How to promote your business in LinkedIn: 4 effective hacks

Contemporary life gives us lots of opportunities and chances. Talking about business development, there are plenty of tools, platforms, and ways to reach different goals starting from brand awareness, ending with the growth of revenue. The thing here is to choose the right instrument, suitable exactly to your business demands. Thus, in this article, we make a review of the LinkedIn social network from the promotion point of view. Keep reading!

LinkedIn is an American social network, mainly used for professional networking. If your work is connected to business especially with its digital directions, it is more likely that you have a profile on LinkedIn with all your colleagues in connections. However, if your company doesn’t have a page on this platform or doesn’t seriously take the promotion here — you should one more time consider it.

Here are some statistics for 2019 that will turn you towards LinkedIn usage for promotion. According to 99firms.com, LinkedIn currently has over 610 million members. It means that this social network potentially opens for you 610 million new customers. Sounds good, right? 

Quite impressive are data, taken from the same investigation and related to the B2B sphere: 

• 46% percent of the social media traffic of B2B companies websites is driven from LinkedIn;
• 97% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn as a content distribution channel; 
• 80% of B2B leads from social media come exactly from LinkedIn.

Now, you probably can’t wait to create your company’s page on this social network or boost it if you have one. Read below for 4 effective hacks in work with LinkedIn.

1. Why do you need a promotion? Define goals

Before launching an ad campaign on LinkedIn you need to prepare yourself for the expensive cost of the advertisement. Thus, first of all, make sure that the advertising budget “can handle” the pricing on this social media. Pay attention to the following:

• the minimum bid on LinkedIn is 2$; 
• the minimum daily budget for sponsored posts is 10$; 
• if you want to receive at least 10 clicks per day and the price you set per click is 5$, be ready to spend 50$ daily. 

The advice we provide is for the ones who are not ready to pay for advertisements due to the high cost or other reasons. Don’t give up and delete your company’s page if you thought that without ads the promotion on LinkedIn is impossible. This platform is so popular among marketers and businessmen right because of its multifunctionality and flexibility.

LinkedIn is based on connections. Thus, sales reps can use it to create a database of potential customers. Marketers may find partners or discover useful contacts on this social network. It can also be used to unite employees and create a common chat or group. This connection principle allows discovering crucial for company contacts, for example, among top managers that, otherwise, could be found only accidentally.

All mentioned above means that LinkedIn gives much more than simply showing ads to potential buyers. It’s a platform that provides truthfulness to the brand, as well as its awareness. So LinkedIn can bring profit even if you are not spending the advertising budget on promotion.

2. Communication with the audience

As it was said before, LinkedIn is based on connections and truthfulness. In other words, the company that provides boring content on its page won’t be popular among customers. That’s your target to bring new, interested in the product users, as well as having “warm” customers among the well-established audience. 

L’Oréal is a nice example of a company that is focused on communication with customers as well as providing unique and creative content. They take several actions to involve their page subscribers into the discussion:

• ask questions in almost every post and share content that pushes people into communication;
• publish their corporate content, as well as their partners: photos, videos, etc.;
• congratulate users with holidays and write wishes;
• answer to the comments of their subscribers. 

All these steps are made on purpose — to ensure their company’s page on LinkedIn with trustfulness from the audience, as well as to receive higher engagement.  

Examples of the L’Oréal marketing strategy on LinkedIn

Use targeting for relevant audiences

Companies’ pages can promote posts but this feature is not available for personal pages. Here is the same situation as with Facebook — companies can use targeting settings and promote their posts among the targeted audience.

Let’s introduce some statistics for you to understand the division of the audience reach on LinkedIn among countries. The diagram below may be useful for people who are searching for new audiences and are about to set targeted ads.

One more statistic might be also crucial to the ones who are working with targeted audiences on LinkedIn.

As you can see from the screenshot above, LinkedIn is mostly used by people whose age is between 25-34. Consider this data while launching ad campaigns.

