternative way to get the results you need.

In order to explore LinkedIn as a marketing network, here are 12 marketing hacks you can use to discover new clients, make new contacts, and eventually develop your business.

1. First, make your own profile

You might be wondering why your own profile comes first rather than your company profile on LinkedIn. No! We are not wrong! It is because your profile and the profiles of other employees of your organization make up the roof for your organization’s image on the network.

When targeted audience searches for your name and visits your profile, you need them to discover something catchy that influences you to stand out from other employees of your competitors.

There are a lot of chances to excite the people who view your profile. Focus on completing your profile and after that streamline your profile in the long run; including your new aptitudes, accomplishments, and cases of your outstanding work.

2. Create an outstanding company page

Your company LinkedIn page is important as it showcases your company’s image. Your company page should be simple enough and be inviting for your targeted customers to understand about your organization, learn more about the employees in the association, and hook up with your content.

Creating a company page is of free for everyone, so you don’t need to worry how much to pay for your profile. Need guidance on how to start a free LinkedIn page, you can find it here.

3. Determine your marketing goals

It is crucial to determine your LinkedIn marketing goals which generally include creating leads and raising awareness of the brand.

When you have an idea of what you need to achieve, it will be quite simpler to determine your target audience.

For instance, if your company is making toys and currently only focus on developing their business on one area, you can set your ad campaigns in a manner that it will be only shown to people who come from that particular place or near that place.

4. Enhance company page to find targeted customers

It is important that you need to enhance your company page to find targeted customers. You need to optimize your company page in such a way that it should appear easily when someone is searching for your company details.

Also, company page should be SEO friendly; for that, you need to do the following:

  • Suitable Keywords: Make sure that you include suitable keywords for defining what your company offers. The keywords should be the one the target audience is most probable of searching on the internet.
  • Link to your company website: Linking the company’s LinkedIn page with your company website is crucial as it will help in increasing your search ranking.
    Not only your company website, you can even link to blogs and include marketing materials. Also, make sure employees of your organization update their LinkedIn profiles; as they add your company as their workplace, a link is made back to your company LinkedIn page.
  • Offer consistent content: A standout amongst other approaches to enhance your rankings and to include your company in search results is by consistently sharing relevant content.
    All the more often as possible you share content that engages the audience, the higher your company will show up in Google’s search results.
5. Add the maximum number of followers

When you get followers for your company page, your updates show up specifically on their LinkedIn page. The more followers you have, chances are also higher your updates will get more views.

Encourage your employees to share the content on their page so that it will reach more people. Also don’t forget to promote company page via emails, messages and so on to various people to attract more followers.

Make sure that you add ‘Follow’ button on your page so that the visitors only need to click on that to always get your updates.

6. Post first-rate content

Ensure that your content is of high-quality because it should be engaging and also focus to achieve two objectives. First, it should help others to take care of an issue or how to carry out their activity better.

What’s more, then it sets you up as an ideal thought leader in that space. If you are offering viewers with valuable content, every aspect of it normally prompts more business.

7. Sponsor your high engaging update

Not only constant updates are necessary, but also when one of the updates goes viral you should think of sponsoring that update. It is an advertising strategy where businesses pay to promote their update into a user’s LinkedIn feed.

LinkedIn users have the privilege to select their interested industries so that they don’t have to receive unnecessary updates and messages from other industry.

So a sponsored update can be a fantastic method to promote thought leadership content which is valuable basically for the targeted audience with a solid invitation to take action.

By promoting your content through this system, your business can focus on a speciality crowd, increase visitors to the website and create potential customers if the content is sufficiently convincing. Know more about here.

8. Constantly influence targeted customers

It is essential to have consistent updates on your page. Images, colours, and content should be consistent with your site and other social media profiles of your business.

The page needs to be updated always to create the impression that the brand is dynamic and active. Keep in mind that it makes a terrible impression on audience mind if the social media networks are updated once in a month or haven’t updated in months.

9. Make sure of your custom URL

Everybody should ensure that they have their custom URL with their name, for example, http://linkedin.com/in/yourname. This is particularly critical for individuals who have a great deal of contact with potential customers..

When you ensure that you have your custom URL, you are also ensuring that your LinkedIn profile comes up in the search engine results.

10. Focus first on connections and then on relation building

Through LinkedIn, business owners or entrepreneurs can connect with their prospects, targeted partners, and other entrepreneurs. What’s more, once the connections are made, the owner can choose how to sustain those connections to build a relationship.

11. Utilize LinkedIn Advertisement campaigns

There are two ways of ad campaigns in LinkedIn – self-service ads and paid campaigns. Like setting up your company page, it is also critical to define the ad campaign goals to understand if it is boosting brand awareness, bringing leads, or building relationships.

