How To Market Your Business On LinkedIn For Free
- By Edmund Blogg
- •
- 09 Nov, 2017
- •
When LinkedIn first started, it gathered momentum slowly. In the early phase (with as few as 20 sign-ups a day) people created profiles because everyone else was doing it, but many weren't quite sure what the platform was for.
Today, LinkedIn has emerged as a powerhouse of social networking for the commercial sector, with over 450 million global members. Far more than just a messaging or networking tool, it is now an established B2B marketing platform offering huge opportunities for companies looking to build brand visibility and generate leads.
Whilst LinkedIn offers some of the most demographically accurate paid advertising available, in this post we'll focus on how your business can reach new customers and market effectively on LinkedIn using organic (or unpaid) techniques.
We'll walk you through:
- how to post content
- how frequently to update
- what types of content to choose
- how to track results
- how to keep consistent
If you're interested in fine-tuning your LinkedIn marketing, we're going to assume that you already have the basics if your company page set up. If not, there are some great guides available with a quick Google search, or you can follow LinkedIn's own walk-through here.
Once your page is set up, it's worth checking a few essentials before getting started with marketing:
Keep Your Company Description Simple
When potential customers are researching your company, they'll often try and find you on LinkedIn. Sometimes company websites can be so focused on dazzling visuals and unique site design that they don't make it clear enough what the business actually does.
Don't fall into this trap on LinkedIn - by all means sell and promote your company in the description, but make sure it's easy to understand what you offer and how you can help.
Use Showcase Pages If You Need Niche Audiences
LinkedIn offers 'showcase pages' as a way of marketing specific products or service lines.
A good example is Microsoft, who have a separate showcase page for Microsoft Office
which allows them to share updates and promotional news unique to their Office suite (unrelated to products such as Xbox, for instance, which will have a different user group and audience).
Showcase pages are a good option if you have very different customer groups that need to be clearly segmented in the way you market, but need to be used carefully as they can create lots of additional work. If not absolutely necessary, you may prefer to keep all your followers focused on one central page.
Build Out Your Key Employee Pages
While your company page is the main platform for your marketing, leadership profiles are valuable online real estate and are often visited by new prospects. It's helpful to think of your leadership (and key employee) pages as extensions of your company page, so they should be fully completed and capitalize on the opportunity to further promote your company. You can also add media to individual pages, such as videos, PDFs and slideshares.
Now that we're set up, we can get to the important part - actively marketing your company on LinkedIn.
Here are some guidelines which will help you design and execute a successful LinkedIn organic marketing strategy:
Keep Active
Vary Your Content
A simple one to start with - one of the key goals of LinkedIn marketing is to acquire followers.
LinkedIn users who choose to follow your company will see your updates in their newsfeeds, and they become your primary audience on LinkedIn. Not only are they able to engage with your updates, they can also share them with their own networks and increase your exposure.
Although many factors play in to how successful a company is in building a follower base, frequency of updates is a major one.
Many top LinkedIn marketers post updates several times a day, but as a minimum it's a good idea to post daily and as a minimum a few times a week.
Vary Your Content
The same old updates coming around gets stale fast, and followers will drop off. Even loyal customers will lose interest in a company page which churns out predictable content.
LinkedIn allows posting of many different types of media, so take advantage and add variety to your updates by considering things like:
- images & photos
- infographics
- blog post links
- news links
- video
Create Content For Your Audience, Not Yourself
When many companies are getting started with LinkedIn marketing for the first time, their instinct is to use the platform as a sort of 'company Facebook'.
Translation?
A continual stream of photos of barbecues, nights out, working lunches and anniversary celebrations...
Whilst showing off life within your business can have a lot of positives (and is an essential component of employer branding), it's unlikely to hit your wider corporate marketing goals.
By all means keep social posts in the mix, but ensure they're not the only thing you're publishing.
In among your company updates should be content which is useful, educational or entertaining for your audience, supporting your broader strategies in brand positioning and development.
Direct Your Traffic Intelligently
A highly effective way to position your company as well-informed industry specialists is to share links to news articles and topical blog posts from thought leaders.
Although this can have a strong impact on brand positioning, it's worth remembering that links like these actually drive traffic off your LinkedIn page and onto a third-party site.
Just as with social posts, your updates will need to strike a balance between displaying you as up-to-date with relevant news and ensuring that your LinkedIn activity also sends traffic where you want it to go.
A few options include:
- company blog posts (these direct LinkedIn traffic directly to your site, where visitors can be moved further through the sales funnel by site features and design)
- LinkedIn articles (posts published by company employees directly to LinkedIn, which often generate higher levels of commentary and engagement than company blogs)
- gated content (this means directing readers to a downloadable piece of content on your site in exchange for an email sign-up - a highly effective lead generation technique).
Get Employees On Board
The exposure your updates get can be greatly increased if your employees like and share your updates. This works because each employee will have their own network and followers, separate from the company. Each time an employee engages with company content, the potential number of LinkedIn users who may see that content is increased.
There are some great tools for helping with the process of getting employees engaged (such as Bambu), but smaller teams can achieve big results by simply sharing links via email, internal newsletters, bulletin boards, Slack etc. You can even make it extra easy by creating a sharing link with tools like this.
Get (And Stay) Organized
As your LinkedIn marketing gathers momentum, the challenge quickly switches from getting it going to keeping it running.
Any business trying to produce strategic, engaging content with variety and consistency will struggle without the right organization tools.
A pre-planned schedule is a must, even if it's a simple spread sheet. To grade things up, social media management tools like Buffer, Sprout Social
or Hooutsuite
can take the strain off manual post-by-post updating.
Track Results
Even if you're not using a social media management tool (many of which will give you built-in analytics on how your LinkedIn updates are performing), LinkedIn's own platform has some useful reporting features that will help you track changes in followers and page visitors as well as showing which of your updates have generated the most views and engagement.
It's important to stay on top of the data, and adjust future content publishing to provide your audience with more of what's working and less of what's not.
Putting It All Together
When all these ingredients are mixed together, we get a basic blueprint for successful organic LinkedIn marketing:
- clear, engaging company page
- showcase pages (where needed)
- fully populated key employee pages
- high levels of post frequency
- varied update format
- strategic update topics
- balanced direction of viewer traffic
- employee engagement and update amplification
- content calendar
- analytics monitoring and optimization
Used effectively, LinkedIn can be an extremely powerful platform to build brand visibility and generate leads. Companies executing a winning marketing strategy can reach huge audiences and acquire customers at a rapid pace.
For any questions or to learn more about how we support companies in building a client base through LinkedIn, feel free to get in touch.