It is important to understand the effectiveness of ad campaigns in social networks and the best metric here is revenue. Thus, an opportunity to manually upload costs has appeared in Ringostat end-to-end analytics. It will automatically count the cost-effectiveness of investments in such a promotion channel as, for example, LinkedIn. 

For further information read the article “Ringostat end-to-end analytics changes its beta-testing status — receive even more opportunities.”

Share the content in LinkedIn Groups

The social network itself suggests relevant groups for you. All you need to do is to participate in communication and promote your content among the group members. However, the last one has to be done naturally — it is better not to make a sudden pitch during the discussion as there is a risk that you will lose credibility to the brand.

Before adding to the group you may be asked to send a request. Meanwhile, after your request would be confirmed you can share with members your experience, links to the blog or website, participate in discussions and debates. 

Pay attention that no one likes spammers. Thus, it is better to become an expert in a field rather than inserting a thousand links to one post. People usually prefer to follow the updates of opinion leaders. Participate in discussions and publish relevant content to become an expert.

3. “SEO Promotion” in LinkedIn

Search engines may become one of the best sources of free targeted traffic. By optimizing titles, posts, and descriptions to the needs of your targeted audience, you get to the top of the LinkedIn search. Optimization rules here work exactly the same as with Google. You can also try Serpstat for keywords searching.

Example of the search top in LinkedIn by companies

4. Use browser extensions for promotion

Pay attention that all described extensions can be downloaded in the Chrome Web Store. This browser was chosen due to its popularity so if you use another one — try to find extensions with similar functionality in your browser’s store.

ProspectIn: lead generation from LinkedIn and time saving during the work with it

According to developers’ opinions, this extension saves up to 70% of the time that is often spent on the search for leads on LinkedIn. It allows:

• automatically visit pages of required people/follow them/send friendship requests and messages;
• maintain a mini CRM in the browser by touchpoints with leads.

You need to set conditions that will match your potential partners or clients to work with this extension. A tool collects for you a list of relevant users and you set them in a list of the visit of the pages. As the program visits all profiles from the list, their owners receive a friendship request and the message written from a template. An additional advantage is that the extension fixes names and surnames if the letters are lower-cased.

Buffer: simplified publication of posts on LinkedIn, as well as other social networks

This extension saves the time of specialists who make a promotion on social networks. It gives an opportunity to instantly make posts on several platforms: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc. 

After you set an extension, it is possible to select text on any website and “transform” it to a post by clicking a right mouse button. You can also set the time of the publication. Another advantage of this extension is that it collects data on likes, reposts, mentions, etc.

Resume

1. LinkedIn is a social network mostly used for business purposes. 97% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn as a content distribution channel. The conversion from website visitor to a potential buyer in LinkedIn is almost 3 times higher than on both Facebook and Twitter. It means that LinkedIn can give three times better result for a business rather than other social media. 
2. Before launching an ad campaign on LinkedIn you need to prepare yourself for the expensive cost of the advertisement. If you are sure that your advertising budget fits the social network prices, you can move forward. If not, try to use outbound marketing on LinkedIn.
3. Communicate with your target audience. The company that provides boring content on its page won’t be popular among customers. Check LinkedIn pages of popular brands and try to implement their marketing strategies forwarded on communication to your business. 
4. Participate in groups. Pay attention that no one likes spammers. Thus, it is better to become an expert in a field rather than inserting a thousand links to one post. People usually prefer to follow the updates of opinion leaders. Participate in discussions and publish relevant content to become an expert.
5. Companies’ pages can promote posts but this feature is not available for personal pages. Here is the same situation as with Facebook — companies can use targeting settings and promote their posts among the targeted audience.
6. Use the search engine to be at the top. By optimizing titles, posts, and descriptions to the needs of your targeted audience, you get to the top of the LinkedIn search. 
7. Use browser extensions for promotion. For example, ProspectIn helps to generate leads from LinkedIn and Buffer is useful to manage the content.