By César Chiva
HOW TO USE LINKEDIN
TO BOOST YOUR
BUSINESS, SALES AND
MARKETING!
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INTRODUCTION
Most people on LinkedIn just set up a profile, sit back, and see what happens. However,
as a Business owner, you know as well as I do that "sitting back" and seeing what
happens is not the best way to market your business and get more sales
Advertising, they say is the heartbeat of every business. For any business to thrive well in
today’s highly competitive world, strategic measures have to be erected in the bid to
inform and entice a wider range of audience/market about what value(s) you are offering,
either as a business owner, service provider, or as a promoter. Someone once said:
“Doing business without advertising in one form or the other is like winking at a girl in
the dark”. Of course you understand it is a futile endeavor. You know what you are doing
but nobody else does. Hence to shy away from putting yourself out there as much as you
can is bad business.
This brings to mind that the competitiveness of the world today is not without its perk. If
anything, it has brought about the inventions of several technologies that have optimally
revolutionized the way we do things, especially the way we work. To say the least, it has
brought about the inventions of several platforms to reach the global world. Your
business, market and sales are no longer confined within the walls of your resident city or
country – Well, except you allow it through your inactions. With just some few clicks
here and there on your computer, it is all out there. Needless to emphasize, it is now far
relatively cheaper, easier, and faster to connect with customers or people who might be
interested or have the need for your service or product with the advent of quite a number
of social media platforms. One of the platforms – LinkedIn – has from the onset been the
seat for majorly professional and work/business-oriented individuals and groups. It is
therefore not out of the world that this book aims at inciting interest in maximizing this
platform, both in people who haven’t seen the need for it and those who are already on
the platform but not maximizing it enough to foster self or business marketing and sales.
Steve Ballmer said “The number one benefit of information technology is that it
empowers people to do what they want to do. It lets people be creative. It lets people be
productive. It helps people lean things they didn’t think they could learn before, and so in
a sense it is all about potential.” There is just so much out there, and we might not be
harnessing the opportunities enough for our maximum gains and benefits, especially with
regards to our business and sales turnover. This is why this book is a good read at such a
time as this. It will help you see how to leverage on the benefits of LinkedIn that might
have before now been misused, underused or abused. In the course of this book,
irrespective of the size and nature of your business, your eyes will be opened to behold
how your business, sales and/or marketing can be given a boost using LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is a platform of mainly business owners with over 140,000,000 members and
growing. It has been around for about 6 years, and although it has been around a while,
almost no one uses it to generate leads for their business like the way I am going to show
you in this short eBook.
Most people on LinkedIn just set up a profile, sit back, and see what happens. However,
as a Business owner, you know as well as I do that "sitting back" and seeing what
happens is not the best way to market your business and get more sales, and it's not the
best way to utilize LinkedIn.
Now that we have established what LinkedIn is, and how it works, let's get
started on how you can use for your business, sales and marketing,
CHAPTER 1
SOCIAL MEDIA AND SOCIAL NETWORKING
Social networking and social media are two very important terms in social marketing, and
to the general public as a whole. While these two terms might have been used
interchangeably on several occasions, there exist between them some measure of
disparity. Albeit one is as a result of the other.
Social media is a platform or channel via which network tethering, among other things
can take place. It is one of the various means by which people can get to connect and
build networks with people of interest in all works of life. Social media can be used to
achieve several aims, one of which social networking is a part. It does this by allowing
people to create service-specific profiles which can be connected with those of other
people. In today’s world, it by all means provide the largest opportunity to reach and
connect with a huge audience.
Social networking, on the other hand, is an act of building connections of like-minded
individuals with the view to getting something out of it. It is not a novel activity; as a
matter of fact, it has long been existing even before the invention of social media. People
have networked in churches, meetings, and other social gatherings. It is whatever you do
to foster associations and spread tentacles. In other words, social networking goes way
beyond just having a network of fans or followers, it encompasses fostering those
relationships, maybe not for instant gratification but definitely for an ultimate goal.
