Of all the social media applications available to your business for marketing purposes, LinkedIn has often been overlooked in favour of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and now TikTok. LinkedIn has long been considered a space to establish your professional profile and network with those in your field, but the idea of exclusively marketing your business on the platform is still relatively new. However, using the variety of tools offered on LinkedIn, you can build a new social media presence for your company and grow your client base. Here are five LinkedIn features you can use to improve your business’ marketing strategy on the platform.
1. Set-up up your business with its own LinkedIn Page
The first step of getting your company set up for marketing success on LinkedIn is to create a dedicated page that can serve as a central hub for all your information, including promotional content, business news, as well as future job postings. A LinkedIn company page (pictured right; courtesy of LinkedIn.com) will save individual employees from promoting the business on their own LinkedIn profiles. Your business fundamentally enters the world’s professional community with its own LinkedIn page, and you gain the ability to join conversations relevant to your industry and engage more easily with your audience.
With a LinkedIn page, your company can post, respond, and edit it on both mobile and desktop devices and provide administrative access to several employees (like your marketing team) so they can collaboratively manage it as a promotional space. Your page can actively react and comment in the same way as a LinkedIn profile, too, which enables interaction with other companies and clients, such as re-sharing content from your employees or partners and recognizing team moments with shout-outs. Media can also be shared on a LinkedIn page, including PowerPoints, PDFs, Word documents, images, and even videos, allowing your company to personalize the online space and use it purposefully.
2. Engage with your clients through LinkedIn Polls
Polls are engaging tools that have made their way into the ecosystem of many social media platforms, including LinkedIn. While traditional social media posts certainly generate views and some engagement, an interactive poll offers a fresh way for new and old clients to respond to specific questions from your company as you prepare and develop future products and services. LinkedIn Polls allow your business to gauge your audience’s opinions, likes, and dislikes; learn about their challenges and successes; and understand their needs and goals. Polls invite your clients to actively engage with your company, and their responses will always serve as useful data for future product development, service improvement, and marketing strategy.
3. Showcase new products and services with LinkedIn Live
Video has become a crucial element of marketing and promotional material, and live streaming has particularly been on an upward trajectory on Facebook, Instagram, and now LinkedIn. LinkedIn Live is a feature of the platform that allows professional communities to come together in real time and interact with each other in a safe, secure, and trusted environment. New products and services, FAQ sessions, and guest speakers or panel sessions can all be the focus of a LinkedIn Live event, and you can promote your events to the right professionals and client base with integrated LinkedIn advertisements.
Even with the added security of the platform, your company can still maximize the attendance of these live streamed events with less registration procedures; as many people can attend your event as you would like, which boosts awareness of your brand and strategically prompts engagement from new clients. At the same time, if you would like to gate your event and collect registration forms, you can quickly generate new leads by collecting basic contact information and following up with attendees after the event.
(Above image courtesy of LinkedIn.com)
4. Communicate with your audience through LinkedIn Newsletters
Monthly and weekly newsletters from companies are a relatively common but effective marketing strategy, so it is only fitting that newsletters are also being integrated into social media platforms like LinkedIn. LinkedIn Newsletters function just like a hardcopy or email newsletter and go directly to your company’s subscribers on a regular basis. Your company newsletter can contain any kind of information you would like, ranging from exclusive content, to news about new products and services, to excerpts from your latest articles and blog posts. Followers of your LinkedIn page can subscribe to your newsletter and opt-in to receive notifications when newsletters are released, either through the app, through a push notification, or with an email. LinkedIn is also optimized to ensure all your connections can seamlessly view your newsletter, and feedback, comments, and other metrics are immediately available to your company page as your audience interacts with your content.
5. Share long-form written content with LinkedIn Publishing
When we think of social media, we typically think of succinct and direct content that we can read in under one minute if not thirty seconds. While short bursts of information are important for meeting the consumer demand for immediacy, detailed written content is still a worthy component of any company’s marketing strategy; LinkedIn has thankfully recognized the importance long-form articles with LinkedIn Publishing. Prior to establishing this feature dedicated to in-depth and detailed written content, LinkedIn limited company page posts to only 1,300 characters, which prioritized the concise contribution style that often defines social media marketing. However, recent updates have dramatically changed the character limit, and LinkedIn company pages can now write and publish articles with over 100,000 characters (or article- and blog-length writing).
LinkedIn Publishing now encourages companies to share compelling and thought-provoking articles that explore industry shifts and trends, suggest how their company can provide solutions to common problems, and promote their products and services through case studies and client success stories. There is also the option of linking to external long-form written content, which your company might strategically use to tease blogs or articles first on LinkedIn and then direct readers to the company website to read the rest of the piece. With the reader now on the website, they can more easily explore your company’s products and services and reach out for a consultation or to get a quote. (Above image courtesy of LinkedIn.com).
Check out our CodeMasters Agency LinkedIn company page to see all these helpful promotional and marketing features in action. If you would like to get your own company set-up on LinkedIn, feel free to reach out to our team. We are ready to help you establish this new and professional social media presence for your business.