LinkedIn is a social network that provides professionals with a platform to share job opportunities, build their professional networks and find new business leads. LinkedIn Marketing 101 will help you learn how to maximize the benefits of this popular tool.
Introduction to LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a social network for professionals. It’s the world’s largest professional networking site, with more than 500 million users in over 200 countries and territories.
LinkedIn enables you to connect with other professionals, discover new job opportunities and get hired for them, or find candidates for your business. Furthermore, it helps you grow your professional network by connecting with people that can help you advance your career goals.
Your LinkedIn profile is essentially the landing page of your online presence as a professional. It tells people who you are and what value you can provide them through your skillsets and experiences. If someone wants to hire someone like you or if an employer would like to hire someone similar to yourself then they will look at how well-developed your profile looks as one of their first impressions of whether or not they want to work with that person further on down the road (ie: interview).
Understanding your target buyers
Understanding your target buyers is one of the most important parts of creating a successful marketing strategy.
The most common mistake businesses make is to assume that all consumers want the same thing and will respond to the same kinds of messaging.
The truth is that each buyer persona has unique needs, interests and pain points, which means they require different types of content in order for you to cater to them effectively.
You need to know who your ideal customer is so that you can tailor your marketing efforts accordingly.
Setting up a business page
Create a business page. Make sure to include all of the relevant information about your business, including its name, address, phone number and email address.
Set up a cover photo that reflects your brand or industry. You can use an image from the company logo or a relevant stock photo from iStockPhoto; just make sure it’s high resolution and suitable for print!
Add a professional profile photo for yourself if you’re the founder/owner of the company — this should be taken against a plain backdrop with no other people in shot (no selfies here).
Building a network
Search for people you want to connect with. The search function is an excellent way of finding your ideal audience and building relationships with them.
Connect with people who are in your network, but don’t forget to reach out to those on the outside as well!
Follow other LinkedIn users based on their connections (recommended by LinkedIn)
Look for people who share your interests and passions (recommended by LinkedIn)
Connect with someone at the same company or industry as yours that you haven’t connected with yet (recommended by LinkedIn)
Connecting with your audience
There are many ways to connect with your audience, including:
Building relationships. You want to be involved in the lives of your readers and followers, not just when you need something from them.
Sharing content they will find interesting. This can be helpful for generating leads, but also gives them a reason to come back and visit more often (which means more opportunity for conversion).
When connecting with your audience, it’s important to remember that you don’t have all the answers—in fact, chances are that most of them know much more about what they need than you do! So when working with prospects or customers who may have questions about your product or service offerings, ask for their input on how best to serve their needs rather than presuming what those needs might be based solely on past experience selling similar products/services.
Posting content on personal pages and LinkedIn Groups
In order to engage with your audience and build relationships, you want to be active in groups. You need to share the right type of content in the right way. Here are some tips for making the most out of this activity:
Posting group content (not your own) gives others a chance to see what it is you’re up to, which can help them decide whether they want to work with you or not. It’s also good practice for getting used to social media marketing.
If possible, choose a topic that has some connection with what your company does so people will know how relevant their comments are when interacting with it—but don’t go overboard! Remember that not everyone may have heard about these subjects before so keep things simple enough for anyone who wants more information about them later on (e-books).
If you want to try your hand at LinkedIn marketing, start with the basics.
LinkedIn is a great platform for marketing your business, but you don’t want to jump into it without understanding what the platform’s users want and how they consume information.
The best way to get started with LinkedIn marketing is to learn about your audience and how they use the site. Once you understand what makes them tick, you can create content that resonates with them and position yourself as an industry leader in your field.
You can also use LinkedIn to find leads or customers by setting up advertising campaigns, creating groups around specific topics related to your industry, participating in group discussions and answering questions from other members of the community.
Another important aspect of LinkedIn for business is building relationships with existing customers who may be interested in purchasing products or services from you down the road (and hopefully referring others along their journey too). You can do this by using tools like InMail messages (which allow users send private messages) and Groups (where members share ideas).
Conclusion
We hope that this post has helped you better understand the potential of LinkedIn as a marketing tool. If you’re ready to explore more ways you can use this platform to reach your target audience, check out some of our other blog posts on how businesses are using LinkedIn.