If you’re a marketing professional, you will have certainly heard about LinkedIn, or perhaps you already have an account. But if you’ve already got one and don’t know how to use it to your advantage, don’t worry, here are our tips for boosting your profile on Linkedin, in order to increase your reach and make the best use of its full potential.
With the right marketing strategy, you can really make the most of this social network in order to stand out and advance in your career.
LinkedIn is an online social community, founded in 2002 and acquired by Microsoft in 2016, which for years has positioned itself as the most popular and widely-used professional network in the world today, with over 950 million members in more than 200 countries.
Our lives are increasingly shifting online, and our work life is no exception. For this reason, LinkedIn has emerged as a unique space for professional networking, becoming one of the must-have social media platforms in our present-day world of work.
But alongside being a place to meet and network with professionals from all across the globe, LinkedIn can also be used as an excellent marketing platform. It is particularly well-suited for personal branding, allowing users to position themselves for work opportunities, but it can also be used as a branding tool for a business or brand name.
The platform’s idiosyncrasies can help us out when formulating a marketing strategy for LinkedIn, as it allows companies – both large and small – to connect with individuals, with options for both a personal profile and company page.
LinkedIn is much more than just a platform to upload your CV: it’s an ideal space to build and strengthen your personal brand at the same time as that of your business. Having a carefully-mapped marketing strategy is going to allow you to stand out in the competitive job market and further your career.
The first important step is to optimise your profile:
- On LinkedIn, having an attractive and complete profile, with a professional profile picture, an attractive homepage and a detailed description of your experience and achievements, is extremely important in order to position your brand as professional and capable.
- If you already know who your target audience is, use this to your advantage and make sure to use keywords in your profile that allow your clients to find you with ease using the search tool – this way, you can improve your personal visibility, as well as that of your business, among other professionals and companies within your sector. The more detailed your profile, the better!
Having a professional marketing strategy for LinkedIn is imperative, especially when it comes to digital marketing, because it’s through LinkedIn that you’re really going to be able to increase the number of visits to your website or blog.
To achieve this, you need to share relevant content:
- Every marketing strategy for LinkedIn is based in engagement – you need to attract attention in order to spark interest and push people to engage with your brand. Think about your target audience and create content that makes sense for them, that they’re going to be interested in.
- LinkedIn is unique in the sense that it has content editors that select the posts that they consider to be most relevant in order to gain prominence on the platform.
- Linking current events and news with your content is a simple way to attract the editors’ attention, as well as that of your target audience. It’s essential to filter out current events that cannot be connected in a natural and relevant way with either yours or your business’s personal or professional contexts.
- With this increased and strengthened visibility, LinkedIn works to attract even more traffic to your website or portfolio.
- It’s for this reason that having a marketing strategy for LinkedIn has become so important, as a study from Ink Now for HubSpot shows that LinkedIn can generate up to 4x more conversions than X (formerly Twitter) and 6x more than Facebook for B2B clients.
Another way you can take maximum advantage of LinkedIn’s potential is by launching adverts on the platform:
- These work in a very similar way to Facebook Ads in the sense that you can upload sponsored content, such as updates from your company page, which will then appear on the timeline of your target audience.
- There are a variety of adverts available, and you can tailor which type you use according to what and how you want to advertise your profile on Linkedin.
- The obvious advantage of uploading ads to LinkedIn is the extensive ad targeting possibilities that increase your chances of reaching the right people: you can target ads by a wide range of characteristics of both companies and individuals, from sector and location up to age or job title. This will allow you to promote your profile, services or products in a highly-focused way, ensuring your ads are being seen by the right people at the right time.
- The possibilities of ad targeting allow us to choose from a very specific criteria of users who are actually going to be interested in our products or services. It’s true that with the proper targeting, the potential to reach qualified leads becomes quite high – it’s worth investing in!
LinkedIn offers a resource called LinkedIn Learning, one of the lesser-known advantages of the platform. Through this, they offer a wide range of online courses and learning resources for a variety of subjects, from digital marketing to project management, in order to further educate yourself and expand your knowledge.
The courses are designed to help you improve your knowledge and skills in career-relevant areas, and offer a certain level of flexibility, allowing you to access the LinkedIn Learning courses anywhere and any time, so that you can learn at your own pace.
After completing any of these courses, you receive a certificate or diploma issued by LinkedIn Learning. The platform itself is integrated with LinkedIn, which lets you automatically add your completed courses and final certificates to your profile.
Given that the platform is online, content is regularly updated in order to reflect the latest trends and developments in different industries.
LinkedIn Learning can be summed up in just one of the many benefits that LinkedIn offers for professionals looking to improve their job profile and stay up-to-date, and, of course, forms part of the process in your marketing strategy for LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is a professional social networking platform and, as such, the building of strategic connections is imperative to increase your reach; you can easily connect with associates, co-workers, industry leaders and other professionals who can add value to your network.
Actively expanding your network of contacts and industry leaders in LinkedIn is a fundamental part of an effective marketing strategy on this platform.
The social network has also become a space that allows you to share knowledge and professional perspectives, since it has added content features such as posts, articles and videos that not only enrich your experience on the platform, but that also act as tools in order to spark interactions and build relationships between users.
These features allow you to improve your profile on Linkedin and give your network of first, second and third level contacts a boost, helping you to grow and improve your position on the platform.
Here we leave you with our top LinkedIn tips for professionals looking to formulate a marketing strategy for this social network.
In conclusion, it’s more than clear this platform is, and will continue to be, a powerful tool to boost your career through an effective marketing strategy. By optimising your profile on Linkedin, creating relevant and valuable content, building solid connections and interacting with the community, you’ll be able to make yourself and your business stand out from the crowd in order to continue advancing down your career path.
Log in today and start reaping the benefits that having a marketing strategy for LinkedIn can give you. Don’t underestimate the potential it can give you to drive your professional growth!