For example, Facebook is a social medium. But it can become a social networking site if
users use the platform to build and strengthen associations. Needless to emphasize, the
social media is a noun whereas social networking is a verb. Social media provides the
means of catching the attention of some set of people by putting up contents that might
interest them and consequently increase fan/follower’s base. Someone might decide to
start a blog and put up contents that might interest a targeted segment of people, thereby
drawing attention to it. But until these contents are used as a means of engaging your
intended audience or potential customers/clients, then you aren’t truly networking. Social
networking boils down to having active conversations, that is, it involves talking and
getting response. It is an active engagement of people to foster interpersonal
relationships, not without the ultimate goal of getting something out of it. Essentially,
networking emphasizes the need to not only connect with people, but going further to
foster and sustain those relationships by taking time to border on a subject and discuss it
with others. You find a common ground with your target audience – to give out your
opinions, and actively get feedbacks from them. Common ground can range from
personal to career interests and backgrounds. With that, networks are built and fortified.
So until your social medium serves as a means to actively engage people in the hope to
build deeper connection with them – outside the shallow buzz generation– it is not a
social networking site.
It can then be rightly inferred that the development of technology has broken quite a
number of barriers to social networking. Social networking is no more limited by
physical connections and local boundaries. It is now possible to network with people
from all over the globe through the unique ability of the World Wide Web to facilitate
such connections. A distinctive feature of social networking sites (SNS) is that they are
web internet-based applications – they provide means for interested users to
communicate over the internet. The lifeblood of SNS is the user-generated content. The
nature of user-generated content is a major distinguishing factor between social media
and social networking sites.
According to Wikipedia, social networking services can be disintegrated into three parts:
socializing social network, networking social network, and social navigation social
network. Facebook comes to mind when we think about socializing social networks. It is
majorly for engaging existing friends. LinkedIn, which is the focal point of this book is
more of a networking social network. It is more adapted for non-social interpersonal
engagements. It incorporates special networking features to almost naturally harness the
act of networking. Social navigation social network mainly help users find specific
information or resources, e.g. goodreads for books. All in all, they are all platforms to
connect and potentially network with people all over the world.
Social media marketing entails all activities that aim to achieve marketing
communication and business branding via the web internet. It is a means of connecting to
the numerous customers (and potential customers) through the various available social
media networks. It is all about creating substantial connections with customers. Social
media marketing goes beyond utilizing the vast resources provided by the social media to
build a community, it extends further to making good use of that community to boost
business, sales and propagate marketing through active engagement with that community.
You leverage your social media connections to build and strengthen relationships, which
will consequently improve your business, market and sales.
CHAPTER 2
EVOLUTION OF SOCIAL MEDIA
Social media did not just jumpstart into what it is today. The ubiquity of the social media
in today’s world has been fueled by several factors over the years. These social media
have long been in place to connect majorly family and friends, before it blossomed into
what now connects people from all works of life, thereby serving as a means to reaching
and connecting with a wider audience. And needless to say, the social media is now a
business marketing tool that is utilized by businesses and brands of all shapes, nature, and
sizes across the world.
Social media has evolved from the days of newsgroups, listservs, and chat rooms in the
70s to days of ICQ and livejournal. But starting from early 21st century, quite a number of
platforms surfaced – Friendster, Myspace, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube,
Instagram, Snapchat, among others. And between then and now, several features have
been added to these platforms by their developers, in order to make them more user-
friendly and add other functionalities.
The social media did not quite get much attention until Facebook came to scene in 2004;
followed by the likes of twitter and YouTube just two years after. But today, everything
we do gravitates towards social media, so much that life without it is unimaginable. A
status update might be all you need to intimate your social community about what is
happening in your personal life, what you have been up to of recent, your professional
achievements, and so many other things. This has gone a long way in promoting
businesses and brands by means of getting them connected to their existing and potential
customers on a more personal level. Not only that, it has fed users generally with many
useful information, and has granted them a platform to freely express themselves in order
to connect and discuss with people of like-minds and interests.
