Beginner’s Guide to LinkedIn Marketing
LinkedIn is one of the most powerful social media platforms used by every individual. It is the world’s largest professional network where nearly 600+ million people across the world using this platform to build a network and market their business.
LinkedIn was started in 2003 by Reid Hoffman with an aim to bring the entire working professionally on a single platform to connect to each other, to identify one’s professional profile, to help people for a job search, to advertise business products and services and many more. It is the next social media platform that is used by start-ups to fortune 500.
Nowadays, LinkedIn has become so useful in every business, where we can connect to a right person for a business discussion.
Since, every business objective is to reach the right audience within a short period of time. This is the wonderful platform used by many business owners. Even the recruiters use the LinkedIn source to hunt for the right candidate for recruitment.
It can be used in many ways to improve your business and to market your business. Every different industry like Pharmaceutical, Oil & Chemicals, Apparels, FMCG’s, etc uses this powerful tool to build their network. We can also find a number of good articles which are posted by renowned authors and new beginners on LinkedIn, where it helps a lot of people using this platform to understand what is going in and around the business world.
Before LinkedIn was started, many business owners were using Facebook to market their business. But later LinkedIn was created in such a way that, it made life easier to find the right person and build a network.
One of the interesting parts of this platform is Groups. Yes! It is one of the ways to find multiple background people with similar or non-similar interests and build your network. You can find ‘n’ number of groups on LinkedIn where different professionals share their knowledge and opinions, on how to improve your business, how to boost your sales, what is happening in the business world, and many more.
Usually, new joiners in LinkedIn, follow their role models and successful business leader, where they get encouragement while reading the posts on how they started their business, what were the challenges they faced and how they achieved them, and how they took the business to next level. Because we all believe that every successful business was once a start-up, it really requires every single individual dedication and effort to succeed.
Now we all know that nothing is free in this costliest world! LinkedIn provides one such premium service to its users no matter what industry you’re in, you can upgrade your premium account where you can develop your network stronger and boost your sales. But before that, one should have the creativity and excellent marketing techniques and skills to utilize this platform to advertise business products and services.
‘Digital Marketing Training institute’ helps to train the new beginners on how this platform along with other practices such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram can be used to improve business, boost sales and make high ROI. Because EOD it’s every business objective to achieve more profits and promote their business. Having said that, we should be very careful when using LinkedIn as a platform to sell products and services. Usually, many people refuse to accept the connections when they see a title such as Sales or Business development because they clearly know that, the objective behind in sending a connection request is to sell something. Since we are using a professional site, It’s always a good practice to ‘send an introductory note’ when sending a connection request to your audience, where it explains to an opposite person what is the objective behind sending a connection request.
Since we all are doing business, everyone needs to reach right person and build a good network. It’s good to utilize LinkedIn platform in a healthy professional way.
LinkedIn Basic Tips:
- Send and accept connections only to right audience: Yes, It’s always good to send and accept the connections only for those are actually buyer to your business. So that, you don’t waste your time in reaching out the person who is nothing to do anything with your product or service.
- Create specific group: Since LinkedIn has a good option where you can create a specific industry group so that only the people who are working in a similar industry can join and discuss further. Also, being a group owner you can accept the request of those persons whom you think are relevant for your business.
- Create awareness: It’s always good to create awareness about your business so that, people will start recognizing what you into being. It does just require word of mouth from one person to another.
- Writing creative posts and creating CTA’s: Yes! If you want your audience to spend time in reading your post you should be able to ‘stand out from the crowd’. Of course, you don’t have to just name your company name and products and services. It’s always a best practice to tell your audience whom you have helped and how they are doing great in the market. Try explaining your benefits than features, while your competitors are busy in looking for thousands of likes and comments on other platforms.
- Being active on LinkedIn: One of the challenging tasks! We all can do 100’s of posts but we don’t have patience to keep a track and answer our audience queries. It’s most important to be active when users look into your post. Never rush to sell, try to understand the query, because you are the only resource to answer your audience questions. Always have the courtesy to tell your audience that you will give a callback or a sending an email because for any business professional ethics carries an important objective to succeed.
Actionable Tips to understand how to boost your sales:
- Complete your LinkedIn Profile: The only way to make your customer to accept your connection is by creating a complete LinkedIn Profile. Remember, first impression is always the best impression. LinkedIn profile is one of the key to success to create the first impression.
Some of the information that you really have to include in your Profile:
- Your Full Name
- Job Title & Designation followed by your Company Name
- A Summary about yourself
- Add Skills in which you are good at
- Ask for Recommendations and Give Recommendations (This is one of the important factors where people show interest in your profile to get connect)
- Attach your Company’s brochure into your profile.
- Create Opportunities: In the above basic tips, I said that, send connections only to your targeted audience. But at some point of time to explore yourself and your business, sometimes you need to break the barriers and start reaching out to the new people where you can share and get new business ideas. The more you explore yourself with your business strategies, the higher you reach. Always have a tendency to satisfy your audience. As Philip Kotler says“The best advertisement is done by Satisfied Customers”.
