Any business today that doesn’t establish a potent online presence, has failed to keep up with its competitors and prospects. In this “super digital” age, social media networks like LinkedIn are THE go-to source for establishing brand presence, communicating with customers and prospects as well as generating more traffic for your business, among other things.
LinkedIn has taken the social media world by storm and matured quite well over the years. Next to Facebook and Twitter, it is considered a must-have for all things business. Professionals who have mastered the art of LinkedIn engagement enjoy benefits like 9 billion impressions each week, with nearly 60% visits coming from mobile and at least 15 times more content on their feed than job just postings
Are you truly capitalizing on some of the really powerful tools LinkedIn has to offer?
Let’s identify certain aspects which can help you mark your presence on LinkedIn and really stand out as an authoritative figure in your industry; namely stepping up brand awareness, devising an SEO strategy to attract more traffic to the business and a customer communication strategy that turns heads.
1. Content and Brand Marketing Strategy
LinkedIn offers limitless business opportunities IF you are utilizing it to its full potential, that is. Even to this day, digital content marketers are constantly seeking ways of showcasing what great content businesses have to offer:
Company and Showcase Pages
Company Pages mark your brand presence on LinkedIn and should as such, offer company information at the highest level. Showcase Pages let you connect with more specific prospects and customers. Here are some common goals Showcase Pages can help you accomplish. In addition, you’ll also know which metrics to keep an eye on:
Common Goals – Thought leadership, event registration, lead generation and brand awareness.
Key Metrics – Comments and inquiries, post clicks, engagement, leads and page followers.
Action Plan – Post at least 3 to 4 times each day, change your header image on a bi-annual basis and commit resources to engage with followers and respond to comments.
Some businesses own multiple entities under their brand name and LinkedIn Showcase Pages make it a breeze to segment content so that a specific product or business brand can be highlighted. For instance, L’Oreal owns several popular brands such as Redken, Yves Saint Laurent and Lacome – by having unique Showcase Pages for each, they are in a better position to engage and share enticing content with select target audiences.
Slideshare
Slideshare’s integration with LinkedIn allows you to readily identify people checking out your content, so to speak. After all, you need to know who is viewing and engaging with the business. If this happens to be the target audience, well and good. If not, it’s a good opportunity to see how the content is attracting visitors outside your target audience. This leaves you in a good position to expand your target base.
Common Goals – Brand awareness, SEO and lead generation.
Key Metrics – Linkbacks, keyword rankings, views, inquiries, actions such as likes, embeds and downloads, and, follower demographics.
Action Plan – Upload fresh weekly content, make playlists to group content, have lead forms and highlight profile page decks.
Publishing Content
Fact: More than a million members publish well over 130k posts each week on LinkedIn. What’s interesting to know is about 45% readers fall in the upper hierarchy of their respective organizations – VPs, CEOs and managers.
Use LinkedIn to publish highly focused and original content which resonates well with your network of connections. If you are already publishing content on the web or your website, it’s a good idea to rehash that content (while providing a link to the original copy) for LinkedIn, in order to better expose your followers to the content you like to publish.
LinkedIn has also published writing themes 2016 which gives you a fairly good idea so as to what kind of content they are planning to promote on a monthly basis. You can fine-tune your publishings accordingly.
Common Goals – Thought leadership.
Key Metrics – Reader demographics; likes, shares and comments; post profile views
Action Plan – Focus on creating content that fuels your passion and go with a monthly or bi-weekly publishing cycle.
Sponsored Content
This allows you to publish focused content in your feed, while also targeting prospects outside your page followers.
When it comes to Sponsored Content, about 75% clicks are from mobile devices. It makes perfect sense to make your content mobile-friendly in advance.
Common Goals – Thought leadership, lead generation and brand awareness.
Key Metrics – Impressions, followers, inquiries and engagement rate.
Action Plan – Go with a compelling photo that speaks to audiences; run at least 2-4 times a week; to test, run for three weeks and iterate, write URL tracking code, establish campaigns according to audience and allocate majority of your budget towards the most high-engagement audience.
2. The Science Behind LinkedIn SEO
As of early 2016, LinkedIn reported have over 400 million users while overtaking other social networks used for business purposes.
A great way to make your LinkedIn profile stand out is to employ highly strategic SEO principles.
Personal URL: How to Brand it
It’s good practice to change your URL from a dynamic to static one.
Dynamic URLs are identified by long ID numbers and random characters. These URLs are complicated to index so when you change your URL make-up, you make way for an improved profile ranking.
Experiment with Keywords
Your job title needs to be saturated with optimal keywords, which users are likely to key-in when searching for skills or services that pertain to your expertise. Let’s say you’re a seasoned programmer; you need to have the phrase “Java expert” or “Java analyst” mentioned in the job title, just to give you an example.
The keywords you use in the job title must be strategically saturated in your profile. Again, if “Java expert” is what you used primarily, you can use variations of this phrase throughout or in the Job History or Summary section, to be more specific.
Take Backlinks into Consideration
Start by linking your company blog to your profile page. This is especially helpful since your blog is what audiences identify as a “high authority voice” in the industry.
When making guest posts to other blogs, add a link to your profile at the end of the post. This is a great opportunity to invite more followers to your page as many blog owners have no issues at all if you wish to put up links to your social profiles in the author bio section.
