3 March 2014
Twitter and Facebook strategies take up a huge chunk of the online marketing spend. Hashtags, retweets and likes dominate the metrics that determine the success of an online marketing campaign. With a combined user base of well over a billion users, the rush to tap that potential is understandable.
However, on the other side of the aisle is a social network that has a huge userbase of more than 250 million users with greater user engagement. Yet, it hardly finds a place in the tightly packed online marketing calendar. LinkedIn, the social network for professionals, or the place where suits and ties hang out, is overlooked by many businesses.
One big reason is it isn’t hip enough. There aren’t cool selfies to gawk at or cute cat videos to share. The “viral nature” of Facebook and Twitter is clearly amiss at LinkedIn.
Overlooking the fact that there have only been a handful of campaigns that have gone “viral”, businesses try to maximize the reach of their hashtags and mentions competing head on with their competitors making little headway.
The arguments to devote a fair share of time on a LinkedIn marketing campaign are quite compelling:
You get to connect with decision makers in an organization.
Be found by businesses who are looking for a fix for their real world problems
Reach the LinkedIn inbox of even those influencers who aren’t in your network.
Readily access the identity of the person who showed an interest in your business.
There are quite a few to add to this list and LinkedIn could complement your sales CRM in more ways than one. But, let us jump straight ahead to kickstart a LinkedIn marketing strategy that’ll get you results and leads!
Create a LinkedIn page and max out on content across all available sections. Upload logos, banner images, list products and services, promote upcoming events - there is enough scope for you to build a microsite over here.
There is enough room for you to spice things up and drive visitors to follow your brand. Add gorgeous banners. Use CTAs like you do in a landing page. The goal here is the same - engage users and get their attention.
One interesting way to stand out is to make use of the Showcase Pages. Showcase Pages are extensions of your Company Page, designed for spotlighting a brand, business unit, or initiative.
Create a page for aspects of your business with their own messages and audience segments to share with. In a few minutes, you’ll be able to create a showcase page that will rival that of a colorful Facebook page!
And, get a LinkedIn button to embed in your blog or website and start promoting your presence alongside the usual suspects of social networking!
Embrace LinkedIn as another social channel for you to communicate and engage with prospects. As for as the content stream is concerned, forget the fact that you’re posting it in a professional network where people post and seek jobs. It’s another logical offshoot of your social outreach efforts.
Share content like you do across all other social channels and all the above mentioned visual aids will only make your job easier when it comes to user engagement. Posting updates frequently helps to keep your audience hooked.
Automating the task of content posting with the help of Buffer or Hootsuite will help you spread posts evenly. Schedule posts throughout the day and share important content during the course of the workday, especially in the mornings.
Plain text doesn’t a help lot with user engagement. A healthy mix of multimedia centric posts add variety and stickiness to content marketing. Thankfully, LinkedIn lets you share multimedia content with rich previews!
Share images, videos, presentation decks and more on your company page with ease. Use the rich text editor to upload and preview content and ensure that your company page isn’t just a wall of text.
These goodies aren’t restricted to the content stream. You are free to add multimedia content to the various sections of the company page as well.
It all comes down to making connections and growing your reach. The first thing that people do is to start pinging as many people as they can to follow them. That’s equivalent to spamming and will do more harm to your reputation than good.
The easy way is to start with your employees. Make sure all your employees are following you company page and are actively participating in the conversation. It’s an all hands on deck effort and without the participation of your employees in the first place, it won’t induce confidence in others to follow suit.
The second rung of outreach should be to vendors, local businesses and your acquaintances. Prospects and people who you don’t know, but would like to connect with should be the last ones in the list.
It goes without saying that every pitch has to be personalized. Replace the template that LinkedIn connection requests are sent out with and replace them with your own. Space these pitches out to see which ones work and which don’t, and fine tune the message accordingly. LinkedIn badges are another way to acquire more followers to the company page.
Every time someone follows your page on LinkedIn, all people in their network are alerted as well. Converting these second and third level connections depends on how well the brand is presented in the company page and the quality of your messaging over there. So, the effort you put into the first three suggestions will bear fruit eventually.
Groups are a great way to expand your follower base and establish you as a thought leader. People tend to stay away from following company pages for quite a few reasons. Being flooded with shameless self plugs and information that isn’t aligned with their interests are the major ones.
LinkedIn groups help you overcome this limitation. By selecting a topic and niche that is under served and the one in which you are an expert at, you stand to garner the attention of many.
For instance, a person has no incentive to follow your travel company’s page. However, by creating a group that discusses about the trends in the travel industry, there is a very good chance of acquiring more followers.
Pay attention to the niche that you select and the name of the group. There are millions of groups in LinkedIn and you don’t want to sport the name that ten other groups do. Sending catchy email invitations is vital as well. All rules with respect to email marketing apply here as well.
The most important thing is to foster engaging conversations within the group. Start discussions on topics that are worth analyzing and give a platform to your group members to engage in meaningful conversations.
Email all group members at a preset schedule with information and collateral that’s of value to them. This could bring inactive users back to the group and keep the conversation going.
LinkedIn’s Influencer program is an interesting proposition. If you are good at writing or if somebody in your team is, you are well positioned to get massive attention.
The influencer program enables top thought leaders to gain a following among millions of professionals worldwide by writing and sharing great content on LinkedIn. Simply put, your thoughts and insights will be syndicated by LinkedIn across the network!
Getting to the front page of Digg used to be a big deal and it brought down servers with a sudden spike in traffic. Hacker News and viral tweets have a similar effect these days. But, they all pale in comparison to what LinkedIn has to offer. Influencers are reporting hundreds of thousands of page views for each and every article they publish.
That’s an insane amount of traffic. And then, there is the massive boost to your brand’s image and the networking effects associated to it. It takes a lot to get into the program, but, it is open to all. Fill out a short application with links to your content and keep your fingers crossed!
The thing that I love about LinkedIn is that it offers more insights about your company engagement than any other social network. For starters, keep an eye on people who visit your company page. Try and engage with them. Check out their profile and see who else they are following and you might know why they didn’t follow you.
The company page analytics is as insightful as it gets. Unlike Google Analytics, the numbers here are handful, but they are extremely helpful. Identify the demographics that follow you, see where they are from and target these segments for better results.
Use these insights to tweak your content strategy and to make changes to the other sections of the company as well. Remember, it’s always helpful to keep updating your company profile section with updated descriptions, headlines etc.
These changes are notified to your followers who might return back to the page to see what’s cooking. It’s a quick way to get some dormant followers back to the fold.
Before getting into the subject of paid promotions, you should really consider getting a premium account. Premium accounts come with a lot of perks. I particularly love the fact that you can see the profile information of people anonymously!
If you aren’t into professional stalking, the ability to send InMail to people outside your network might be a feature worth paying for. As an additional perk, you get a super sized advanced search option.
New filter options to target people by narrowing down your searches based on their years of experience, seniority level, groups they subscribe to and more. Either way, for $29 a month you will have access to a huge pool of prospects.
LinkedIn’s sponsored updates can be compared that of sponsored stories on Facebook. You get to promote your business in front of people who don’t follow your company page. This promotion comes with advanced targeting of users based on factors like location, demographics among other criteria.
Ideally, you should create a promoted message that’s short and catchy, write a targeted copy that’s few words long, add a relevant image and link to a page where your full blown message with CTA is. It’s the same old process that you follow for paid promotions elsewhere in the socialverse!
