AdvertisingTips & TricksThe Complete Guide To LinkedIn Marketing For Brands

When it comes to promoting your brand on social media, Facebook and Instagram usually emerge as the preferred platforms. However, if you’re ignoring LinkedIn marketing and not including it in your social media strategy, then you’re making a big mistake!

LinkedIn isn’t just a place to hunt for jobs anymore. The platform has matured into a pulsating network of professionals over the years and is now a top marketing junction.

Whether you are a startup founder, a creative professional or even an established brand, LinkedIn should be your platform of choice for making your content visible or generating leads.

If you’re getting started with LinkedIn marketing for your brand, here’s a guide to make the ride smooth for you.

Why LinkedIn Marketing?

LinkedIn has grown up to be the world’s largest professional network boasting of a whopping 562 million users! Not to forget that executives of most Fortune 500 companies like to spend time on LinkedIn, looking for valuable content for their business.

LinkedIn’s uniqueness over other platforms lies in the fact that people are there strictly for business purpose. Which means you already have a targeted audience in place. Also, it’s about drawing people to you through your content and connections, rather than pushing your brand for promotion.

Also, it’s interesting to note that more than half of the social traffic to B2B blogs and websites actually comes from LinkedIn. The fact that close to 91% of marketing professionals look for quality content on LinkedIn, serves as the icing on the cake.

Now that you have a convincing answer to “Why LinkedIn?”, we move on to the best practices that brands should follow.

Ensure An Effective Company Page

Take your LinkedIn Company Page seriously, as it acts as your business’s profile, prospective customers turn to for information. Make sure it includes a complete set of information for someone who’s getting to know your company for the first time.

A proper company’s logo, description and cover image are the basic elements to start with. Here’s an example of Vidooly’s LinkedIn company profile that you can use as a benchmark.

In addition, the website URL, the company size, industry, location should be there. A complete Company Page helps you maintain professionalism and credibility for your brand.

Simply creating a company page won’t suffice. Make sure you optimize it. Add relevant keywords within the description to increase the visibility of your page in search results. Create links to your company page on your website, blog and other marketing resources.

Have A LinkedIn Marketing Strategy In Place

The first step is to identify goals – both for your business and for your audience. What’s your target? Do you want to generate leads, find prospective business partners, be a thought leader in your industry or simply hire top talent.

After you set your goals, it becomes easier to target an audience. For instance, if you are out there to find out potential takers for an eCommerce personalization software that your company builds, then you’ll be looking for eCommerce startup founders or marketing managers in the eCommerce industry.

Your employees and your connections are going to be your biggest assets, so include them in your LinkedIn marketing strategy. Did you know that every LinkedIn user has about 400 connections on an average? Multiply that with the number of employees your company has and their connections further. That’s quite a good pool of prospective followers for your page!

Share Content And Post Consistently

If you want to grow your audience organically and also keep reminding your followers of you, keep posting engaging and valuable content on a regular basis. Content marketing statistics are indicating that LinkedIn has emerged as the best place to deliver content and enhance audience engagement. About 3 million LinkedIn users are sharing content on a weekly basis and you don’t want to be left behind.

Try to minimize “salesy” content that directly talks about the benefits of your products. Instead, share knowledge and answer questions. This will build trust amongst your followers and potential customers for your business.

Enhance engagement on your posts by adding rich media. It grabs more attention than just text. Look for more images, YouTube videos and presentations that you can share.

If you are a YouTube content creator and have a channel of your own, you have the option of linking to your videos from your posts on LinkedIn. LinkedIn allows YouTube videos to play on its own in the news feed, unlike other social platforms where you need to upload native videos.

Maintain a consistent schedule. Posting once a week is a good option. But if you’re short on time, posting once a month can also suffice. Just make sure that you have a regular posting interval.

Use the Power of LinkedIn Ads

Already using Pay-Per-Click techniques on Facebook or Twitter? Expand your reach with LinkedIn’s powerful advertising platform. LinkedIn Ad campaigns would help you target a niche set of an audience on the basis of job title, industry and other options.

Even if you are a small business, LinkedIn offers flexible pricing options. You can even start an ad campaign with as low as $2 per day.

Here are the advertising solutions that LinkedIn offers

Sponsored Content

Don’t rely just on organic traffic to your page. A sponsored post will help you target a wider audience as it allows native advertising on LinkedIn. Your content will appear in the news feed of relevant professionals.

Sponsored InMail

Target your audience via their LinkedIn inbox by delivering sponsored messages to drive more conversions.

Text Ads

These are PPC or CPM ads that can be created easily using a catchy headline, a convincing description and even a small image.

These appear within LinkedIn search results, profile pages, group & home pages and more.

Lead Gen Forms

Aiming at generating more quality leads? Use Lead Gen Forms. This is a LinkedIn feature that enables you to add seamless forms to your sponsored ads. A user can simply access these forms through a call-to-action (like a Sign Up button) embedded within sponsored ads.

The form gets auto-filled with the user’s profile information. Once they submit, you instantly get information to create new leads for your business.

Analyze To Find Out What’s Working

Simply running a campaign will not be enough. You need to analyze the performance of your ad campaigns further. LinkedIn’s ad platform helps you track important metrics for the same. Below are the critical ones –

Clicks – How many people clicked on the link to your ad?

Impressions – How many times did people see your ad?

Click-Through-Rate (CTR) – You get this metric by dividing the number of clicks by impressions.

Average engagement – The no. of likes, comments and shares determines engagements. We get the average engagement by dividing the total engagement by impressions.

If your target is to generate leads and conversions, following are the metrics you should track –

Conversions – A count of the times someone took action on your ad, be it a sign up, download or purchase.

Conversion rate – The frequency of your ads leading to a conversion.

Cost Per Conversion – The total cost of running the ad divided by conversions.

Leads – Number of leads generated from ads through Lead Gen Forms.

Cost Per Lead – Cost incurred on the ad divided by leads generated.

So, tap your professional network today to increase your brand’s reach, establish a credible image and drive as many conversions as you can. LinkedIn marketing is a valuable arm of your social media strategy that is giving you a huge opportunity to grab!

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Thanks for reading the blog. If you are a brand/agency and want deeper insights related to your video marketing campaigns then reach us at 8527863094 or send in your queries at marketing@vidooly.com