Guide, Marketing

A Novice’s Guide To LinkedIn Marketing

A Novice’s Guide To LinkedIn Marketing This article is a beginner’s guide to LinkedIn marketing, where we will tell you a few things that you should be doing every day in order to result in at least one likely-to-convert lead every other day.

What is LinkedIn marketing?

Over 30 million companies use LinkedIn for business- not just because it’s a distinct social network for hiring and recruting top talent. LinkedIn has over 690 million members, and more and more brands are using LinkedIn marketing to network, connect, and sell everyday.

LinkedIn has been designed for marketing your brand and increasing your reach to the audience. LinkedIn Ads are a great way to advertise your service or products, primarily if you cater to B2B clients. What are B2B clients? They are other businesses that need services or products from your company. Hence, B2B or business-to-business.

LinkedIn is excellent for growing your business by creating new connections and generating leads. You can establish your brand image, improve brand awareness, and establish partnerships. LinkedIn is an integral part of your digital marketing strategy.

Here are a few useful hacks and steps you can perform to result in at least one strong, as in a likely-to-convert lead every other day.

Steps to successful LinkedIn marketing

1. Create a company profile:

Creating a company profile takes about 30 minutes maximum and is entirely free. There are about half a billion users on LinkedIn. So it is crucial that your company page really stand out. You can ensure this by doing the following when creating your company profile-

The picture you add to your company must be an iconic one that showcases your brand.
The About Us must be informative enough to give your audience a decent idea of what your company and brand offer.
You should be as straightforward and transparent as possible when writing in the About Us section.
Featured groups are crucial to generating new leads; therefore, do not forget to join them.

You should have created a well-rounded page for your LinkedIn, and now it is time to optimize it to increase your outreach.

2. Search engine optimize your LinkedIn profile:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) isn’t something you should only consider when writing articles for your blogs. You can also use SEO to make your LinkedIn profile easier to discover and access. You can add specific keywords in various parts of your profile so that people searching for those keywords on LinkedIn definitely come across your profile.

3. Search for an extremely targeted audience and connections:

LinkedIn’s targeting technology is incomparable to any other piece of tech available in the digital world. Small businesses can zero in on the specific industry, company size, and job role that they know would normally buy their product or service.

4. Stay relevant to your customers:

This is a very important point. As they say, “out of sight, out of mind.” You cannot let this happen, and your brand must remain on your customer’s radar. There are some companies that aide small businesses to produce leads on LinkedIn. You, yourself, can do what these companies do for their clients.

Introduce yourself to potential customers after thoroughly searching through the LinkedIn databases.
Stay in touch with the people who seemed interested in acquiring your product or service.
Send emails every month to transfer information about the kinds of issues your company can solve for its customers, and communicate what you have achieved thus far with other clients and customers.
Engage with your audience through various means, such as webinars.

These activities are inexpensive and not that time-consuming, but the result in a decent amount of lead generation.

5. Grow your email marketing list:

You can message 50 people at a time with LinkedIn. A good idea would be to write a letter to everyone connecting with you, thanking them for joining. Also, invite them to your email marketing list in that message. This is an excellent way to increase your email marketing list. Your email should include a direct link using which the email receivers can sign up for your email marketing list.

6. Use LinkedIn's sponsored tools:

LinkedIn has been designed and optimized to maximize the growth of your company and increase your reach.

LinkedIn offers four different kinds of sponsored tools that you can use to promote your business.

i. Sponsored Content

With the help of sponsored content you can broadcast native ads across LinkedIn feeds on all you devices (both desktop and mobile). You will be able to reach a highly engaged audience with sponsored content. By reaching such an audience, you will be able to create and build brand awareness and nurture profitable relationships.

The most prominent feature of sponsored content is the fact that you can target people with a professional mindset. As you can directly target people who really want to do business with you. Sponsored content comes in four different formats-

LinkedIn also offers various courses where you can learn to advertise your brand/ company through sponsored content.

ii. Sponsored Messaging

This is a much more personal way of reaching your prospective clients with the help of direct one-on-one messages. Sharing interactive messages (such as ones containing a free product trial, or a link to sign up for a newsletter) can engage your prospective clients and lead to quality results. You can also drive more traffic to your website with the help of sponsored messaging.

There are two main formats of sponsored messaging-

iii. Text Ads

Text Ads in LinkedIn are a great way to drive the right traffic to you and generate like-to-convert, quality leads. LinkedIn offers two different pricing and payment strategies so that you can control your budget. You can choose pay per click (PPC) or cost per impression (CPM) as your pricing option.

iv. Dynamic Ads

Dynamic Ads allow you to personalize the experience for your audience. Your ads can be customized based on your target audiences’ profile data. You can specially tailor your ads. This helps in growing brand awareness, converting certain prospects, and driving traffic, and gauge and enhance your results directly in Campaign Manager. Types of dynamic ads that you can use to build brand awareness-

Follower Ads- Increase your audience and gain higher number of followers for your LinkedIn or Showcase Page, and nurture your influence when they see and engage with the raw and informative content you share on LinkedIn.

