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.

 

15 Social Media Trends You Should Focus in 2018

Long gone was the time when social media is used only to share your pictures of vacation or honeymoon.

Even though, that trend still remains, nowadays, social media is used by many brands to promote their items.

Brands have chosen social media as a channel to promote and endorse their products because people 24*7 check on portable devices such as mobile to browse and more time is spent on social media.

If people have any frustrations or dissatisfaction with any of the brands, they express their emotions on social media.

Mostly people search on social media to get ideas about new brands.

More brands are using social media to build relationships with their customers which will help them to create loyalty towards their brands.

Let’s take a look at the social media trends you should focus in 2018.

1. Ephemeral Content

The phenomenon of Ephemeral content is introduced by Snapchat. Wondering about what exactly is that?

The content which user has created vanishes after 24 hours and followers only have that limited time period to view that content.

Snapchat pioneered this phenomenon but Instagram copied that idea and introduced it as Instagram Stories.

Each month more than 200 million people are using Instagram Stories; which is more than 50 million of Snapchat users.

If it’s continuing by this rate, by the end of 2018, more than half of Instagram users will be using Stories.

Since launching the Instagram Stories, the average time per day spent by users on Instagram has increased to 28 minutes.

This is definitely 7-13 minutes more time spent before introducing Stories.

Each month, stories feature is actively used by more than 1 million advertisers.

The advantage of using stories for brands is that any Instagram user can see your brand stories even if they are not following you.

2. Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is one of the best ways for the companies to get connected with next generation audiences.

World famous companies such as Rolex, The North Face, and HubSpot have made huge profits by making use of influencer marketing .

On the other hand, companies who have used traditional marketing strategies struggled to get connected to social media users.

This clearly indicates that 2018 is definitely a year for influencer marketing to bloom.

3. Understand Learning Styles

When you are trying to build and enhance personalized experience and categories for your targeted customers, you need to take an extra care in understanding learning styles.

Learning styles indicates the pattern how each people learn and process information is different.

The way you handle different learning styles on social media must be different.

Social Media Learning Styles from Nan Ross

4. Generation Z or Gen Z

This is one important area to focus more in 2018. Generation Z or Gen Z is more valuable to brand owners because this group is influenced more by the social media than they are by other sales and discounts.

Gen Z is also known as Post-Millennials, iGeneration, or Homeland Generation which includes freshly passouts from colleges who will enter corporate life or have already entered.

As they enter into workforce, their buying capacity also increases.

More than 80% of Gen Z says that they spend at least one hour in watching videos. This in turn will make more influencers move towards the brands.

Influencer marketing is an instant hit among Gen Z as they deliver 11 times Return On Investment (ROI) over other usual digital media channels.

5. Live Streaming

Live streaming was one of 2017’s top marketing trends and it will continue the same in 2018 as well.

Videos are always preferred over photos. In comparison with photos, Facebook videos get more than 135% of views.

Brands stream live videos on social media platforms which helps them dramatically to increase user engagement and followers.

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other platforms offer in-app live video streaming which help them in creating more user engagement.

6. Chatbots

Chatbots is a software application which is used to interact with customers; usually it adopts texual conversations with users.

Already, Facebook messenger have more than 100,000 active bots on a monthly basis. These chatbots have helped in increasing prodictivity of the organization up to 3.5 times.

More than 60% of Millenials says that they have already used chatbots in their business and other 71% wants to try hands in experiencing chatbots used by brands.

Don’t mistake chatbots to be robots. Using machine learning technology, chatbots are programmed to speak like human agents.

Brands are able to customize their bots in such a way they perfectly reflects personality of the brands and also send personalized messages to its users.

7. Messaging Platforms

More than 2.5 billion people use various messaging platforms such as Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp and, Kik to communicate with companies.

Instead of simply posting marketing content into profiles and feeds, companies should take an extra care to make it simple for customers to start one-to-one conversations.