The widespread of the use of mobile devices and the vast global availability of the web
internet have been major drivers of the sweet-demon referred to as social media. As at
2015, research conducted has it that out of the 7.2 billion people in the world, there are 3
billion active internet users; about 2.1 billion people own social media accounts, and 1.7
billion out of these are active users. Furthermore, it was found that across the world, there
are 1.65 billion active mobile social accounts. If you ask me, these are really massive
figures, and it is daily on the increase. It is then not uncommon to find people in all age
brackets bent over their smart phones and PDAs scrolling through their social feeds on
the streets, coffee shops, social gatherings, and even in the office. This in turn has led to
several vices in light of low productivity due to wandering from one post, picture and/or
videos to the other. Cybercrime has also been on the increase since the bloom of social
media. These and many more atrocities are however not enough to cancel out the
numerous benefits that can be obtained from the technology. Because in all fairness, it all
boils down to us – the users. It is dependent on what we allow and make out of it.
CHAPTER 3
THE ADVANTAGES SOCIAL MEDIA NETWORKING AND MARKETING
OFFER
We realized from previous discussions that it is not just enough to have a social media
account or even many followers on social media, what matters is how well you can build
and sustain relationships with those in your circle by finding a common ground to interact
well with them. Only then can you transform those “likes” to more profit for you. Or of
what use is spending time on social platforms when no value is being added to your
business?
There are just numerous benefits from the intelligent use of social platforms that it will be
a sin to miss out on them by just wandering around on such platforms without leveraging
on the several features and resources provided by their developers to enhance your
business, sales and marketing.
Social media have many advantages in store to the business over the traditional
marketing strategies. This is not a reason to eliminate the use of traditional media though.
The two can be well integrated to boost business. The following represent incentives why
social media networking and marketing should be made a huge part of your business
promotion and marketing plans:
i. The first apparent reason to delve into social marketing and branding is its
potential to reach a large audience from all over the world. With an estimated
number of about 2.87 billion people across the world on the different social
platforms, getting to reach a high percentage of target customers from around the
world is not impossible. This number is even expected to increase over time. For
example, survey has it that two new members join LinkedIn every second. The
additional fact that people spend quality time on social media gives assurance that
a sizeable number of your target audience will get your message.
ii. Through the “filter” feature on many of the social network sites, it is easier for
business owners and marketers to segment their target audience in terms of
location, age, sex, and other metrics. This in turn helps to fine tune campaign and
marketing activities to be well suited for the target audience, and consequently
leading to an improved ROI.
iii. Whereas traditional marketing can be really draining on your pocket, social media
networking and marketing will cost you no or little bucks. All you need is to set up
your account and get it active and attractive enough for your target audience. This
of course can be quite time consuming, but it is definitely worth it.
iv. It helps business owners to get leads on techniques to get more intelligent and
strategic about their businesses and products. Through information gained from
the strength and weaknesses of competitors, social platform is capable of
providing business owners and marketers alike, with insights on how to improve
their products and marketing strategies in a manner to get the attention of more
customers. This improves market intelligence that helps to get ahead of
competitors.
v. Social media marketing gives business owners and marketers direct links to
customers. Times before the blossom of the social media, a major challenge faced
by business owners and marketers is ensuring that their contents reach their
customers in the shortest possible time. But with the rich development of social
media, sharing content is relatively easier and faster. With this advantage, they are
able to easily disseminate information to them, and receive instant feedbacks from
the customer’s point of view. This ultimately enhances healthy customer
relationships which go a long way to bring about customer loyalty and referrals.
We know how much that means to the success of a business, don’t we?
vi. One good feature common to most social media is that they are very user-friendly
– easy to use. No special skill is required to navigate the interfaces of these
platforms. So far you can read and write, you are good to go.
vii. Connection from any part of the world is possible. Whether you are in Europe, or
you are in North America, or in whichever part of the world you choose to be at
different points in time, you are still able to connect with your online audience. All
other things being equal, your location is necessarily not a barrier to effective
social networking. With this in view, your consistency is not threatened. You can
post from any part of the world.
viii. Social media has the ability to spur your website’s visibility. It not only increases
traffic to your website but also improves its ranking. This is made possible when
users follow the links from social media to your website. Link sources can be from
shared content, social media profile, and those gained by outreach (from
established relationships with industry experts and influential followers).
CHAPTER 4
WHY THINK LINKEDIN WHEN YOU THINK SOCIAL MEDIA
NETWORKING AND MARKETING?
