One of the most effective ways to grow your business is through leveraging your LinkedIn profile.
With the right strategy, LinkedIn can be an effective way to grow your business and raise your profile. And best of all, it doesn’t take hours each day to master.
Keep reading for tips on how to dominate on LinkedIn.
Five tips to help your business dominate on LinkedIn
Here are five simple yet effective ways for you and your business to market yourselves via LinkedIn.
1. Ensure your personal and business profiles support each other
It’s easier to build a personal LinkedIn profile than a company page. LinkedIn trainer Kate Merryweather recommends the 80/20 approach: “Focus 80 per cent of your content on your personal page and 20 per cent on your company LinkedIn profile.”
2. Develop your brand on LinkedIn
One way to develop your brand on LinkedIn is to become a trusted voice for your industry – something that publishing thought leadership articles can help with. “It’s not about becoming the go-to expert,” Merryweather says. “Rather it’s about consistently sharing high-value content.”
Merryweather says when useful advice is shared frequently, it can attract more followers and your reputation as a contributor may be enhanced.
She also recommends using video, which can be a great way to stand out and “stop the scroll”: “And with the right conversion strategy, this can help drive leads to the business.”
“Your content should focus primarily on the people you want to sell to, but avoid pushy messages”
3. Identify your expert subject areas
Becoming a thought leader means sticking to a single content pillar that relates principally to your career or business speciality.
Covering a range of subjects can be confusing. “By concentrating on a core content pillar, you may have a better chance of becoming known within your industry,” Merryweather says.
“You’ll establish a reputation as the ‘personal indemnity specialist’ or the ‘lawyer who specialises in staff contracts’.”
4. Identify your target audience
Your LinkedIn activity should work within a broader marketing strategy. Or, as Merryweather says, it should focus on three segments:
- Those you can sell to.
- Those who can refer to you.
- Those you can collaborate with.
“Your content should focus primarily on the people you want to sell to,” she says. “But avoid using pushy messages. Provide content that entertains, educates and inspires as this gains trust and over time should result in positive leads.”
5. Develop your content pipeline
It helps to plan your LinkedIn content in advance, perhaps a week or a month, and then use a scheduling tool to publish it at the times that best suit your audience. Merryweather recommends using three types of content:
- Value content – offering help, advice, news and insights (this should form the majority of your content).
- Affinity content – telling stories with an emotional or powerful hook (such as your biggest mistake or lesson learned).
- Sales content – sharing specific calls to action (to attend an event, book a sales call).
How you can market your LinkedIn profile
When promoting your profile, there are three points to consider:
- First, make sure it’s easy to find your page. Think about the search terms someone looking for you would use to find you.
- Second, you should make your profile appealing. People should immediately understand who you are and why they should follow you.
- Third, implement a strong engagement strategy that uses comments and contributions to get you noticed. (Another option is LinkedIn ads that can fast-track your growth.)
Measure your success and tweak accordingly:
LinkedIn measures results using analytics such as views, post impressions and search appearances, and tracking this information each month can be a good way of gaining an understanding of how successful your strategy is.
If you want more in-depth analysis, Shield provides greater audience insights that help you understand which content receives the most traction and engagement. This allows you to tweak your strategy as required to ensure you continue to publish more of what your audience wants.
Developing a social media presence using tools such as LinkedIn is an effective way to support your growth by reaching the type of audience that’s crucial to your business.
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