LinkedIn is the greatest professional network when it comes to growing your network and increasing your social presence. It is one of the efficient and effective platforms to enhance your customer base and expand your business portfolio. Hence LinkedIn marketing for beginners has acquired greater importance. Beginners are seeking to understand the techniques and strategies they need to adopt for building up a strong LinkedIn portfolio.
In this article, we will discuss, the tips & tricks of LinkedIn marketing for beginners. But before that let us understand the importance and benefits of LinkedIn marketing.
What is LinkedIn marketing?
A common notion about LinkedIn is that it connects professionals and job seekers. But LinkedIn marketing goes beyond that in providing a strong platform for professionals to gain potential customers for increasing their business portfolio and market presence. It helps to build thousands of connections, a useful mechanism to promote your band.
Numerous discussion forums, community groups, and business activities are hosted on LinkedIn by various professionals and companies. Along with career growth, it provides ample opportunities to connect with customers and capitalize it into your company’s revenue.
What is the importance of LinkedIn marketing for beginners?
LinkedIn marketing for beginners is crucial and important in selling your products and services. But for that, you need to build a strong network of connections, an audience, and awareness of your brand. Customers need to understand the benefits of your company’s products and services. Hence a strategy is vital to exponentially increase the presence.
Studies have revealed that LinkedIn generates far greater leads than Facebook marketing. It is a robust marketing tool and social media platform to place your business or company to the next level of success. Good planning combined with an effective strategy is a mandate for successful marketing in Linkedin.
Tips and Tricks of LinkedIn Marketing for Beginners
Now that we have understood the definition and importance of LinkedIn marketing, let us now focus on the tips and tricks of LinkedIn marketing for beginners.
Discover target customers and potential connections
First and foremost you need to understand which customers you need to target related to your business and domain. If you are a small business entrepreneur then you need to look for niche customers who prefer investing in emerging businesses and companies. If you are a big brand company then your customer base will be more.
Targeting the right segment of customers is an important step in LinkedIn marketing for beginners. After identification, your advertising campaigns and promotional messages must be devised and strategized in such a manner that they can reach the appropriate audience. Your company’s products and services will then only earn greater visibility, your profile will rank high in the search list of potential customers.
You can create personal messages for highly influential customers so that they can invest in your products and services. At the end, revenue generation must be the objective of LinkedIn marketing and campaigns.
Continuous Customer engagement
You need to ensure continuous customer engagement so that you do not lose the potential customer base. The best way is to publish related blog posts which talk about recent trends under your niche area, and the benefits of the products and services to the consumers. Send out personalized articles to customers specifying how your company can benefit them.
Conduct discussion forums and online live events, inviting consumers to be part of it. You can even request them to share their experiences and their feedback, a good way to attract more and more customers. Sharing the results of your company’s performance financially and operationally is another intelligent method to generate sales leads and hence potential customers. Organizing webinars for sharing success stories can also be adopted for spreading your company’s success to the outside world.
The more you talk about your brand and its relevance and importance, the more the chances to gain customers. Publishing whitepaper has also been a great tool and an efficient one in LinkedIn marketing for beginners. Sharing innovations in trending technologies related to your business domain and genre lure consumers; a preferred method to develop confidence and trust with the company and its leadership.
Expand your email marketing list
Email marketing has been proven to be very effective in attracting customers and acquainting them with your company’s products and services. LinkedIn provides the capability to email 50 people at a time. You can create an email list with the potential customers to target.
In the mail, mention the signup links to your website or online business. Specify the advantages one will recognize after signing up for the emails. You can send across a newsletter providing updates about the products and services like for example introducing a new line of business, new locations, new acquisitions, success stories, etc.
At one go, you can reach a greater audience and open up new opportunities to earn a greater range of customers. Through emails, there are great possibilities for customers to reciprocate your messages. Ensure to attend to customer queries through emails or through LinkedIn messages.
Once customers sign up, ensure that you frequently update the newsletters and pass on important communications that in turn will be beneficial to customers. The information provided in the emails and the newsletters must work towards building trust and confidence with your company or business.
Create a Strong Profile
One of the crucial steps in LinkedIn marketing for beginners is to create a very strong profile. The profile must elaborate on the company’s products and services. The employee base along with the key profiles of the company must be highlighted along with the experience and expertise of the key profiles.
If you are an individual entrepreneur, then do not forget to mention your academic qualifications, certifications, and professional memberships. Ensure to display the recommendations obtained from any customer, a preferred way to build trust and confidence.