LinkedIn, although a bit lowly ranked than the rest in the pack (Facebook, Twitter, etc.),
is the dominant professional social network site. It started in 2002, but today, it boasts of
about 400 million registered users, over 39 million of which are students and recent
college graduates. It is usually the choice for professionals who aim to connect with
others. It is about the best platform to put out your business to the world and connect with
other enterprises. The uniqueness of LinkedIn lies in the fact that unlike popular buzzing
media like Facebook and Twitter, it is business-oriented and its target audience are
professionals from all works of life. Matter-of-factly, it is the world’s largest community
of professionals. Every form of networking done on LinkedIn centers around business.
This makes it easy to target the right people for your business. And with no iota of doubt,
LinkedIn has the highest credibility rank than any other social channel. So whether you
have a job or you have a career or you are a professional( or looking to be one), LinkedIn
is an awesome platform to promote yourself (and business) by making the right
connections. And contrary to some people’s opinions, LinkedIn isn’t all about finding
jobs, it goes a long way into building B2B and B2C relationships. Furthermore, LinkedIn
developers were able to break through the hard rock of China’s ban on many American
social media. Hence, no barrier to accessing your account from any part of the world.
The advantages of LinkedIn cannot be made separate from its specialized networking
features and tools. This is because the features and tools are well adapted for users to
connect and share contents with other professionals of interest – colleagues, business
partners, new employees, potential employers, and prospective customers/clients. This
makes it a fantastic business/sales/marketing booster, compared to other existing social
platforms. The rich features of LinkedIn that gives it an edge over the rest in terms of
marketing and business boosting include (in no particular order):
Profile – the primer for building a professional presence on LinkedIn is the profile.
LinkedIn profile skeleton is so designed to avail users the opportunity to highlight
their professional background, skills, experience, and interests. The goal of the
information provided in the profile is to catch the attention of like-minded people,
and people who may be interested in what and who you are. Interestingly,
LinkedIn makes it possible to add a variety of media such as pictures, videos,
documents, links and presentations to enhance the summary, education and
experience sections of the Profile. Since many serious-minded individuals and
professionals care more about outputs, it is an opportunity to put your best foot
forward using these means.
Company page – this is one very unique feature LinkedIn provided to promote
business branding and marketing. It allows you to create a company page to
enhance your brand’s visibility on one hand, and to build, sustain a beneficial
community around your business’s value offering.
Analytics tab – a fantastic tool made available for Company pages to view t.
Updates – this feature of LinkedIn gives users the chance to make their events,
interests, views, and show off expertise to their connections. The richness and
relevancy of these updates to your target audience makes a whole lot of difference.
Group – the advantages of this feature are numerous. For one, it gives an avenue
to meet with other professionals in a field or topic of interest to discuss, learn, give
out your thoughts, and of course, connect. Group Creation and membership might
be a step to becoming a thought leader in your industry. In addition, certain
benefits come with it – gives room to bypass the rule of compulsorily having a
first-degree connection with user before one can message the person. With group
connection, provided you have been a member of LinkedIn for a minimum of 30
days and a member of the particular group for at least 4 days, LinkedIn allows to
send up to 15 free personal messages monthly to group members. Full profile of
group members can also be viewed by fellow group members without first degree
connection.
Saved Search – it is a powerful feature, especially for sales prospecting. After
narrowing down your search with different criteria, LinkedIn provides you with
the opportunity to save it, and run it as need arises later on. Asides this time saving
advantage, the use of saved search allows you to get updates as new members in
the network match up with your saved search criteria set.
Resume Builder Tool – this can be used to automate the conversion of your
LinkedIn profile into a resume-friendly format. The format can then be tweaked to
your taste and exported in PDF format.
LinkedIn Jobs Postings – avails employers and job seekers alike to target the one
who best fit a job opening and land awesome new positions respectively, by means
of LinkedIn’s advanced search feature. Saved search can be quite helpful too.
Recommendations and Endorsements – with these features, colleagues are able to
confirm the enlisted skills and experience in your profile; and also tell a story of
their experience working with you. This gives more reputation and credibility to
profile’s skills set and experience. It is a crucial building block for business and
marketing success, as it goes a step further to establishing your professional brand.
