The Ultimate Guide for Linkedin Marketing

LinkedIn is a professional networking site for professional development and networking, founded in 2003. While it primarily supports individual individuals, allowing them to post achievements and work history, as well as upload resumes and other supporting content, it also provides companies with opportunities to post jobs, advertise new products and services, and network with potential prospects. There is also a messaging feature that provides two-way communication between users.

LinkedIn is an effective tool for companies to collaborate, exchange best practices and prioritize marketing efforts. To order to expand their network, independent organizations can participate to different groups and managers and business owners can place themselves as thought leaders in their industry.

Below is a comprehensive guide for what you need to learn to get your company founded on LinkedIn and make it work. Here you will learn everything from setting up your company profile to optimizing your professional details to building a professional network with special tools and features to target potential prospects.

Setting Up Your LinkedIn Business Profile

It's easy to set up your company account in LinkedIn. You will be using it to create brand awareness and attract clients and prospects with your products and services.

• First, click on the “Work” dropdown at the top righthand corner of your homepage and select “Create a Company Page+” from the bottom of the menu.
• Upload a logo and banner image for your page.
• Post company updates from your page that your audience will find interesting and helpful.
• Tailor content to your audience’s needs and interests.
• Promote your page to attract followers.
• Create LinkedIn Showcase pages for specific products so you can customize your messages for different segments of your audience.

It's important to update your Business LinkedIn profile, because you want to continue to attract followers as well as remain significant. Dead accounts mean no one's alive, after all. Alternatively, you'll want to keep your profile placed to always engage your followers. Ways to do this include:

• Refreshing your LinkedIn Profile’s branding such as your background image and more.
• Auditing the rich media on your profile, such as YouTube video links, to make sure they are still relevant and active.
• Checking your website links to, once again, making sure they work.
• Accessing your LinkedIn connections to delete anyone who isn’t relevant or to reconnect with those who can help you build your brand.
• Viewing your LinkedIn activity to increase visibility and views.
• Checking your company page to ensure that the new images and updates are all correct.

The reason for all this checking and re-checking is because LinkedIn, like many social media platforms, often makes changes to its profiles that you need to be made aware of.

Finally, it is important to customize your LinkedIn company profile, because it enhances exposure and allows users to know which parts of your profile are most relevant. You want to see to it that the fundamentals work for you. These may involve making sure you are using a correctly lit high-resolution picture and the headline uses keywords that your target audience uses most often.

After that, don’t forget to:

• Customize your contact information. Make sure all the entry points to your profile reflects important keywords.
• Use a video to introduce yourself and your work.
• Solicit endorsements and give recommendations.
• Share your education, certifications, and all awards.

Advertising On Your LinkedIn Business Profile

In addition to serving as a good way to get information about your business out there, LinkedIn is a great tool for content marketing. This can include using LinkedIn advertising or LinkedIn Matched Audiences, two resources that specifically advertise your business to the people who might be most interested.

LinkedIn Matched Audiences allows you to retarget visitors to the website, market contracts from your consumer accounts and marketing automation tools and meet decision-makers for your account-based marketing initiatives at target companies. It's available for all advertising products from LinkedIn including Sponsored Material, Sponsored InMail and other ad formats.

Three of the new targeting capabilities are:

• Website Retargeting — Allows you to market to LinkedIn members who have already visited your website.
• Account Targeting — Helps you reach decision-makers within your target accounts.
• Contact Targeting — Enables you to upload or integrate your contact list to build a customized audience for your business.

You need to run split tests to track audience response to boost your LinkedIn Advertising. The split test is also known as the A / B test. It includes the optimisation of your promotions for LinkedIn Sponsored Material. Split testing requires testing and iterating to refine every aspect of your campaign, including photos and calls-to-action. To be truly meaningful, experiments will run for at least two weeks, and you should only check one variable at a time to see if that makes a difference.

LinkedIn ads work best to hit small to medium sized companies. To do this work, you need to activate the "Business Size" filter that lets you target the businesses that are most likely to buy your product or service. One of the drawbacks for this service is that many businesses with 50 or fewer people have not set up a company page on LinkedIn and those who don't require individual employees to link their profiles to the company page.

The good news is that LinkedIn allows you to retarget advertising to visitors to your website, meaning you're going after people who have shown interest in your product or service before. You also have the opportunity to connect with eligible leads through lead generation forms designed to gather information through your ads. For example, when members click the call-to-action button on your ad, the form will be opened using details from their LinkedIn profile with fields already filled in. That is so simple.

Eventually, the video ads are another option available through LinkedIn. Users are able to study a target audience by interviewing current and former clients, conducting an interview with a member of their executive leadership, and evaluating existing clients or prospective clients ' LinkedIn profiles.

Analyzing Metrics On Your LinkedIn Business Profile

So let's say you set up your profile, make sure it's configured, ad campaigns created and even record some footage. How do you know whether or not all of that messaging works? The response is within key metrics that you will use to measure the success of your LinkedIn Company page against the competition pages. The starting-point includes:

• Creating an audit spreadsheet.
  Identify which techniques, such as shares, clicks, and “likes,” are getting you the best results and which ones are falling short.
• Tracking follower data.
  Use LinkedIn’s built-in analytics tool to assess your company page and not the total number of your followers. Use this number over time to see how it grows or doesn’t.
• Examining engagement data.
  Your LinkedIn analytics will show the number of impressions/reach, clicks, “likes,” comments, shares, and more, for a certain time period.
• Measuring referral traffic.
  You’ll want to use Google Analytics to analyze how much traffic LinkedIn is sending to your company website.