LinkedIn for business allows you to reach other brands, entrepreneurs, professionals and soon freelancers with whom you can build a meaningful network and credibility as well as gain valuable insights about your industry.
LinkedIn is the largest professional network. More than 50 million companies use it for business not just because it is considered to be amongst the top talent acquisition places to go to, but because LinkedIn marketing is still something not fully explored by companies. It is the mystery of social. With almost 740 million members across the globe, this social network provides opportunities for each one and could turn out to be a hidden gem for your business.
In this article I’m not going to convince you to start using LinkedIn in your marketing strategy, but I’ll share my experience with the platform and show you how to get started with it if you’ve ever considered it before. Using LinkedIn for personal matters, recruitment and business are 3 completely different directions you could go for. So today I’m going to focus only on the business part and its basics. Without further ado, let’s dive in.
Contents
What is LinkedIn marketing?
Before we get to the basics, we need to give an answer to the question: What is LinkedIn marketing at its core?
LinkedIn marketing is the process of generating leads, driving website traffic and building brand awareness for your business. It helps you engage a community of professionals to take actions relevant to your business.
This social media channel exposes you to millions of people in over 200 countries and in 24 of the most widely spoken languages including simplified Chinese, Arabic, Russian, English, Japanese, Spanish, etc.
Source: LinkedIn
Unlike Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, hard-selling and spamming are highly advisable to be avoided. The network consists of a totally different audience than the other platforms with different intentions and behaviour. Because of this, you might want to consider carefully crafting and aligning a marketing strategy specifically for LinkedIn.
Tip 1: Instead of advertising aggressively, prepare yourself to give your audience quality content, tips, recommendations, personal experience. If you are not ready to do this, then maybe you are not ready to start exploiting LinkedIn.
Establish your brand with a free LinkedIn page
Create a LinkedIn page
Before actually creating a page for your business, you need to have a personal profile on the platform. If you already have one, take some time to explore other companies just to get a basic idea of what you have to do next. The more you use LinkedIn as a user, the easier it will be to conduct business afterwards.
Now that you have a personal profile, it’s time to create your business page. Currently this is available only on desktop.
- Go to your feed and click the “Work” icon in the upper right corner, then select “Create a Company Page”.
- Choose the type of page you want to create.
- The next step is to fill out all the mandatory fields LinkedIn asks for like Name, Industry, Size and Type of company, as well as choose how your public URL appears.
(pro) Tip 2 (from personal experience): Be very careful when writing the name of your company. If in a month you decide you want to change it completely, that would not be possible, except if it is a really small correction.
Even rebranding your company is not a sufficient reason to change your name because “you may confuse your followers and the people who have listed they work for you”. Here you’ll find a list of possible corrections.
Tip 3: When writing your public URL, try to be as consistent as possible with the other social channels you use.
- Verify you are an authorized representative and click “create”.
2. Optimise your LinkedIn page
Congrats! You are one step closer to having your official LinkedIn company page. Now you should complete the missing information. This will help your business to be found easier and appear in the search results in both LinkedIn and Google. This step is something like doing SEO but not for your website. Not sure what SEO is? We have a great article explaining all about it.
- Start with the logo and the header
Your LinkedIn page’s logo size is 300x300px. If there is a specific sign or character within your brand elements and especially your logo, use it for your page. Pages’ logos that consist of words look really small. And as people tend to remember the visual parts, it is very important you stand out. Here’s what I mean:
This section appears on the right side of any company page and represents similar businesses. Can you read what’s written on the logos? Neither could I.
The header (or cover image) of your page is as equally important as your logo. Its size should be 1128x191px which is rather narrow but with some imagination you could definitely utilize the space.
Tip 4: Make sure any important information is placed on the right side because otherwise it will be hidden by the logo. To be precise 222px on the left should be blank. I learned this the hard way by editing our cover image about 7 times before it fit perfectly both on desktop and mobile.
P.S. It’s not a masterpiece but I’m not a designer either, so it works.
Tip 5: Don’t be mistaken by the admin view of your page. Always navigate to “member view” to actually see how it will look to your audience. Afterwards you don’t want anything to be cropped or missed. Also as people use the platform both on desktop and mobile, you might want to open the page on your phone as a user and double check if everything is okay.
- Tagline & Description overview
Adding details to your LinkedIn page will give it more visibility and make it more trustworthy. As I mentioned above, this section serves as the SEO of your company page. Because of this, take some time to write a compelling description of your business, what it offers, what are the unique features of your products and services. You don’t want to sound salesy or pushy, simply present what benefits you offer to your clients instead. While writing, you should think of keywords and phrases to include in your description. The maximum number of characters you can type is 2000.
The tagline is probably the most important sentence you should think about. It is placed right below your name and is the first thing someone sees when visiting a page. In 120 characters you can briefly present what your business is all about.
Tip 6: Google search results show up to 156 characters of your LinkedIn page texts. This includes your tagline and a part of the first sentence from your description.
- Buttons, locations, specialties
Even though you have a special field for your website in your info section, you can place an additional button on top of your page. This could be again a shortcut to your website or another important for your business place such as a lead form, a survey, a newsletter subscription, a contact form, etc. By having this button you are turning visits into actions. You can switch on and off the button and also choose a name for it from the dropdown menu.
Tip 7: When adding the URL to the button, it’s a good idea to create a UTM link so you can easily track results. I use Campaign URL Builder as it is a tool by Google Analytics and directly shows you the data for the link in GA. This way you’ll be able to differentiate the traffic coming from this button or the main one in the info section.
Location is another mandatory field. If you don’t have a street address though, you can skip it. Locations also help your business to be discovered in search results. If you have more than 1 office, that’s also not a problem as you can add a “primary” location and secondary ones.
Specialties is the place to showcase all your services. Keep it simple and only add keyword phrases. They appear in the “About” section of your company page. By using specialties, people will have a clearer idea of what you do.
3. Invite your connections to follow your LinkedIn page
Some may argue that inviting your connections is not a good idea to do at first. And they may be right, but not entirely. Within your connections you sure have some close people that you can trust and ask for a favour. Even if you still haven’t started posting updates, those people can help you give it an initial boost. So once you get to the content part and actually start sharing information, it will look a bit more legit to “outsiders” who haven’t heard of you so far.
Moreover, you can also ask your employees who have profiles on LinkedIn to follow your page and add it as a place to work. Don’t expect everyone will agree to do that, but it is worth trying, because there are also loyal ones who will share each of your updates and will boost the engagement.
Alternatively, if you don’t feel comfortable asking anyone for a favour, you can simply share the page as a post on your feed and write 1-2 sentences explaining what you need. This way people will have a choice to either support you straight away or not.
LinkedIn is the different social media network. To master it, you first need to learn how it works, what is its goal, who are the people who spend their time on it and what are their reasons to do so. LinkedIn is a challenge and an adventure at the same time which I’ve been undertaking during the past couple of years. LinkedIn is a mystery and that’s why working on it is so exciting.
In my next article I’ll share with you my personal tips about LinkedIn content marketing, so stay tuned.
In the meantime, our team is always happy to help with any marketing struggles you might be facing. Don’t be shy to send us a message and ask for a free consultation.