An Intro to LinkedIn Marketing

LinkedIn is an amazing professional tool. The world’s largest business community offers so much in terms of useful information, relevant business discussions, and opportunities to network. This access to an amazing group of business professionals also makes LinkedIn a great destination for marketing. After all, there are as many as 202 LinkedIn profiles within the U.S. If done correctly, marketers can use LinkedIn to their advantage to reach new audiences, educate on new products and learn about their target audience.

Linked has some unique benefits for marketers.

• It’s the largest collection of business professionals in the world, which makes it a great media tactic for advertisers trying to reach specific titles or job functions.
• Since LinkedIn is also a great place for those looking for a job, it’s also a great destination for those looking to recruit.
• As a website for professionals, advertisers can rest assured that the website will be brand safe.
• LinkedIn offers various ad formats for those looking to run paid social campaigns.
• LinkedIn offers small businesses a venue to promote technical content about their industry.

If done right, LinkedIn marketing is a great way to grow your business. However, this is all easier said than done. LinkedIn is a great tool, but there are some best practices to ensure that you are using your LinkedIn marketing successfully. The experts at JSL Marketing & Web Design put together some thought starters on how to use LinkedIn marketing to take your business to new heights!

Is LinkedIn the Right Choice for Your Business?

The answer is that, yes, LinkedIn is useful for any business. Bar none. We’ve been in the marketing world for some time and can confidently say that every business ought to have a LinkedIn profile. However, not all businesses should put the same amount of time and effort into LinkedIn.

For instance, a jewelry website is probably better served using TikTok and Instagram as mediums to reach their perfect audience. A lawyer specializing in mergers and acquisitions, inversely, should probably spend most of their marketing efforts on LinkedIn since their ideal customer is likely a business professional. While it’s not an ironclad rule, businesses that sell to other businesses, or B2B businesses, should consider LinkedIn their most important social media platform. B2C businesses, or those that sell to the consumer, should still have a LinkedIn profile, but LinkedIn likely won’t be their bread-and-butter for social media. There might be use cases where this isn’t true, but it works well as a rule of thumb.

Know Your Audience

The most foundational element of LinkedIn marketing is to know your audience, much like any other marketing effort. The best LinkedIn campaigns in the world will not drive results if they are addressed to the wrong audience. Specific research is always recommended to truly understand who that audience is and how to influence them. You might have an idea of who you consider to be your ideal customer profile, but market research is the only way to truly corroborate your assumptions. Trust us; if you want to see the best results with your LinkedIn marketing, you need to understand your target audience.

Align Copy and CTAs

Now that you have your audience thoroughly defined, researched, and vetted, it’s time to ensure that your creative copy and calls to action are aligned with this audience. Many small businesses, as they move towards LinkedIn, look to their past social media efforts to help inform their LinkedIn marketing. This can be helpful, but be sure that you don’t merely just copy and paste from what you’ve done on Facebook and Twitter. The short quips and memes that resonated with your Twitter audience might not fare well on LinkedIn.

Think About Your Goal

LinkedIn marketing is a great tactic for marketers, but you do need to remember what your end goal is when looking at utilizing LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a great medium for paid advertising, lead generation, audience education, brand awareness, and promoting new content, but advertisers can still struggle to align LinkedIn to their business goals.

For example, let’s say that you’re a niche accounting firm looking for leads from a particular type of business. You have a very select ideal customer profile and need to reach very specific people. You decide to regularly post content on your LinkedIn through organic LinkedIn engagement and run paid LinkedIn advertising to any business looking for accounts. Both of these tactics might make sense for another business, but for an accounting firm that needs specific types of leads from very select businesses, this strategy won’t produce great results.

The issue in the above use case isn’t LinkedIn; it’s how the business in question used LinkedIn. For instance, if our fictional business’s goal was to educate current customers about new service offerings via content promotion on their LinkedIn feed and create brand awareness among businesses looking for accountants via paid advertising, then the above media mix would have made a lot of sense! Ultimately, we see too many small businesses thinking of LinkedIn as a one-size fits all approach when nothing could be further from the truth.

Partner with JSL

It can be challenging for small businesses to get started with LinkedIn marketing, but you don’t need to do it alone. Turn to JSL Marketing & Web Design for a free LinkedIn consultation! We’re an award-winning digital marketing agency based in DFW, and we’d love to talk shop.

Our process is simple. We work to ensure that we understand your specific use case, from your competitors and value propositions to your short-term and long-term goals. Once we understand this, we’re able to make an amazing LinkedIn marketing campaign that aligns with your vision and needs.

Contact us for….

• Social Media Strategy
• Organic Social Media
• Paid Social Campaigns
• B2B Content Promotion
• & More!

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