If all social networking platforms were a group of friends, LinkedIn would be the smart one that has its future mapped.
What keywords do you associate with LinkedIn? Networking, professional connections, leads, marketing, b2b, and jobs are some that we recall. These keywords are the magnet that attracts marketers to LinkedIn. As of November 2022, LinkedIn hosts 630M professionals, of whom 63M are decision-makers. LinkedIn Marketing essentially involves creating a company page, sharing updates and content, using LinkedIn Ads, and engaging with other users on the platform. Its goal is typically to reach a professional audience, establish thought leadership, and drive business results such as website traffic, leads, and sales.
Here’s what makes LinkedIn different from its mates like Instagram, Meta, Twitter, Snapchat, and others:
Professional audience: LinkedIn is a professional networking platform, so the people you'll be communicating with are likely to be professionals looking for business or career opportunities. This means that the content and messaging you use should focus on the business and professional aspects of your brand’s products or services.
Emphasis on thought leadership: LinkedIn is an excellent platform for sharing thought leadership content, and many business leaders use the platform to establish themselves as experts in their fields as fuel to their brand’s image. This can involve sharing insights, opinions, and research on topics related to your industry.
B2B focus: LinkedIn is often used by businesses to connect with other businesses, so it's particularly well-suited for B2B marketing. Close to 95% of B2B content marketers use LinkedIn for organic content marketing, making it the top-rated social media platform.
LinkedIn lets you take a two-pronged approach to host and market your brand on the platform based on which you can strategise your activities. The first involves establishing your brand on the platform, and the other is creating an identity for yourself as a brand owner or thought leader of the industry with knowledge and experience. While the first route gets all attention to your brand, the latter diverts the attention you receive toward your brand as an asset. Doesn’t getting all attention to your brand make more sense? Then why do you even need to position yourself on the platform like the other 17M opinion leaders, at all?
The answer is credibility. To follow your brand your audience needs to be sure that they can trust its existence and its capability to provide the promised. Being a thought leader can also help attract new clients and business opportunities and establish the owner as a go-to source for information and insights in their field. Additionally, actively participating on LinkedIn can help increase the business's visibility and reach, as their network can share and amplify the owner's thought leadership content.
Here are some tips to follow marketing on LinkedIn as a business owner:
Optimise Your Profile: Optimisation is essential irrespective of whether yours is a company profile or an individual one. It's based on the goals you are trying to achieve through LinkedIn, the audience you're trying to connect with, and the services you offer.
Know Your Audience: Keep a tab on who is connecting with you and showing interest in your content. This will help you target your communication better and make your LinkedIn marketing more effective.
Create Algorithm Aligned Strategies: Whatever your goal to be on LinkedIn may be, you must align your plans to the algorithm that LinkedIn follows for effective results. The most important step is to maintain consistency in publishing content to garner consistent results. Other common steps include using visual content, slide shares, and posting high-quality content.
Humanise Your Profile: This includes staying active, engaging with your audience and other profiles, and being creative with your content as well as comments. Moreover, share your story, insights, thoughts, and results as a part of your content. This gives your profile credibility and boosts the attention it receives.
Drive the credibility, interest, and attention you gain toward your business based on the goals you’ve set. Once you are better established on the platform, maintain consistency in your LinkedIn activities, and leverage it to achieve your business goals.