Content Ads– Lead is generated as members download your content. The leads are directly downloaded to Campaign Manager. The leads can also be sent to your CRM or marketing automation tool.

Spotlight Ads– Drive traffic to your landing page or website by featuring your product, event, newsletter, service, and more, with a clear instructions for action for your target viewers. With spotlight ads you can generate lead when content is downloaded. The content can be downloaded directly to your Campaign Manager. You may even transfer them to your CRM or marketing automation tool.

If you want to start using content ads, then contact a sales representative right away. Content ads can only be accessed through a LinkedIn representative for now.

LinkedIn also offers a nifty tool called Campaign Manager. With Campaign Manager, you can easily keep track of how well your Ads are doing and what kind of feedback and reach it is generating. With Campaign Manager, you can manage all your ads from one place. It has an easy to use interface which makes keeping track of all your advertisements and content an absolute breeze.

7. Post quality content:

The idea is to post actionable, engaging content that will bring your dream clients to you. You stay relevant amongst your clients and peers by posting content that engages and creates a space for productive discussions.

Good quality content can be very targeted and should be able to accomplish two primary goals.

Your posts should contain teachable information or lessons on how to solve a particular problem or how others can do their job better. Make sure these "problems" are ones that are usually faced by your clients. This way you can show your clients that you can, indeed, solve their problems and you can do it better. This is a great way to appear on your clients' radar and attract the clients you want to offer your services to.
Your posts should establish you as a “thought leader” and showcase your expertise in your area. This is a very good opportunity and way to get recognized and noticed by your dream clients. More on this will be discussed further in this article.

The point is to offer value to your clients and audience; so that they seek out your services, and you can grow your business.

Posting the right content at the right time is imperative to growing your audience base on.

8. Stay active:

Don’t just sit on your own page and post content. Go! Give your dream clients a follow and engage in their posts. Post comments, engage in intellectual debates to show off your knowledge and expertise.

9. Leverage groups and make your own:

Join LinkedIn groups that are relevant to your target audience, especially if you are a small business, still looking to gain traction. This can be a great way to gather information and your audience and analyze their wants and needs so that you can best provide for them. You join a total of 50 groups on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn InMail is a nifty feature you can utilize to stay active in your groups. Make the most of this feature. The only downside to it is that it is a part of LinkedIn’s paid marketing strategy. So, no, you cannot use it for free. But with InMail, you can directly contact anyone on LinkedIn. This is a much faster and more efficient mode of communication than email. It is an incredibly powerful way to get in touch with prospective clients and audiences.

Don’t just stop and join other groups, create your own too!

10. Build relationships:

The definition of marketing is managing profitable customer relationships”. Therefore in order to maintain relationships, you need to build profitable ones. The first step to this is to identify which relationships are profitable and which ones will be draining. Cut out the draining ones and engage in the profitable ones. Start with a connection and then build it into a strong relationship.

As a business owner, you should connect and interact with prospects, referral and strategic clients, and other business owners. LinkedIn is a mass communication tool, and you should make the most of its features by connecting with as many valuable people as possible.

LinkedIn knows how a connection with the right person can lead to sales and massive business growth. Therefore, it allows you to search for individuals with an accuracy that is, quite frankly, a little scary. And once you have reached that one person, you can further build your network by connecting with mutuals.

Special 3 step strategy for lead generation

1. Add 20 of your dream clients:

Search up and 20 of your dream clients. However, do not slide into their DMs or leave any sort of personalized messages. You want them to come to you, not the other way around.

2. Comment on ten posts by your dream clients:

The 20 dreams clients you added in the first step? Now go to their pages, and comment on 10 of their posts. Make sure you comment on topics that you are expert in. Also, ensure that your comments are well written and showcase your expertise.

Try adding valuable content to the conversation. For example- correct any misguided viewpoint on topics that you are expert in or add your take on a particular issue. However, confirm that all of your opinions are well researched and logical.

The point of this exercise is establishing your presence. Simply put, you are letting your dream clients know that “hello, here I am.”

3. Post informative content:

Post highly educational value or tips and tricks posts that help guide your own audience get valuable leads.

And post at least twice. If you are capable of posting more then definitely do it! Now the key to this special three-step strategy being a success for you is simple. You have to talk the talk and walk the walk. Whatever you promise, you have to deliver. A simple way of doing this is to make resources available to your clients. Illustrate what you can do for them. People are attracted to results. Contacting you and getting a hold of you should be super easy.

If you are able to generate strong, likely-to convert leads every other day it should be good enough. Moreover, if you can successfully execute these steps and can truly adapt and embrace the process, you won’t even have to use sales funnels or lead magnets.

LinkedIn marketing and earning strong likely-to-convert leads isn’t all that difficult. It is a game of resilience and consistency. Be consistent with your posting and be resilient in your journey to growing your company and generating more leads.

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Yousuf Hossain

I am an entrepreneur who always invests time closely with people to successfully bring their business online. My main mission with this blog is to help people with offering them free guides and tutorials related to website design and marketing so that people can grow their online businesses following my guidance and path!