Get introduced – it is one of the various means to contact someone you have no
direct connections with on LinkedIn. It works if you have a mutual connection
with the target professional. You can send a message to the mutual connection,
asking him to introduce you to one of his connections – your “object” of interest.
“News” Signals – provides real-time information about the current status of your
contacts. This gives users insight of who is or is not online, which can ultimately
help with some strategic planning.
Advanced Search – allows users to “hunt” for others within their circle of interest
using metrics like industry, language, company size, seniority level, etc. to narrow
their search to the “exact” person they need.
Alumni Search – as implied by its name, this feature helps to expand your network
by digging out and giving the chance to connect with people you had affiliates
with in times past.
Leads generation – this feature gives user the opportunity to generate leads. Links
to Posts and other activities done on LinkedIn can be shared to other social
platforms. Study shows that LinkedIn generates the highest visitor-to-lead
conversion rate, even three times higher than Facebook and twitter.
These represent just the tip of the iceberg. The list is inexhaustible as there are many
more fantastic features, and many others more for paid premium account users – Open
Profile message, InMail, etc. These are really powerful tools well-tailored to meet your
business, sales and marketing needs.
CHAPTER 5
IDEAS AND STRATEGIES TO BOOST YOUR BUSINESS, SALES, AND
MARKETING WITH LINKEDIN
This is the part where we learn how to leverage LinkedIn’s rich and well-structured
system to boost and bolster up our business, sales, and marketing. As you will discover
when you read on, the whole idea of business branding, sales and marketing boost
typically revolves around major concepts like:
Building a profile to get you noticed/found
Building a reputation that sells
connecting and expanding your network with beneficial connections
Fostering relationships
engaging target audience with relevant and captivating contents and
hiring the best candidates
To successfully do the above, there are critical questions to find answers to when
planning your moves:
Who are your target audience?
What do you know about them?
Where are they located?
What are their lifestyle choice?
What are their interests business-wise?
These questions will guide you to putting your energy into something that will get you
the desired results. Otherwise, you might just be running several kilometers in the wrong
direction. Thankfully, LinkedIn features make it easy to implement many of the strategies
required to boost your business brand, sales, and marketing once these questions are
answered.
Business Branding
LinkedIn incorporates a number of features to help business owners carve out a niche for
their business in a manner to attract the interest of prospective customers and
professionals. In building a quality brand for your business, three important activities
cannot be overemphasized:
i. Build a profile that unveils your expertise and gets you noticed: the first step to
getting a tight profile for your brand is to understand your audience. With that, you are
able to conjure up a story that is capable of catching their attention. Whoever your
target audience are, be it potential customers, new business partners, job candidates, or
any other category, understanding your audience will go a long way to helping you
suitably tailor your LinkedIn profile to make them want to know and connect with you.
Afterwards, you can start utilizing the wealth of features made available by LinkedIn
to enhance it. Put a face to your name. In your profile, don’t hesitate to put up a fine
professional picture of you. It is not being fake, rather it is branding yourself well for
the right people. It is the first impression your connections have of you, and it goes a
really long way to attract them to you.
You will not want to miss out on the advantages of putting up a punchy headline in
your profile. Making use of keywords or phrases that speak directly to your audience is
one of the first things they will notice, it is expedient that you do that right.
Furthermore, use the summary and experience sections of the profile to showcase your
career experience and achievements. Add keywords and phrases that capture your best
skills and improve your visibility on LinkedIn and SEOs generally. Use multimedia
like pictures, videos, etc. and provide links to your previous works – blog posts,
presentations. In all, give people a reason to want to engage you. And as insignificant
as it might seem, get your colleagues, employers, and customers to give you
recommendation – let them attest to your claims, let your network speak for you. It
adds credibility, thereby making you catchier for potential business and client contacts.
