How to use LinkedIn for your Business

LinkedIn has over 740 million users in 200 countries worldwide. Around 33% of LinkedIn users spend more than 5 hours on the platform every week. Posting regular content on LinkedIn that’s relevant for your target audience is a great way to gain visibility and get your business in front of your prospects. 

When comparing the Vision-to-Lead conversion rate, LinkedIn is 277% more effective in Lead Generation than Facebook and Twitter. 

LinkedIn is one of the best places and tools we have to interact and connect with our prospects and convert them to leads, while simultaneously building credibility for your business. If you’ve not been using LinkedIn to meet your business goals, you’re leaving a lot off the table. 

An effective LinkedIn marketing strategy will go a long way in growing your business in a steady and organic way, and for absolutely no cost. So, what does a good LinkedIn strategy for marketing entail? 

Your LinkedIn marketing strategy consists of five integral components:

1. Profile – Create a killer LinkedIn profile
2. Engage – Engage with your target audience
3. Connect – Connect with key figures and personalities
4. Post – Start posting regular content
5. Convert – Generate leads, increase your business

Let’s understand each one of them in detail.

LinkedIn Profile

Your LinkedIn profile is the mirror of your professional journey. It should be interesting, engaging, and give a clear understanding to your audience about your career, achievements, and expertise. 

What factors contribute to making your LinkedIn profile strong and powerful?

Profile picture

Your LinkedIn profile picture should be a professional headshot, in  passport format, in appropriate attire, looking into the camera, and with a smile. The picture should have a neutral background, preferably white. Avoid pictures of you partying, holidaying, playing sports, with your family or personal occasions, etc.

Here are some tools you can use to optimize your LinkedIn profile picture:

• Removing background – remove.bg
• Analyzing LinkedIn Profile picture – https://www.snappr.com/photo-analyzer/
• Analyzing your photos – https://www.photofeeler.com/

Headline

The content of your headline is a major factor in LinkedIn’s search algorithm, and the second most important thing your profile visitors will notice after your picture. Addressing your clients directly through your headline is a great idea as opposed to merely stating your profession or designation. This will make your profile stand out from the others.

The following is a highly recommended template for the headline 

Helping/Enabling/Empowering [target audience] to do [what] | [Profession]

Example – “Empowering Corporate Professionals to Wake Up Happy on Mondays! | Career Happiness Coach”

Banner

Most LinkedIn users don’t use the big space available to them as the banner. It’s a great opportunity for you to create your personal brand. Canva is a great tool to create your own banners. It has templates for LinkedIn banners that you can customize to create a unique banner for yourself.

Bonus tip: Test your banner design on your LinkedIn profile to check how it looks along with the profile picture.

LinkedInSmart Engagement

An efficient LinkedInSmart Engagement strategy involves the following 4-step engagement formula:

1. Search for the ideal client – Be as specific as you can when thinking who’d be the ideal client for you
2. Visit profiles – Your name will appear among their profile visitors list in turn giving you visibility.
3. Engage with posts – Leave meaningful comments on their posts.
4. Follow – Follow the profiles of your ideal clients.

Bonus tips:

• Engage with people that like and comment on your posts. 
• Engage with your profile visitors
• Join industry-relevant LinkedIn groups
• Customize your URL address (When you open your LinkedIn profile page, you will see the option Edit public profile & URL at the top-right side of the screen. You can change how your name appears in the URL. Get rid of irrelevant text/numbers you see in the default URL.)
• Check your Social Selling Index (SSI) score (Go to www.linkedin.com/sales/ssi to know your SSI score, anything above 50 is considered a decent score.)

Although numbers do not mean much, they can be a good indicator of whether  you’re headed in the right direction or not. Your SSI score should improve once you start optimizing your LinkedIn profile. 

LinkedInSmart Connect

If you implement the above Engagement strategy, connecting with the right people of LinkedIn will be extremely easy.

This is what the LinkedInSmart Connect strategy entails:

1. Connect with people you already know
2. Connect with people you’ve been engaging with in the above stage

Bonus tip: Add a personalized note when you send a connection request. The note should be about the person you are sending the request to and their needs. 

LinkedIn Visibility / Posts

Not every LinkedIn user posts content regularly. However, LinkedIn generously rewards those who  post relevant, useful, and engaging content that adds value to others with visibility and reach. If you want to increase your LinkedIn visibility, nothing works better than posting good quality content on a regular basis.

Why should you post on LinkedIn?

1. To start conversation
2. To share value
3. To build trust
4. To demonstrate experience
5. To develop relationships
6. To generate new business

What content formats can you post on LinkedIn?

• Texts
• Photos
• Videos
• Polls
• Documents 

When sharing PDFs and PPTs on LinkedIn as documents, make sure to give them an aesthetic appeal to attract a larger audience. Polls are a great way to understand your clients  better. They also promote engagement. The LinkedIn algorithm supports video content more than other formats as they increase the dwell time on the site. Therefore, videos tend to perform better on LinkedIn.

What kind of content should you post on LinkedIn?

1. Talk about what inspires you
2. Answer your client’s questions or clarify their doubts
3. Top 10 lists
4. Reactions to other posts
5. Create/share infographics
6. Highlight your customer/product
7. Common mistakes in your industry
8. Predict the future trends
9. Explain your process
10. Book reviews
11. Favorite podcasts
12. Comment on industry news
13. Share your biggest challenges/wins
14. Client interviews
15. Give a shout out to your mentor/guru/employees/clients

Bonus tips:

• Avoid sharing links to external sources on LinkedIn as such posts don’t gain much visibility or traction. If you must add links to your post, add them in a comment to your original post as opposed to having it in the main post.
• Engagement is much higher when you post from your personal profile page as compared to the company page as people prefer to engage with other people and not with businesses/entities/brands.
• Post 2-5 times per week (Quality vs Quantity)
• Give a story-like twist to your posts to increase interest and relevance
• Share human faces
• @mention individuals (only if relevant – they will be notified you mentioned them in your post)
• Add post-specific hashtags, create your own company or personal hashtags to curate your content under these labels (5-9)
• Use icons or graphic elements
• Post during working hours
• Analyze engagement on your posts

LinkedIn Convert

Here are the four major steps of converting your prospects to leads through LinkedIn?

1. Search for ideal connects
2. Engage and connect with them
3. Communicate with them
4. Move offline

And repeat. That’s how you can build your brand, grow, and scale your business using LinkedIn, the largest professional network available to us, simply by optimizing your profile and following the above steps of LinkedIn B2B marketing strategy.

Sign up for our practical B2B Digital Marketing and Lead Generation Course now and develop the skills to help you build a marketing machine that will grow your brand and generate leads