5 Ways to Grow Your Business on LinkedIn (A Comprehensive Guide)

According to LinkedIn , there are over 19 million Company Pages on LinkedIn. If yours isn’t not one of them, you’re missing opportunities to get your content in front of the audience that matters most to your business.

Your LinkedIn Company page is more than just “About us” page, it’s usually one of the first pages LinkedIn members visit to learn about your company. It’s your marketing tool to build awareness for your brand, establish your company as a thought leader, engage your employees and prospects, publish and share content and drive high-quality leads. And since LinkedIn is the largest professional network with around 575 million professionals, LinkedIn makes an invaluable addition to your Digital Marketing Strategy.

So to help you establish your Online Presence and Grow your Business on LinkedIn, here are 5 ways you can start doing right now:

1- Optimize your LinkedIn Company Page

Make sure your LinkedIn Company Page is well- optimized and includes relevant and up-to-date information especially before running Ad campaigns like Sponsored Content which requires a Company Page. Note that Google ranks LinkedIn pages in search engines and that they tend to rank high in search results so optimizing your Company Page is essential for your overall marketing strategy both for developing organic and paid strategy.

There are certain sections within your Company Page you should always optimize and keep them up-to-date with relevant information to maintain your Company Page’s Credibility including:

1- Company Logo

2- Header Photo

3- Summary Section

4- Company Information Section

5- Recent Updates Section

6- Consider Creating Showcase Pages if needed

7- Careers Section

8- Claim your Custom URL that includes your name and also helps with search engine results (e.g.,http://linkedin.com/in/yourfirm).

2- Define your Objectives and Build a Strategy to achieve them

You should define your own objectives before starting your marketing efforts. Your objectives will shape your strategy and the way you will market yourself. It will also define what KPIs and metrics you should look at when assessing your performance. Objectives can be divided into four common objectives which are brand awareness, lead generation, thought leadership, and event registration.

• If your objective is to generate brand awareness then you should always monitor certain metrics like the number of followers, the number of likes, comments, shares, and post clicks, and the engagement rate.
• If your objective is for example lead generation, then you should monitor metrics like the number of inquiries and the number of leads. Also, make sure to include tracking codes within the links in your posts to assess which LinkedIn Post/Ad generated that specific lead.
• If your objective is to establish yourself as a thought leader, then you should monitor thought leadership metrics like the number of followers, the number of likes, comments, shares, and post clicks, and the engagement rate.
• If your objective is event registration, then you should monitor metrics like the number of event registrants driven directly from your page and you can measure those using tracking codes on your event registration URLs.

3- Build your Following (Organically)

You don’t build a following overnight, it happens overtime especially without Sponsored Ads. If you’re just starting on LinkedIn and your Company Page doesn’t have much followers or content, you should consider first building up enough followers’ base and posting enough engaging content to increase your credibility so that when you start your Ad Campaigns later, people can trust your brand when they visit your page after seeing your Ads and find engaging content and a decent number of followers.

So How to increase the Number of your Followers Organically?

1- Make sure that all your employees complete their profiles on LinkedIn and add your company to their Profiles as employees are automatically followers of their Company Page.

2- Encourage your employees to share your content with their many connections. This will raise your brand awareness and increase the engagement including the likes, comments, and shares. Remember that employees on average, have 10x the connections as their company has followers on LinkedIn and so when they share your content with their connections, this will increase the visibility of your brand.

3- Follow other businesses and influencers in your industry and engage with them so that you can use their reach to grow your following.

4- Post Updates frequently that your followers can like, share, and comment on. When they engage with your content, their followers will also see your updates. According to LinkedIn, B2B prospects engage with 7 pieces of content on average before making a purchase decision. That’s why Top performing Companies post several pieces of content each week, and some even post daily. Content often published on LinkedIn include images, infographics, posts from the company blog, links to events, webinars, ebooks, and other content. So drive higher quality leads by featuring a good mix of upper funnel and lower funnel content, including tip sheets, eBooks and case studies.

5- Post High-quality Content. Your content should focus on teaching others how to solve a problem and establish you as a thought leader in that area. According to LinkedIn, 74% of prospects choose the company that was first to help them along their buyer’s journey. So sharing perspectives on industry news and trends, helpful product how-to’s and articles that reflect your company’s vision will definitely establish you as a though leader in your industry.

6- Post and share rich media like engaging visuals, videos, and infographics that capture the audience attention. According to LinkedIn, adding rich media to your LinkedIn Sponsored Content can increase CTRs by as much as 38%!

7- Engage with your network by responding to comments, liking or sharing other posts, and engaging in relevant groups for your industry. Also, joining groups that are relevant to your target audience will enable you to know what your audience is talking about and communicate with them. You can also create groups to share your content that your audience will be interested in and demonstrate your expertise while at the same time ensure that no competitors get in.

8- Add social sharing buttons and links to your Company Page on your website and other social media platforms. Add them on all of your blog posts and website content to allow users to quickly share content as updates.

9- Update your Career Section frequently with job postings so that people looking for jobs will find your page in search features or through connection suggestions and will hopefully follow your Company Page to stay updated with new openings and future opportunities.

4- Grow your Business with Targeted ads.

With LinkedIn Targeted Ads, you can target the right people at the right time with LinkedIn Advanced Targeting Features. LinkedIn targeting is unparalleled since it provides you with targeting options that aren’t available in other social media platforms like Facebook. The Demographic Targeting is exceptional where you can target people specifying the company name they work in, their job function, their seniority level, the industry they’re operating in, the company size, the degrees they’ve acquired, the education level, the groups they’ve joined, and many more. This targeting method is what makes LinkedIn Advertising Cost higher than other platforms, but at the same time the leads acquired through LinkedIn Ads are more qualified and valuable leads which makes the Conversion Rate higher.