- Generate Content Marketing Strategy: Yes, I am talking about the most challenging strategy to reach and engage your customers. We all know that, LinkedIn offers 3 most important options to market our business on their platform.
- Write an Article
- Post an Image
- Share a Video
It is always recommended to use all three strategies to promote the business by providing a proper link, which could be more appealing. Use your brilliant content to convert visitors into loyal customers.
- Create LinkedIn Company Page: It is the most important thing that you must do. Creating an effective company page always brings ample opportunities for your business. Always remember, your audience are more interested and curious to know your company, and this brings engagement with the relevant content.
Some important tips that you must follow while creating LinkedIn Company Page:
- Update your profile image and banner
- Write effective “About Us” section and include relevant keywords
- Fill out other key fields such as URL, HQ Country, Industry, Company Size, Address
- Create Showcase Pages to promote your Specific products or services
- Build a career page which helps to support in your recruitment process
- Keep tabs on the competition
- Use ‘LinkedIn Sales Navigator’: The most powerful tool in LinkedIn is Sales Navigator. It offers the most advanced level of leads and company search features. With the help of this tool, you can search and build relationships with prospects and customers with unlimited searches.
According to LinkedIn Sales Solution, on average social selling leaders see:
- 45%more opportunities created
- 51%more likely to achieve quota
- 80%more productive
- 3Xmore likely to go to club
Some of the best LinkedIn tools used to boost your sales:
- Discover Personality by using ‘Crystal ’: It is the App that tells you anyone’s personality. It creates an accurate personality profile for any LinkedIn profile that you are looking at.
- How does this Review tool Crystal works?
Whenever you view a person’s profile on LinkedIn, Crystal tool reveals how you should speak, how to write an email and sell to them most effectively. Without causing, it tells you the exact words, phrases, styles and tone that you should use to reach your recipient in the way they likely to communicate.
- Where does crystal gets this information?
Crystal gets all this information from other social media such as, Facebook, blog posts, tweets and others sources as we go about our business on the internet. All these information can be added to one’s LinkedIn profile only if the Crystal is being installed.
- Why should you use Crystal?
If you really want to build relationship with your audience and convert them to your prospect buyer then you should use this. It is really a game changer entirely. It doesn’t only give you the person’s information but also helps you in drafting a mail to the people you never met with, using a tone and language that their LinkedIn profile suggests, if you take a paid subscription. This tool saves more time when it comes to writing an email or LinkedIn messages.
- Datanyze LinkedIn: This is another recommendable LinkedIn tool to boost your sales. We all know that every business runs on Technology. Datanyze provides ‘Technographics’ facility to B2B companies by providing real insights into the technology choice of company you are looking for.
- What are the benefits of using this tool?
- Technology tracking: It allows users to sell and market based on your prospects technology choices
- Predictive analytics: Users create an edge in their existing pipeline and also help them find new accounts
- Prospecting: It helps users to search for a contact, find email addresses, and research accounts.
- Data enrichment: It is a value-adding process. It Addtechnographics to its users CRM.
- LeadFuze: It is another incredible LinkedIn marketing tool that helps you to generate leads with ease. It says, “Every Deal starts with a Lead”. With a simple search, you can attain all the relevant contact information about your prospects. Such as email address, prospect information and phone number. Leadfuze also helps in sending automatic personalized emails and follow-ups.
- What are the benefits of using this tool?
- Search option for new potential customers instantly
- Provides detailed information about prospective.
- Integrates one of the popular CRM and can export LeadFuze data any time.
- Unlimited accessing and complete list building automation
- eLink Pro – Top LinkedIn Marketing Tool: It is another popular LinkedIn marketing tool that connects you with your contacts using simple keywords. It helps you find, attract, and engage with hundreds of prospects, daily, on LinkedIn. eLink Pro marketing software is the number #1 LinkedIn sales tool. eLink connects you on LinkedIn to potential sales prospects, increases your professional network, and drives your online influence.
- How does it work?
Conclusion: Building an online presence is one of the important and best practices similarly like generating profitable prospects. It’s always good to think about how I can add value to my customer, instead of rushing to pitch the company’s products and services. A value defines ‘bundle of benefits’ and for a customer, value is first priority.
Several Social networks with large followers of audiences have numerous amazing features. But none of them provide such effective B2B networking and marketing opportunities like LinkedIn does. One thing we all can agree that, with the help of LinkedIn tools, we can generate more revenue for the business by utilizing such a wonderful platform.
By using LinkedIn sources and tools you have a good chunk of opportunities to attract new customers.
At last Social Media is all about Communicating with each other, not Broadcasting. Always remember a conversation with others on this platform should be your major goal. Social Media Marketing requires Listening. Learn Social Media Marketing course to build your social media skills and marketing knowledge required to build relationships with the targeted audience.