It is more suitable to integrate chatbots and voice assistants into messaging platforms to create a unique and personalized experience for users.

Engaging more number of users through these platforms will contribute a huge difference in taking your business into new levels of success.

8. Social Listening

Social listening is the science of tracking conversations of the users which involves certain phrases, brands or words.

Then you can make use of these phrases/words together in finding new opportunities to create content suitable for your users.

Social listening tools help brands in synthesizing their customer’s digital footprint.

Using social listening, brands are able to track brand health in social media, develop marketing campaigns suitable for customers and therefore able to provide excellent brand experiences.

9. AI Marketing

Wondered when you search for something in internet and has seen related ads on pages you visit?

It’s because social media marketing has collaborated with Artificial Intelligence (AI) that enables corresponding ads to appear.

More than 50% of marketers already make use of AI in their businesses.

With the advancements in technology, the growth of AI is expected to reach around 53% in coming years.

10. Sentimental Analytics

In 2018, social media marketers will be concentrating more in analyzing emotions and feelings of customers towards brands rather than looking just into Likes, Views, Shares and Clicks which are great.

Social media marketers will be analyzing the following questions:

  • What is the customer sentiment towards the brand?
  • How social media can change that sentiment?
  • What’s the strength of our Brand Health Index?
  • Does our brand have high Net Promoter Score?
  • Do people think about our brand frequently?

The answers to these questions do matter as these answers can help you in analyzing what people feel about your brand and how you can improve the image of your brand.

11. Augmented Reality / Virtual Reality

Most brands are not aware of the marketing possibilities Augmented Reality(AR) / Virtual Reality (VR) possess and still thinking it’s expensive and take years to adapt to it.

AR/VR are able to drastically enhance content marketing, media relations and customer service.

AR/VR is expected to give whole new dimensions to SEO, social media, public relations and enhance better experiences to audiences.

12. Visual Content

Visual content gives brands a major opportunity to grow in 2018. As tons of contents are cluttering the social media, people don’t pay attention to these contents as they scroll very fast through the social media pages.

This trend can be avoided by videos (pre-recorded or live stream) as they stand out in between the junk contents.

So, visual contents are going to be a stand out trend in 2018.

13. Support Key Influencers

Another important social media trend to focus in 2018 is to support key influencers related to your industry.

It is important because by providing data, ideas, products and support to people who can easily connect large groups of followers to your business brand is a major trend to be focused.

Definitely a key influencer can outreach your marketing strategies by their influence in the followers.

They can do so much for your products, services and brand but you have to make sure that they also receive equal value for the relationship they have with your brand.

14. Video Ads

 Video was one of the hit trends for 2017 and it still continues to be same in 2018 as the need for videos are only increasing.

43% of users prefer to see more video content from marketers.

Social media ads is the area where brands can capitalize more on social media in 2018.

As social media ads are already trending and expected to continue the same throughout the year.

It’s clear that video ads can influence people greater, because 95% of the message conveyed through the video stays in minds of people compared to 10% while reading content texts.

15. LinkedIn

Last but not least, LinkedIn. You will be thinking why LinkedIn not any other platforms?

It is because LinkedIn is a mix of culture, business, life insights and lot more. LinkedIn doesn’t have any limiting algorithms like other platforms to bind its activity.

Content can be published by anyone and also can be seen by anyone; this makes the platform as an open source for its users.

While other platforms need someone to follow to even see their published content.

As it is an open source, there is more chance for achieving success. This makes LinkedIn one of the hottest  social media trends in 2018.

Why You Should Care About Social Media Trends?

Social media trends are definitely the ice breakers in gaining large number of customers.

To achieve success in your business, not only you should take care of social media trends but also in keeping up trust and transparency for your customers.

As you now know the top social media trends to be focused in 2018, we hope that this will definitely help you in achieving heights of success.

Please let us know if you have any questions or queries.