Over 250 million people use LinkedIn on a monthly basis meaning you should be thinking about your presence on the platform, no matter your business size. If you are a freelancer selling web services, or perhaps a tradesman or have your own catering business, your small business can benefit from doing some marketing on LinkedIn. Read on to find out how small businesses can best use LinkedIn to win business and promote themselves.

Setting up a Page

The first thing to do is to create your business’ LinkedIn page. You can do so by going to the LinkedIn marketing solutions’ website and then choosing Small Business from the options.

The next step is a form to fill out details of your business. It is fairly straightforward but make sure you pay attention to the following:

  1. When you create a url for your business make sure it matches across all your different social sites.
  2. Upload a logo and create a tagline that describes your value – adding these get you up to six times more visits.
  3. After you create the page continue and fill out all the remaining details: company description, location, hashtags, cover photo and a custom button. The custom button is the action you want your customers to take, for example, go back to your website.
  4. Share your page with all your connections, your company database and encourage them to like and share the page.
  5. Finally, make sure you add the ‘Like’ button to your website and email.

Create a LinkedIn Marketing Strategy

As for any other activity you do – including small businesses – you should set out goals and a budget for what you want to achieve for LinkedIn – Do you want to get leads? Or publicise your brand? The key to success is to create great educational content that will get help your target users and get them interested in and trusting of your brand. Whether you decide to sponsor your content with ads or not you still need to get together a budget as creating good quality content takes time.

You should also get together a content calendar. It is very likely that you are not just creating content for one channel so you should map out how you are going to push out that content across each of the different channels in different ways and formats that suit the channel. For LinkedIn, follow the tips below:

Use Images and Graphics

LinkedIn research suggests that posts with images receive 98% more comments than those without. LinkedIn also finds that custom collages that include 3-4 images in one post perform well for pages.

Improve for Reach and Engagement

LinkedIn’s algorithm primarily looks at your personal connections, interest relevance and the possibility of post engagement to help rank articles. There are many things to do to try and get the best possible ranking out of LinkedIn’s algorithm.

  1. Make sure your content is relevant and current.
  2. Use an image or video, statistics and quotes to attract attention.
  3. Keep your post short, sharp and succinct, and use paragraph spacing and bullets.
  4. Make the audience you are trying to reach clear by naming them in the title (‘small businesses need better SEO’).
  5. Lead with a question and create polls for feedback.
  6. Tag people and pages mentioned and include hashtags.
  7. Respond to comments quickly to keep the conversation going.
  8. Tap into FoMo (Fear of missing out) by suggesting that if they don’t do something their competitor will.
  9. Stand for something – Customers now compare about your green credentials and how you stand on various social issues.

Post Regularly

In order to build up an audience you need to post regularly, with the proviso the more often the better. Weekly is good, but daily posting gains even more traction.

LinkedIn Live

According to LinkedIn live video get 24 times the engagement of pre-recorded video. You can take advantage of LinkedIn Live to host interviews, webinars and even virtual events. Viewers like it because of the personal, intimate feel and the opportunity to ask questions.

Create a Showcase Page

A showcase page engages you to get specific and target a particular community. Much as you might have an industries section on your website, it offers your users a chance to just get information on their sector.

Get Insight from LinkedIn Analytics

LinkedIn Analytics gives you detailed breakdowns of your posts that were most engaged with, read and inspired your readers to take action. You can also look at the background of your audience. This insight enables you to then improve your content calendar, adding topics that are better resonating with your audience.

Targeting

LinkedIn marketing tools actually include organic targeting options. You can target posts based on your follower’s profile data including organisation size, industry, job, seniority, geography and language preference.

LinkedIn Groups

Besides LinkedIn marketing software, you can help utilise groups to help promote your small business. You can create a group and use it to offer up all your content and answer questions related to your work or to anything that can help your target customers. In addition, you can join related groups for small businesses or your industry, ask questions to learn more, meet influencers, and look out for potential clients.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Simply by utilising the search box in LinkedIn you can find prospective customers by searching for companies and their employees; however, LinkedIn Sales Navigator takes that to the next level allowing you to search by job title, years of experience, location and others; in addition, organise prospects in groups, get recommendations and get analysis and insights. It is not a free service, but you may well find it offers you a means of finding clients faster and becomes a worthwhile investment.

Ads

If you have the budget, you can use LinkedIn Ads to target your customers.

  • Sponsored posts – This gives you the opportunity to boost your content to ensure it gets on the feed of your target customers.
  • Sponsored messaging – In this case it allows you to get your message into the inbox of your designated customer targets.
  • Text ads – Similar to Google search ads, this is an opportunity to put your product or service next to the feed of your prospects.

About Hoof

Hoof’s payment solution has all the tools to help you win business and more efficiently manage payments. Its invoice and quotation software makes it easy to create and store invoices and therefore makes filing taxes for self-employed easier.