Overall, make yourself easy to find. A tight profile goes a long way to building strong
relationships. Also, ensure that you are visible. You can go further to attain more
visibility by customizing your public profile URL to increase your chances of
appearing in search results.
ii. Expand your network to include business contacts that can help you be more
successful: every connection is important. It has a ripple effect in that each connection
averagely connects you to about one hundred others. Needless to say, the more
connections you have, the better your chances of finding the right contacts to drive
your business. Tips to expanding your network include:
Create your connection base. Usually, these are people you know off the net.
They include your friends, colleagues, clients, and family. They are your brand
advocates. Add them up and encourage them to add you up on LinkedIn.
Connect with alumni. The role of these people in your career life cannot be
taken with levity. For one, some of them have gone ahead of you in your chosen
field, and you never can tell, they might just be the people you need to take you
to the next big phase of your career. You can find and connect with them by
going to the Students and Alumni section of your alma mater page and sort
alumni by the years you attended.
LinkedIn groups is another fertile grounds to expand your network, knowledge,
and increase your expertise around a topic of interest. So. Be enthusiastic about
joining groups that match your professional interests, be involved in discussions
– put out your mind on the concepts too.
Link up with new people you meet in your regular life – at conferences, social
gatherings, meetings, weddings, and other events. Anytime you come in contact
with a professional in your business line, do well to add them up on LinkedIn to
sustain the relationship. You might not need them at that moment, but it could
turn out that they are people you need as you go on.
Search for contacts. The “Search” feature enables you to find contacts by
location and industry. Other filters like function, seniority level, years of
experience, etc., can also be utilized to narrow down your search to about the
exact person you need.
Reach out to them. After laying hands on potential connections, reach out to
them via warm introduction, messaging, InMail, as the case applies.
iii. Reinforce your relationships: it is never enough to have a large community. Turn
your connections to functional business relationships. Connecting is just the first step
to building a lasting business relationship. The bulk of the work and the most
rewarding aspect of it is cementing those relationships. It takes relevant and well-
seasoned conversations to achieve that. Here are tips to help:
Put yourself out there as an expert. Publish posts that introduce you as an
expert. Such posts reach beyond your personal network to other LinkedIn
professionals through shares. This is one way to earn deep respect. You can
also share sound articles, updates, and videos, not forgetting to add your
insights.
Harness relationships with reminders. This is very essential if you will turn
your connections into a prospective working business relationships. Set
reminders to reach out to your connections. Consistency is key, so ensure
you have an active line of communication with you contacts.
Leverage LinkedIn Groups. Find groups in line with your area of interest,
profession, or industry. Engage other experts by sharing your knowledge
and insights on topics. It builds reputation and respect.
Leverage the LinkedIn Connected App to get relevant updates about people
you know, and reach out to them when necessary – new skill acquisition,
job changes, birthdays, etc. These are ways to nurture relationships with
your connections.
Evaluate to see who is interested and adjust accordingly. It is important that
all your effort are directed towards and appreciated by your target audience.
You can check who has viewed your profile to find out something about
them – their business, industry, locations, etc. These information can be
used to fine-tune your contents afterwards.
Sales Boost
Sales turn over gets better when you are reaching out to the right people. So whatever
you do, ensure you are in touch with the right people, and be tactical about the best ways
to strike up conversations that can make a whole difference. Ways to boost sales include:
i. Build a reputation that sells: this still boils down to putting your best foot
forward by building a profile that reveal you as an expert and establishing a
network that increases your chances of connecting with the right people. Showcase
your company by uploading and sharing links pertaining to the uniqueness and
achievements of your company – company’s blog posts, websites, and
presentations. Be active – speak knowledgeably to industry news and trends. Share
updates relevant to your industry. Do these regularly to keep you on top.
ii. Find the right people: you can leverage the LinkedIn search feature to find key
decision makers in your industry, so as to be better equipped with the right
information to close more deals. Save your search template so that LinkedIn can
automatically notify you when new results come in. Do not hesitate to run checks
on your newly-found decision makers to be sure they are exactly people you need.
iii. Contact: this is the part where you reach out to the people you are sure you need.
The strategy to reach out to these decision makers is dependent on if you have
prior connection to them or not on the network. You can use metrics like mutual
connections, alma maters, and work experience find a common ground on which
to kick start your conversation with them. You can get a warm introduction if you
have mutual connections or InMails if no connection at all beforehand.