12. Make use of LinkedIn analytics

When you are done with creating valuable content for your page, don’t think you are done with that. You also need to monitor your targeted audiences’ behaviours and preferences. For that, you need to make use of various analytic methods of LinkedIn.

  • For monitoring and enhancing your company page’s free campaign performance, you can make use of LinkedIn’s company page analytics.
  • Enhance your paid campaign performance with assistance from your LinkedIn campaign manager analytics.

Observing your LinkedIn analytics dashboard day by day can enable you to settle on information based choices that prompt better outcomes.

Sum Up

We hope that this article has helped you in getting an idea to launch and maintain your LinkedIn page to successfully market your products and services. If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to share with us. We would love to hear you.

 

5 Ways to Create a Business Blog for Your Target Audience

Business blogs pull traffic and are central to your content marketing success. According to Hubspot, B2B companies that blog more than 11+ times a month attracted 3X times more traffic than those blogging once a month. The success of your best blogs only compounds over time and one successful blog can get you consistent leads for years to come.

The essential aim of creating business blogs is to grow your traffic and reach new markets. For this to happen, your blog must talk to the right market about what they are searching for. Here are five ways to help you create a business blog for your target audience.

1. Know Your Topic

It is essential that business blog writers are well versed with the products and services that you offer. A good blog gives people answers that they cannot find elsewhere and in the form that is easy to understand.

Research the content which is already available online. Study the statistics of the bigger blogs and try to break their monopoly over the audience. This can be done by giving more in-depth knowledge or presenting the same information in an easier form. In any case your blog will sound better if they are written by someone who is an expert in your industry.

Apart from knowing the company’s products it is important to know the branding and philosophy behind a business. This is because your blog is your voice online.
The most important skill to make a blog successful after understanding the topic is the ability to present it in a simple way.

2. Know Your Audience

Right marketing is all about finding the right market and fine-tuning your message to them. Before you start writing the blog always ask these four questions to yourself about the audience:

a. Who are they?
b. What do they need?
c. How much do they need?
d. When do they need it?

Firstly, who are they? This question should answer who your audience really is. Are they small business owners? Do they require information to grow their business? Are they big business owners and need solutions to organize their business?

What do they need? Will the topic you are writing about help them? The title of the blog should catch their attention. The audience should get an instant feeling of security after reading the blog title itself. They should feel “Yes, this blog is going to help me solve my problem.”

How much do they need? It is very important that you understand the main goal of your blog and provide the right amount of information. Avoid overwhelming the readers with too much information or too little information.

When do they need it? At which stage of their business would they need assistance from your blog? If their business is at an initiating phase then how can you help them? Will the same blog be able to help people who have already set up their businesses?

After answering all these questions, make a buyer persona of your audience and write the blog as if you are conversing with them. You now know what, how, why, and when they want information, you just have to provide them with the right answers.

3. Organize the Blog

Organizing the blog includes many factors such as having a strong introduction, structuring the content, breaking the paragraphs after regular intervals, and making the blog look clean.

Using images and videos is a great way to hold attention of the audience. Statistics show that blogs with images get 94% more views compared to blogs with no images.

Remember to include all the necessary information in your blog. Do not shy away from long form blogs that get to the depths of topic. Long blogs with detailed explanation are in-fact doing better in SEO results nowadays.

4. Monitor and Update Your Blogs
This simply means that you should regularly keep track of what the audience wants. Which type of blogs does the audience prefer and how can you evolve your blog into that type. Regularly update your best performing blogs to keep them relevant.

You can even create a small feedback form that your audience can fill once they have read one of your blogs. This will help you create better blogs in the future and at the same time you would be creating a data base of your readers as well.

5. Online Presence
One of the most important steps in creating a successful blog is ensuring its visibility. Visibility is essential for any blog in order to reach its target audience.

In 2017, 66% of marketers reported using blogs in their social media content. This would help you get audience from all the platforms but more importantly you will easily be able to understand how your blog is performing. You will be able to see what people are sharing, liking, re-tweeting etc.

Final Thoughts

These are some ways for creating a successful business blog. Once you understand your audience and their needs, you are on the path of success with the help of your ideas. After all, content marketing is all about giving your customers what they want.

Now that you have the pointers to create a great blog, go ahead and start writing. One last tip would be to write consistently. The more you understand your audience and write for them, the better your blog will get.

Guide to Create Exceptional Content for Your Business

It is totally your choice on how much time and effort you want to put into creating exceptional content and helping your brand prosper. You can choose to go on with bad content but you will definitely not get anywhere with it. It will prove to be a total waste of time, energy and money.

