How to use LinkedIn for Business – Part One

LinkedIn is a social media platform that millions of professionals use every day to grow their networks and careers, but did you know you can use this very platform to grow your business, too?
It’s definitely different from the other social media marketing platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter or Instagram; businesses have a direct access to consumers that they can easily market to with status updates, posts, and images. LinkedIn on the other hand makes an invaluable addition to your digital marketing strategy by focusing on areas like career development, professional connections, industry discussions and other business-related activities.

LinkedIn needs a different approach to get the results you want. To help navigate this marketing platform, we’re breaking this into two parts. Here are the first six hacks you can use to find new customers, create new contacts and ultimately grow your business.

• Find highly targeted customers and connections
  If you are a small company, target on the exact industry, company size and job role that you know will buy your product and service. In this way, you can set your advertising campaigns only to the business under that grouping, only to executives to those companies with a customer-support title.

• Stay on customers’ radars
  Once you introduce yourself to the world of LinkedIn, always stay in touch with the people who have expressed interest. Update your status daily, publish a weekly blog post to keep the clients’ name in front of their network. By sending them monthly emails, you can increase your database as well. The result is simple, inexpensive, and systematic.

• Grow your email marketing list
  When you make a connection, always craft a letter thanking them for connecting with you, invite them to be part of your email marketing list. LinkedIn allows one to send messages to 50 people at one go. But make sure that you also reciprocate to the mail – offer to look at something of their offerings as well.

• Use sponsored updates
  Just like Facebook ads, use Sponsored Updates to push your updates to individual’s LinkedIn feed. One key difference in this platform is to customise based on company name, job title, job function, skills, schools and groups. You can also target industries even without having them in your mailing list. With the help of a strong call-to-action, people will get to see something useful for free, you can get a niche audience, increase website visitors, and if you’re lucky enough, generate sales as well!

• Post only high-quality content
  Without good content, you can lose everything. With your ability to reach to people, you should accomplish two goals – teach others how to solve a problem or how to do their job better. Thereby, you establish a leadership thought in that space.

• Go viral
  When you post a status or a blog, with a little bit of momentum, LinkedIn itself will put a spotlight on you and get your more readers. What more reasons to do you need to improve your visibility!

Using LinkedIn can be a little complicated with the kind of audience you have and the content that you put out. But it’s a space that professionals use next to Facebook. So use it well!