Marketing
Marketing strategy requires that you are very appealing to your target audience. And the
almighty LinkedIn has provided users the opportunity to freely create a company page,
combined with other marketing-strategy features to seamlessly achieve this. You can
boost your marketing on LinkedIn by:
i. Establishing Brand presence: this involves getting to know your audience, create a
tight company page based on the knowledge of your audience, and making your page
easy to find. Knowing your audience entails running some checks into the profile and
interests of the people who fit your customer description. Creating a tight company
page would mean setting up your company page to include your logo, banner image,
description, and the right information to help draw the attention of the target audience.
Improve your company’s visibility by putting up links to other online properties like
website, blog, and other social media.
ii. Connect with your audience: build a community made up of your exact target
audience. The more people are informed of your brand, the more business you can
drive. You can connect to your audience by:
Engaging your employees – like someone rightly said “your employees are your
first customers”. Your relationship with them has a direct impact on your brand.
So encourage them to add their current positions in your company to their
profiles. This automatically make them followers of your company page; and
your company page will appear in their profiles. This drives more traffic to your
page.
Get your company in front of the right people. Reach beyond your network and
promote your business to anyone on LinkedIn with LinkedIn Ads and sponsored
updates.
Track your company’s page progress with the analytic tab in your page. It
monitors your page to provide information about the growth of your page and
the caliber of people you are reaching.
Don’t leave your current regular customers out of the loop. Invite them to add you up on
LinkedIn. Provide links to your company page from your other online properties. You
can also promote your brand in your Groups. Find groups talking about your industry.
Join and be active – be a though leader. This will drive attention and traffic to your page.
iii. Engage them with contents: the best and potent means to drive new businesses to
your door hinges on sound content. You can borrow from the 80/20 rule to get started
with engaging your audience with contents. The rule preaches the creation and share
of quality and relevant contents in ratio 20:80. It emphasizes that not all contents you
put up should be yours. As a matter of fact, most of your contents should be from other
sources that are relevant to your brand. 80% of a company’s content should be a
variety of related but non-promotional contents the rest 20% can be used to promote
things specific to your business or product.
These contents can be memes, videos, slide share presentations, links, articles,
pictures, etc. what matters is that they catch your community’s attention. Furthermore,
post frequently, prompt your colleagues and followers to participate in your posts
through likes, comments, and shares. Don’t hesitate to engage with followers in the
comment section. And most importantly, always improve on your content. Observe
what parts of your company page interests them the most, and bank on that. Test other
topics and formats to understand what appeals to them better. Trust me, it is worth all
the stress.
One more concept to wrap it all up is hiring. Every business needs good hire to better run
their organizations. With the right hire, your business can take on a whole new
dimension. Boosting your business, sales, and marketing can require that you hire a better
brain and/or hand for the job; and this can be achieved on LinkedIn. With over 330
million professionals and LinkedIn’s specialized recruiting tools, you can be sure to get
the perfect hire capable of taking your business to the next level. It entails building your
employer brand, and attracting job candidates. More explicitly, create smashing LinkedIn
profile and company page; create a job post that gets your vacancy in front of the right
candidates.
With these tips, you are assured to notice significant boost in your business, sales and
marketing.
CONCLUSION
Boosting your business, sales, and marketing is not a hard nut to crack with the right
information. The focal point of the book is that creating a social media presence is never
enough for a business looking to dominate. The true power of social media lies in using
your social media connection to better brand your business, drive sales, and propagate
marketing.
Social media marketing is about creating meaningful connections with current and
prospective customers. You should adopt social media to establish and grow brand
recognition, gain leads, and improve customer relationships.
Without doubt, we understand that the nature of LinkedIn’s user interface is one that
offers a great deal of features to achieve many of these boosting strategies. Businesses
can use LinkedIn to locate talents and network – find and connect with clients,
prospective customers, and decision makers. LinkedIn offers exposure for businesses
which goes a long way to enhance sales. Overall, LinkedIn is a platform to actually reach
target customers.
Two terms you should not forget anytime soon when looking to boost your business on
any social platform whatsoever, are contents and consistency.
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