Growth with LinkedIn – how LinkedIn plays an important role in business growth

LinkedIn usage has become a norm nowadays. From the fresh undergraduate student to a full-fledged professional, it is a platform which is used by many for recruiting/hiring top talent or job search. But it isn’t just for individuals - it is also used by 30 million+ companies for business. With LinkedIn, self-branding has become possible and effective. It is a useful social platform that helps in growth of an individual and can play an instrumental role in his/her growth strategy.

According to Jason Miller, Content Marketing Manager at LinkedIn, 1 out of every 3 professionals on the planet is on LinkedIn. LinkedIn plays a significant role in your growth strategy and this article explores that domain.

Let’s delve deeper into how LinkedIn helps a business grow in both the short and long-run with these “LinkedIn strategies for business growth”.

19 reasons why LinkedIn is the best platform to grow a business

1.  High signal platform since the beginning:

LinkedIn, as compared to other platforms such as Facebook, has a hyper-reach. It is specifically useful for B2B marketing as Facebook does not work that effectively when it comes to B2B marketing since most businesses are unable to reach out to their target audience. With LinkedIn’s customized features such as geographical location, professional title, company name, and seniority level, the social media market is vast. With this type of feature available, businesses can easily reach to another business in the same locality, belonging to a specific professional title, a certain business they are searching for or senior professionals.

Research indicates that from above 580+ million users, 303 million are those who use LinkedIn actively every month and are therefore known as “Monthly Active Users” (MAUs). From these, 2/5 are those who are “Daily Active Users” (DAUs). Majorly, these are specialized business professionals from across the globe.

So, for marketing or sales professionals, LinkedIn is the platform best suited to your need. The reach to other businesses is much faster and efficient as compared to any other platform namely Facebook and Twitter. This is the reason why for business purposes, LinkedIn outpaces all other social platforms. As for other channels such as emails, referral marketing, and webinars, it is daunting and tiresome to generate the leads from a huge amount of traffic and takes a lot of hard work, effort, and time.

2.  Page-sharing options:

LinkedIn also has a resourceful feature where professionals can create their pages on LinkedIn to reach a mass market. This helps boost the number of followers and generate leads for their business. Be it any type of business, from apparel to jewelry, or a service ranging from banking to insurance, LinkedIn is an excellent platform when it comes to marketing. You can simply let other people know that your business is operational. For increasing the number of followers and attracting customers, you can send an invite to people, asking them to like your page.

In the case of subordinates, you can send an e-mail to all your employees asking them to like the company page and add it as their ‘place of work’. Moreover, you can also grow your business by asking your employees to invite people from their network to like the business page. With an online presence, the business gives potential and visiting customers a chance to take a glimpse into the products/services being offered. It also gives the potential recruits a chance to visualize the company’s culture.

3.  A complete LinkedIn company profile:

With a complete description of our company profile on LinkedIn, incoming potential customers have a better and 360-degree knowledge of your company which aids them in decision-making, and a successful business is then able to thrive and prosper. It is a researched fact that companies that have complete profiles receive up to 2X more viewership than those with incomplete page profiles.

It is necessary to have these 7 items in your business page for your business to flourish:

1. Logo
2. Company Description
3. Website URL
4. Number of employees (Size of Company)
5. Company Type
6. Industry or sector
7. Location

With these basic details present in any business page, it is guaranteed that you will gain a high number of viewers and followers. This will in turn attract relevant customers for the business which helps it to grow in terms of sales, revenues and profits. As is the case with Facebook, LinkedIn profiles can also be viewed with the help of the “Overview” option. This way, one can view his/her business page and update all the relevant details.

A high-resolution company logo and an attractive cover photo that explains your brand well, along with an “About Us” section provides knowledge to the customer about the business and its offerings. This helps to create a good business and brand image in the minds of consumers.

Therefore, having a complete company profile with all the crucial components present is a driving force in making your company look professional. This type of professionalism is very important in providing visitors with all the information they need, to establish a relationship with your company, once they have complete information.

4.  Posting consistently:

Research suggests that company pages with at least 150 followers tend to have more company page views as compared to those with a lesser number of followers. It should be a target to at least post once a week or set up a posting schedule to ensure consistent posting. This way, you can easily reach your target audience.

There will be a high number of visitors to your site if the following components are included:

• Descriptive caption: A descriptive caption gives an insight into your business, what are its plans, its products/services, and other updates.
• Attractive imagery: Aesthetics help your business to stand out from the other businesses as your clients enjoy looking at them and are more interested in buying from your business, since with the help of visuals they can imagine what type of products you are selling or the wide range of services that your business offers.
• Hashtags: They are a good way to engage your audience. Hashtags are trending in the contemporary era and the audience tends to enjoy reading content which has a lot of hashtags.

5.  Keep sharing your top content:

There may be times when your business is running out of the content or there is nothing new to share. When this happens, it is always best to keep sharing your top-rated content. These can be posts from your past; doing this ensures that the posts not seen by most of the people will reach them effectively. These posts can be easily found on your top posts in the analytics section on the Buffer dashboard. These are present in the “Most Popular” category.

6.  Get your colleagues and employees engaged:

Your colleagues and employees are the most influential people when it comes to marketing your business and making it thrive and grow. They can consistently share your LinkedIn content and also increase the visibility of your firm page on LinkedIn to get most of the people to like it. Not only this, but you should groom your employees and colleagues into pitching, messaging, and positioning your products. This may be strenuous in the beginning but it is likely to yield high results for your products as well as the business in both the short and long-run.            