Profiles must contain certain keywords so that they come up high in the search results of potential customers. The tagline of the profile must be related to the domain or genre and must be engaging.
Customers must read the tagline and be interested to look into the details of the profile. This opens up opportunities for earning new leads and thus gaining potential customers.
SEO friendly and high-quality content
Remember when you post your articles in LinkedIn, they must be of high quality and SEO friendly. Reading the content must impart knowledge that is beyond the availability of generic information on the internet. It can be about a trending topic through which you can share some interesting insights and resourceful information.
You can write about any innovative ideas developed by your company or business and share the details about it. Besides, you can write about your lines of business, products or services of your company and the benefits granted to customers. Ensure the content is of high content and provides high value to your consumers.
The article must reflect the thought leadership of your organization and how you think about the needs of your customers. Through your article, customers must be able to resolve problems and perform their activities in a smooth and seamless fashion. Reading the content will provide the customers a good feel of your company’s mission, vision, and objectives.
Join LinkedIn Community Groups
A great idea in LinkedIn marketing for beginners is to join LinkedIn community groups. You can join the discussions and understand what customers in your business or industrial domain are looking for. It is very important to be aware of the customer demographic and plan your advertising campaigns or promotional strategies accordingly.
You can interact with other small business owners or individual entrepreneurs. Furthermore, you can contact the members of groups individually and build your social connection and network. Who knows, you may gain some customers from the members of the group and stand in a win-win situation.
The suggestion is to first search for groups that are related to your domain or sector of business. Check whether the groups are active and comprise a good number of members. Observe the discussions, participate in them and ask queries as deemed necessary.
Be proactive and ensure to check the group activities on a regular basis. Groups in LinkedIn serve as a source for seeking potential clients, a good way to enhance your revenue and increase the customer base.
Create your own LinkedIn Group
One of the best tips in LinkedIn marketing for beginners is to create your own LinkedIn group. The group name must be related to the company brand or domain of specialization. While being present in other groups, deep dive into the member’s list of each group.
Check the profiles of the members and try to shortlist them as your potential or target customers. Start inviting them to your group. You can curate a personal message for them so that they feel connected and interested in joining your group.
Be cautious and extra careful while selecting the list. Ensure you are not inviting your competitors into the group else you may land in trouble. Information will flow out of the group which may disturb your promotion strategies as well as the customer base.
Once you have a good number of members or potential clients, start sharing interesting topics related to the products and services offered by your company. Impart the value you can bring to your customers which may include some sales pitches or promotional messages. Answer queries from customers and substantiates or quantify your responses with facts and figures.
Description and Summary section of your profile
Often companies or professionals tend to neglect the description or the summary section of the profile. They prefer to keep it casual and short. But that is a very wrong concept.
You must write briefly but include all the points about your company which are valuable and important for your customers. Before visiting your company website, customers prefer reading the details of your profile and understand what your company has to offer.
Once they are comfortable with your company’s reputation and branding, they can hop into your website for capturing more details. So the description and summary sections are powerful tools to capture the attention of your customers.
Be sure to specify clearly and concisely about your company’s domain or niche capabilities, the products or the services offered, and future endeavors.
Focus on the Quantitative aspect
At the end of the day, one aspect beginners must remember as part of LinkedIn marketing is the numbers. The more your count of customers, the more is your chances of increasing the revenue and profits. So you have to continuously work on expanding your customer base.
Your strategies, campaigns, email marketing will be effective only when you can increase the reach and build on your connections, a suggestion is to set a target for each month, and a quarter. Measure the % achieved and understand if there are any gaps.
Try to bridge the gaps by scanning through additional customer profiles and channelize your effort into expanding connections and potential customers. You can grow if your customers increase and subsequently your revenue to shoots up.
Work on building relationships
Once you shortlist your customers, ensure to build a strong relationship with them. Your effort must be to ensure that it’s your company and not any competitors, your customers must look for or rely when purchasing their products or services.
They must gain confidence and trust in your way of working, before sales and after-sales services. Your company must serve as the one-stop solution to your customers. Be proactive in collecting feedback from them and conduct surveys to check out both the positive and negative comments.
Address grievances, complaints, and negative feedback immediately by providing appropriate solutions. Ensure no repetition of faults by adopting preventive and corrective measures as fast as possible. Move from a tactical to a strategic or long-term relationship. That will ensure a steady flow of revenue to your company.
And the Final Thoughts…
LinkedIn marketing is a great mechanism to spur up your company’s reputation and brand. As beginners, if you follow the above-mentioned tips and tricks, then you will surely be able to gain prospective customers and even business partners as well.
