Why (and How) Should I Market My Company On LinkedIn?

Why (and How) Should I Market My Company On LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is a social network for professionals. That we all know. There is no other platform where you will have so many decision-makers together. The question is not if you should be on LinkedIn but rather how to use it to its fullest extent, so that you can build trust and relationships, which will, in turn, create a source of income like no other. LinkedIn can be your only source of content (besides your website of course) and you will be absolutely in the lead.

Prepare to have your mind blown, let’s look at some statistics:

LinkedIn has 630 million users. Let’s flesh that out even more:

• 90 Million senior-level influencers
• 40 Million mass affluent
• 10 Million C-Executives
• 3 Million MBA Graduates
• 6 Million IT decision-makers
• 17 Million opinion leaders
• 63 million decision-makers

This platform can give you the audience.  What you do with this is up to you. Throwing sales pitches and nothing else is going to get you nowhere. Providing solid, fact-based content and participating in healthy conversations (as you would do around a boardroom table) gives you leverage over your competitor.

The same way you would not walk in blind into a business meeting, being prepared when using LinkedIn is going to show in your relationships and success.  Have a plan, take time to figure it out.

What needs to be included in this plan?

Keep it simple. Start with analyzing your current following. Look if the top 5 of your clients that you want to do business with this year is on your list of connections. Bonus points if you have more than one connection from the same company.  That means more people of the same target market seeing your message.

Want to get even more out of LinkedIn? After you’ve done the plan, do the checkup on your analytics, to see how effective your efforts were – you will be glad you made the effort! Case in point – When checking statistics for a new client over the last 4 weeks, we found out that:

• Within 5 posts, we increased the views with 320%
• Increased the company page likes with 125% in 5 days

What is more important is looking behind these statistics.

What we established

We could establish that within these company likes, 71% are based in their service area, 53 individuals job descriptions are ideal to the persona that they are trying to reach. Lastly, we could establish that almost 85% of these individuals are C-suite executives and up, making it the perfect client that they would like to target.  We can now go ahead and pinpoint these individuals and start a dedicated marketing campaign, not just throw spaghetti against the wall and hoping that it will stick.

How we should proceed

If you have a plan, now is the time to implement and track it carefully. Create content that directly speaks to the target markets’ pain point. Answer their questions. Analyze each individual and check when last did we make contact (if ever at all).  It would be sensible to establish what would be the best way to connect with them individually, seeing that we are connected already. So not talking sales, but showing value.  Perhaps sending a personalized message to say thank you for connecting, there are many ways to customize this message. Another great idea would be to look at these individuals’ LinkedIn profiles to see what they are posting, start commenting, liking and sharing their content.

This would be a long-term strategy, building trust over a period of time. You are still not selling, you are building relationships at this stage.

What we should keep on doing

These statistics and follow-up should be done consistently and diligently. Check if the people you are connecting to are reciprocating. Are they sharing/liking/commenting on your content? What happened with the articles and content that you have posted? Last month vs this month, vs last year. You need to keep track of your goals and your achievements, in order to stay the course long-term. This sounds like a lot of work, but if you’ve established what you want to gain out of it, it will be easy to track and to hit your goal.

In our next blog article, we will chat about the Tone Of Your Message – be sure to tune in for the last of the series.

Don’t have a strategy in place? You will find a myriad of good, solid strategies on the internet (which might just confuse you even more. I have read a great book recently, called “See you on the internet” which might help you along the way.

If you’re the kind of person that needs to help you start and walk a journey with you, I’m your gal. You can reach out to me via email or connect with me on LinkedIn.