7.  Encourage colleagues to get engaged with your content and to fill out their LinkedIn profiles:

As stated earlier, getting your colleagues to engage with your content can help spread the content to their networks. This can raise the company’s reach using this platform. Employees are the biggest assets when it comes to promoting the company. They can drive and fuel LinkedIn’s marketing strategy and growth.

In addition to this, employees must also be encouraged to fill out their LinkedIn profiles. This is particularly beneficial as individual profiles tend to influence the brand and play a vital role in helping the business grow. This is also just a simple way to create awareness of your brand. It also makes your company more prominent in search results both on and off LinkedIn. Hence, motivate your colleagues to add your company in their contemporary work experience on their LinkedIn profiles and keep themselves involved with the company page posts.

8.  Gaining international reach by positioning yourself in search engines for different languages:

Yes! You read that correctly! LinkedIn has a huge impact on different search engines. Profile optimization can lead to humongous benefits, and one of those is being recognized by search engines and being at the top of SEO in terms of company name and job alerts. These can attract potential employees and customers you need for your business. Furthermore, if you translate your profile and company page, it will be translated into every language that you have opted for.

Isn’t it wonderful to have your company name and page being featured in different languages and gain international recognition?

9.  Aligning marketing to internationalization strategy:

Every mature business is concerned about expanding into different regions and countries. Well, who doesn’t? To become visible to potential clientele in foreign countries, your profile language should be translated into the language of the target audience. Hence, the alignment of your company profile with their native language makes it easy and convenient for the international residents to get to know about your company and probably make the decision of buying from it.

10.  Text Ads:

They are the oldest and one of the primitive forms of LinkedIn ads which can be launched only to the desktop audience. Text Ads are especially preferable because they are one of the cheapest ad formats in terms of cost per click. However, one of the biggest downsides of text ads is that since they appear on the right side of the customer’s LinkedIn feed, they do not receive the engagement they should be getting. However, conclusively, they are still a good source of growing your business and support your growth strategy.

11. Sponsored Content:

Sponsored content is one of the best ads being offered by LinkedIn. There are several reasons behind it. These include their native appearance to the concerned audience, seamless appearance in the audience’s feed, and availability in both mobile and desktop platforms. Customers tend to engage more with Sponsored Content because it appears recurrently in the audience’s feed and that too in their native language!

12. Sponsored InMail:

These ads are LinkedIn’s form of e-mail marketing or direct messaging ads.  Sponsored InMail ads, although having low chances of your audience reading it, or clicking on the link provided, are effective than sending emails. Sponsored emails work best only if you want to adopt a “personalized” approach of sending emails. Sponsored InMails could include sending invitations to webinars, events, or to download sector reports.

However, for marketers and salespersons, this must be kept in mind that the Sponsored InMail is targeted towards a narrow range of relevant audiences, these are people who may be directly interested in buying your brands based on their current engagement with the brand or likes and interests. Having a wide range of audiences can be a costly decision, therefore the audience must be kept narrow.

13.  Dynamic Ads:

Dynamic ads, as is the case with Text Ads, appear on the right panel of LinkedIn feed and set up your profile picture with a brand logo you may be interested in. This is another way of personalizing ads to the relevant users and making your business grow through this strategy. While dynamic ads may not work on LinkedIn’s mobile app or browser, they are compatible with desktop and enable traffic on your page.

14.  Promotion of company page beyond LinkedIn:

Marketing channels do not work in a silo. A business only becomes successful when its promoted across all the well-coordinated digital platforms. It is recommended to link your company page to other marketing mediums, e-mails as well as blogs. This is known as “cross-promotion” and can be done via social media and email. While other mediums may be utilized for company promotion, it is LinkedIn which acts as a backbone to these mediums, so that there is the consistent growth of the company.

15. Usage of social media buttons / LinkedIn “Follow” button to your website:

It is compelling to add social media buttons for cross-promotion of content. This also makes it very easy for the viewers to share your content as much as they want after giving it a read or after site-browsing. With a LinkedIn “Follow” button added to other pages or usage of social media sharing buttons on blog posts is likely to gain a high reach to your business on other platforms as well.

16. Use key points/statistics and quotes:

To engage your audience with your content, use key points, statistics (could be facts and figures), and meaningful or relevant quotes to make your content appealing and captivating. Your content should motivate the potential buyer to buy a product and not be discouraged from buying. Basing your content on this criterion, only makes it readable and exciting for the audience.

17. Use a personalized approach with your audience:

Call out your audience while you are trying to reach them. This is a “personalized” approach of selling your brands and directly referring to the people you are trying to reach out. This is likely to help your posts gain tract, that too from the right people. For example, if you are selling a tech-based product, refer to your audience as “calling out all the tech-geeks” or “calling out all the technology experts”. Similarly, if you selling a makeup brand, refer to the targeted women as “Hello! Beautiful ladies”.

An audience that is made to feel special would be more interested and likely to buy your products/services than the audience which is not being referred to.

18. Tag the people and pages mentioned:

While you upload a post, do not forget to tag your employees and your company page. This is a smart strategy as the person reading the post also tends to click on the tagged people and pages. So, while they are directed to these links, they will gain insights from your business and consider buying from it. This strategy is useful for success and reach in the long run.

19. Create LinkedIn polls to receive feedback and engage with your audience:

An admin of a LinkedIn page (particularly the owner of a company) can create a poll from the group’s homepage or the company page. There is a minimum of two and maximum of four options on a poll. This poll can be created concerning your products and services and the degree to which customers like or dislike the product. This will also aid the company in receiving valuable feedback from customers through which they can bring substantial improvements in the product and maintain a good reputation of the company for sustainable growth.