1. LinkedIn Dynamic Ads now available in the Campaign Manager are great to attract new followers. LinkedIn Dynamic Ads are divided into three formats which are the Followers Ad, the Spotlight Ad, and the Content Ad. The Dynamic Followers Ad allow you to increase your page followers similar to Facebook Page Likes Ad, a new feature that wasn’t available for us before. If you want to learn more about LinkedIn Dynamic Ads and how to increase your followers using them, you can check “New from LinkedIn! Increase your Page Followers with Dynamic Ads” article here.
2. Also, LinkedIn Sponsored Content allows you to publish relevant content and reach a targeted audience of professionals beyond just your LinkedIn Company Page Followers. You can promote the company’s content through Sponsored Content Ads to target a niche audience, increase visitors and generate sales leads. You can also choose to add a “Follow button” to your Sponsored Content if your goal is to acquire followers.
3. You can also add a “Follow button plugin” for free to your website so people can follow your Company Page from your site. You can request the “Follow Company Plugin Generator” through this link.
4. Also, promote the company’s content through other types of LinkedIn Ads like Text Ads, or Dynamic Ads to target specific audience and generate awareness, increase traffic, and generate qualified leads. Another type of Ad is Sponsored inMail where you send a personalized message to LinkedIn members’ inMail box and with a CTA feature asking them either to subscribe, sign up, download, and many more.

Remember to identify your target audience clearly and determine who you’re trying to reach and who are the people you want to be your Company Page’s Followers before starting your Ad Campaigns by answering the following questions:

• What is their job function or title?
• Where are they located?
• What industry do they work in?
• What is their seniority?
• What are they interested in?
• What kinds of content do they like?
• What kinds of questions do they have?
• What are their pain points?

5- Improve Content Engagement and use Analytics to Track Performance

1. Share Valuable and Informative Content with your Audience including eBooks, SlideShares, Infographics, YouTube videos, Blogposts, Case studies, Third-party industry articles and reports, Helpful how-to content, Vivid visuals, and Serial, themed posts (For example, #MondayMotivation and #WednesdayWisdom). Also, note that Company Updates containing links can have up to a 45% higher follower engagement than updates without links!
2. Share Engaging visuals and make sure that your Company Page is visually compelling by avoiding stock and dull images. Try to create your own images whether in-house or using online tools like Canva and Pixlr. The recommended dimensions for the organic posts and the Sponsored Content are “1200x627” and always make sure that the text is light and the image matches the message. Also, make sure that your header photo is visually attractive and try to change it every 6 months at least.
3. Keep the text short and to the point with 150 character or less.
4. Include a clear Call to action CTA in your posts or Ads showing your audience what action you need them to take.
5. Include shortened links with tracking code parameters. You can use Google Campaign URL builder to generate a URL with tracking code parameters. Adding tracking code parameters to the end of your link will show you where the traffic is coming from and which update, post, or Ad specifically generated this traffic.
6. Follow the 4–1–1 Rule. For every piece of content you share about your company, share other four pieces of relevant content written by others. That way your updates won’t be all about what your company sells, but more about what your audience need.
7. Post regularly 3 to 4 times a week minimum. Some Top-Performance companies post daily and also some even recommend posting 3 to 4 times a day. But it’s all about the quality not the quantity even if you will post only once weekly, just make sure it’s high quality content.
8. A/B test with different headlines, texts, images, colors, etc. You can use Direct Sponsored Content to share content directly in the newsfeed of your audience and A/B test different versions of posts and target different audiences without having to originate posts on your LinkedIn Company Page.
9. Optimize your Landing Page or Website for Mobile Viewing. First, optimize your content taking into consideration the posts’ dimensions that are mobile friendly. Also, note that 80% of Sponsored Content Engagement comes from mobile devices so make sure that your landing page or website design is responsive.
10. Use Targeted Updates on your Company page if you want your posts or updates not to reach your whole audience and reach specific audience. For example, if you want your update to reach only people living in USA or people only speaking English, you can choose the targeted audience feature for that purpose. You can select audience to target based on language, geography, job function, university, etc.
11. Use Company Page Analytics to Assess Performance. The Company Page Analytics provide monitoring metrics including the visitors analytics, the followers analytics, and the updates analytics. The visitors analytics show you the number of visitors of the page (page views) and the number of unique visitors, traffic metrics (from mobile or desktop), and visitor demographics (location, function, seniority, industry, company size).

The followers analytics show you the total followers, the new followers, followers gains from organic and paid, followers demographics (location, function, seniority, industry, company size), and Companies to track section where you can see how your followers and updates compare to those of other similar companies. The updates analytics show you the number of likes, comments, and shares, engagement both organic and sponsored, engagement rate, and CTR rate.

You should always monitor these metrics taking into consideration your objectives and analyze each company update, post, or Ad performance compared to other posts and A/B test different versions of content and choose the best type of content to share with your audience based on what the analytics and performance metrics have shown.

Conclusion

LinkedIn is the #1 network for B2B marketing and it can be a powerful tool in building brand awareness, engaging your employees and prospects, publishing and sharing content, and driving high-quality leads. If you follow the previous steps, you’ll grow your business and achieve your objectives effectively over time.

That’s all for now and I hope you guys have enjoyed it and if you have any questions, please fell free to to comment below or message me directly. Have a nice day!

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