LinkedIn marketing: How to make it work

LinkedIn is a professional networking platform that debuted in 2003 and aimed at professional development and networking. Think of it as the ‘business social network’ that is not only useful to professional individuals, enabling them to post their accomplishments, articles, and resumes; it provides a platform for organisations to post jobs, highlight their new products and services, and network with potential prospects.

For businesses, there are few tools as effective for collaboration as LinkedIn. It allows for highly targeted marketing efforts, as they can share best practices, grow their business networks, and position themselves as thought leaders within their sectors.

In this series, I will teach you everything you need to know to get settled on LinkedIn and start making it work for you. I’ll show you how to set up a profile for your business to maximise the LinkedIn opportunity, and will highlight things like how to target prospects through the platform’s features, and how to groom a professional network.

Let’s start with setting up a LinkedIn business profile. This isn’t difficult at all and will be used to build and grow brand awareness, as well as to promote your offerings to existing and potential customers.

To begin, click the “Work” dropdown at the top righthand corner of the homepage and from the options, choose “Create a Company Page+.” From here, upload your company logo and banner image for the page. From here, it’s even more straight forward. Start posting any company updates from your page, that you think will be helpful and of interest to your audience. Think carefully about the content you post; it must be designed with your audience’s requirements and interests in mind.

Next, you will start promoting your page to garner more interest and followers. This can be done by creating LinkedIn Showcase pages for particular products or solutions so that your message can be tailored for the different segments in your audience.

Remember that it is also important to keep your Business LinkedIn profile updated, as this will help you attract new followers, and remain relevant. Inactive profiles suggest that no one could be bothered, or that your company isn’t very popular. I can’t stress enough how important it is to keep your profile positioned to engage with and attract new followers.

There are lots of ways to do this, including refreshing your LinkedIn profile’s branding, for example, the background image and suchlike. Moreover, add rich media, such as video links to your profile, and make sure they are both relevant and active and refresh this content regularly. Ensure that all your links work – nothing chases away a prospect that bad functionality and broken links. Do regular ‘audits’ of your connections. Cull those who aren’t relevant, and reconnect with those who are and those who can help you grow your brand.

Keep a close eye on your LinkedIn activity to increase visibility and views, and check your company page often to make sure that all your new images and updates are correct. We do this because, like many other social media platforms, LinkedIn sometimes makes changes to its profiles that users are unaware of.

The reason for all this checking and re-checking is because LinkedIn, like many social media platforms, often makes changes to its profiles that you need to be made aware of.