Publishing Posts
Get into the habit of publishing quality content that’s relevant to your industry or niche. LinkedIn is a good medium when it comes to re-purposing content you’ve already published on your website or elsewhere. Hand-pick posts that have gotten lots of views, likes and comments (as long as they are relevant to your profile and industry) and have a post synopsis ready before posting it to your LinkedIn profile. Don’t forget to link back to the original source.
It must be noted that Google is very sensitive to duplicate content and does not allow publishing the same content verbatim in two places or more; content between your blog and LinkedIn profile therefore, should stand out in a unique way.
Keeping Your Profile 100% Complete
People might find it off-putting to arrive at a profile that’s incomplete. It does happen, and this is something to be avoided at any cost. For instance, make sure your work history is populated with as much detail as possible, secure a high number of recommendations and endorsements, and list complete details of all academic achievements and certifications.
Optimizing Photos
Google “crawls” for images pretty much the same way it does for pieces of content. So what you need to do is have your profile photos optimized.
Rather than having a name attached to your profile photo, label it with your job description. Example: instead of Mathew Rogers, you should go with “Web Graphics Designer”. Now, technically speaking, people looking up your profile aren’t going to see this, but Google will.
3. Attracting More Traffic to Your Profile Through Pulse
LinkedIn’s article publishing feature has been a game-changer since its inception in 2014. In a fairly short span of time, user posts can get hundreds to thousands of impressions.
The best part: they have the potential to rank high on Google. An added bonus apart from getting more traffic to your page, is that they can serve as leads to your main page. All you need to do is insert links throughout the post and specifically at the end of the post in order to promote your landing page.
In order to maximize your chances of being discovered through LinkedIn Pulse, here’s what you need to consider:
Keyword Strategy
Since we’re posting on LinkedIn Pulse, it makes sense to determine a popular keyword that Google crawls and add that to your headline, subheadings and other relevant sections throughout the blog or article.
Photos and Videos to ‘Break up’ Text
Readers generally like to skim and not everybody might want to read each and every line in your post. Particularly on LinkedIn, readers do not have the time or patience to settle down and give in to a long read. Break it up with photos and videos wherever appropriate.
Maximize Value in the Post
Users on LinkedIn are only there for select purposes only: to promote their business or get ahead professionally, network with others in the industry, hiring, job-seeking etc. Your content needs to be highly actionable and relevant.
Bio Call-to-action
Rather than simply linking to your landing page, have a highly engaging CTA in order to let people know what they are in for.
Select a Compelling Topic
Choosing the subject of your Pulse article wisely is something that can help you reel in prospects more effectively, before they even consider checking out your landing page. Try it out and see for yourself – post at least two engaging articles a week and see your leads flying in.
At Forbes, LinkedIn traffic saw a 127% increase between July and December in 2015. Forbes employs a very effective formula where it likes to post about 12 stories and quotes every day with 1.2 million regular followers. In December 2015, they experienced their biggest traffic spike, nearly overnight. Forbes’ chief product officer says they’ve gone to lengths to build their audience on LinkedIn, and the platform has taken certain steps to make sure that everybody wins.
Read more here.
4. Boosting Communication with Prospects and Customers
Establishing clear and consistent communication channels is the key to effective branding. LinkedIn happens to be the perfect platform to connect with prospects and maintain a healthy, consistent communication channel.
Here are some best practices you can employ to better reach your customers organically.
It’s All in the Headline
Practically all interactions on LinkedIn lead back to your business profile – this is where you sell your expertise and industry know-how.
Your headline must have a focused description of your most ideal customer along with what you’re offering. If you’re in the engineering sector, lead with an official title or a generalized statement pertaining to your role: “Seeking organizations looking for quality engineering materials and manpower, particularly mechanical and industrial engineering.
Headlines are very important because they appear next to your name every time:
- Your profile turns up in Google searches
- New discussions are posted in LinkedIn groups
- Posts are published on LinkedIn Publisher
- You are found in someone’s list of contacts
- Private messages are sent
So more or less, your headline goes around practically everywhere and this is essentially what’s considered as a first impression. Customers are way more likely to check out your profile on the basis of an interesting and richly detailed headline rather than one which simply says: “Leading engineering materials manufacturer”.
Get to Know Them
There are generally two ways of getting to know who your most ideal customers are on LinkedIn. Knowing what approach to take depends on whether or not you are already connected with customers on your LinkedIn profile.
For example, if the only people you connect with are your current and/or former customers, you can use the Search and LinkedIn Premium Account feature to get a profile of your most ideal customers. Click on the link to check out all your “1st Connections”. From thereon, expand the various categories found in the left sidebar.
You now get a summary of various attributes like industries, locations and company sizes of your customers. This information can be well-utilized when you’re searching for more customers to connect with, or even when you’re creating LinkedIn Ads in order to seek new customers.
Send Those Inmails
Sometimes, it’s difficult to connect with your ideal customers on LinkedIn. What you can do is send them an InMail.
Premium LinkedIn account holders can send a certain number of InMails each month. Send a private message to any other LinkedIn user; at this point it doesn’t matter if you’re connected to them or not. InMails work pretty much the same way as sending a private message on Facebook does.
So, instead of going straight to the recipient’s spam folder, your message lands in their LinkedIn inbox, where’s there’s no chance of it getting missed or deleted. Read more here.
AOKMarketing can help you win LinkedIn. Get in touch with us today to know more about how we can be of help.
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