In order to boost your ranking in SEO and increase website traffic, you need quality content on your website. If the content is original, then that could help you get more exposure on search engines. In fact, Google penalizes sites which have copied or duplicated content. So, quality content would not only help to make your website look more attractive but also help to improve the overall ranking of your website.

Below are a few tips to create exceptional content for your business:

1. Create Original and Unique Content

Copying content from other websites could lead to severe consequences from Google and your visitors. When we say originality, we mean original ideas and not re-phrasing the existing content and concept. If you think that you can hire cheap labour to just fill up your website with content or just collect different articles available on the internet and re-post them, then you are making a big mistake.

Always remember, if you pay well, then you get quality and if you don’t have any quality content, then it is better to not write anything. These are two simple principles which you should remember. These would take you a long way.

2. Pay more focus on Headers and Sub-headers

Your content should have proper headings and sub-headings. If the headlines are interesting, then the reader automatically gains interest in the article. As per commonly known statistics, about 80% of the people tend to read only the headlines and only 20% of the readers actually spend the time to read the other content under the headers.

Have as many headings as possible in your article. You should try to highlight the headings to make them prominent to your readers. Take the time to create good, relevant to the topic and interesting headlines. A good way for deciding headings would be by thinking of a few and then shortlisting the one you like the most. Don’t ignore the headings. Depending on the headings, people decide if they are going to read your blog or not.

3. Give your Readers Actionable Content

You should give proper guidance on how to use or apply the information given in the content. Don’t feel that you are degrading the users by telling them what to do. You must give assurance to the readers that they are very well aware of how to use the knowledge they have picked up from the content.

In your content, you must give tips to your readers about what information you are offering to them. You have to write in a way that you cover all the possible questions the readers have in mind – why, what, how, where etc.

4. Your Content should be able to Give all the Answers

When people use a search engine like Google, they are looking for some answers. They search for a particular query and search engine delivers the answer to their query. Similarly, when a reader is reading your blog or article, then he is expecting some answer so that he can gain some knowledge about the topic.

You should make your content easy to read and scan because readers are looking for answers, that too fast. So, it is important to make sure that they get all the answers too quickly. Include as many titles and sub-titles in your content which makes it easy for the reader to read and understand.

5. The Source of Information and the Statistics should be Accurate

Thousands of people are going to read your content and it is extremely bad for the reputation of your business in case the information stated in it is not relevant.

The content on your website is the reflection of your business. You must get statistics verified before you mention them on your website. Accuracy is important to gain the readers’ trust. Below are certain tips which you can follow when tackling the accuracy issues:

> Be sure of the source from where you are picking up the statistic details. If you are intending to provide a link to another website in yours for statistics, then you must make sure that it is a genuine and authentic website. If it is a quality website, then it would help gain the trust of the readers.

> If you are linking content within your website to substantiate what you are writing, then that can be extremely helpful in gaining the readers’ trust. People start feeling that the content is authentic as it can be validated.

> If you link your content to other sources then that would help the search engines in knowing about your content and it will help them categorize it.

6. Create Content that keeps the Readers Engaged and Curious to Read more

If a reader finds your content engaging and interesting then he spends more time on your website. The only trick to achieve this is by writing your content well. Here are a few tips to achieve this:

  • Include many questions in the article which keep the readers thinking about what the answer could be. You need to build the readers’ curiosity to continue reading to get the answers. Remember not to leave any question unanswered in your article. This could make the reader feel irritated.
  • Most of the readers read the first few lines of the article properly and continue reading the article only if they like the introduction. You should have an interesting and involving start to your article or blog. You should discuss the key features of your article and give the readers a motivation to keep reading.
  • Visitors like reading about different experiences and stories that people have actually experienced in life. Stories keep people involved, engaged and give them a huge amount of information.

7. Adding Images and Videos is Always Liked

As we all know that people understand better by seeing, images and videos are always a good idea to make people learn about what you are talking in the article. Diagrams and graphs are also a great way to illustrate your point..

8. Content should be Crisp and Precise

You should always remember to make your content brief and to the point. Make sure you don’t repeat the same point in your article in different ways. Readers don’t like repetition. No need to worry about the word count, instead focus on making it precise. Avoid going off the topic, as that might make readers lose their interest in your article.

9. Keep Updating Your Article Frequently

Once you build a website, you should always remember that you have to stay committed to it forever. Search engines prefer those sites more who are regularly updating their content. Most of the top websites update their content very often. There are several statistics too which prove that websites whose content is updated frequently tend to attract visitors.

Don’t treat the content of your website lightly. It is difficult and extremely time-consuming to write good content. You must make sure that the language you use is simple and the article shouldn’t have grammatical and spelling errors.

After you have written an article, you should proofread it at least two times before publishing it on the website. Keep the content entertaining and original for the readers.