LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network with over 740 million members. With so many professionals on the platform, LinkedIn presents a major opportunity for businesses looking to establish their brand, network, recruit talent, and drive sales.
While LinkedIn marketing requires dedication and strategy, the platform offers a variety of powerful tools to help businesses boost brand awareness, generate leads, and build relationships. For both B2B and B2C companies, LinkedIn’s targeting capabilities, ad platform, Company Pages, content marketing, and more can significantly impact growth.
How Can LinkedIn Help Grow My Business?
LinkedIn offers several benefits that make it a valuable platform for business growth:
Increasing Brand Awareness & Authority
Having a complete and optimized LinkedIn Company Page helps establish credibility and trust with your target audience. You can share compelling content, company updates, job listings, and information about your products and services. This helps prospective customers and partners understand exactly what your business does.
Generating Leads & Customers
LinkedIn’s detailed targeting options allow you to deliver sponsored content and ads to your ideal audience. You can also organically share content and engage with prospects to build relationships and convert them into customers.
Recruiting Top Talent
LinkedIn is the #1 platform companies use to hire employees. With over 55 million registered job listings, you can find and connect with the most qualified candidates for any role.
Establishing Thought Leadership
By regularly publishing long-form posts, articles, and insights on LinkedIn, you can establish your brand and representatives as industry experts. This improves trust and credibility with your audience.
Networking & Relationship Building
LinkedIn’s groups, events, and other networking features allow you to connect with potential partners, affiliates, influencers, and more. You can foster mutually beneficial relationships through the platform.
Promoting Your Content
When you post content on LinkedIn, it has the potential to gain significant organic reach. By optimizing posts for SEO, you can also attract people searching for related topics on Google to your LinkedIn content.
LinkedIn Features That Can Grow Your Business
Here are some of the specific LinkedIn features and offerings that can be used for business growth:
LinkedIn Company Pages
Company Pages are LinkedIn’s version of Facebook business pages. This is a hub to showcase your brand, products/services, job openings, and content. Current and prospective customers can follow your page to stay up to date.
Sponsored Content
With LinkedIn’s sponsored content ad format, you can publish posts just like you would organically but ensure they are displayed at the top of members’ feeds. This allows you to get your content in front of your target audience to drive awareness, traffic, and leads.
Sponsored InMail
Sponsored InMail allows you to directly engage your prospects by sending personalized messages to their LinkedIn inbox. According to LinkedIn, InMail messages have 3x the response rate of promotional emails.
Lead Generation Forms
You can attach lead gen forms to your Company Page and Sponsored Content. This allows site visitors to easily convert into sales leads right from your posts.
Targeted Text Ads
Similar to Facebook ads, LinkedIn Text Ads show up on the sidebar. You can define your target audience based on job title, industry, location, interests, and more. Then create customized ads to reach those members.
Dynamic Ads
LinkedIn Dynamic Ads automatically target members who have already shown interest in your business by visiting your site or page. This re-targets those individuals to drive conversions.
LinkedIn Groups
Joining and participating in LinkedIn Groups related to your industry allows you to establish yourself as an expert. You can also identify prospects and connect with like-minded professionals.
LinkedIn Events
Through LinkedIn Events, you can host webinars, workshops, and classes. This provides opportunities to generate leads, build authority, and network with attendees.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator
LinkedIn Sales Navigator provides premium tools to identify prospects on LinkedIn, connect with decision makers, and integrate LinkedIn data into your sales and CRM platform.
LinkedIn Marketing Solutions
For larger businesses, LinkedIn Marketing Solutions (LMS) offers advanced options to manage multi-channel campaigns, generate leads, gather data insights, and more.
Best Practices For Growing Your Business on LinkedIn
To fully capitalize on LinkedIn for business growth, focus on these best practices:
Complete Your Company Page
Make sure your LinkedIn Page has all relevant sections optimized, including your overview, employee bios, job listings, and contact info. This establishes credibility.
Encourage Employees to be Active
The more active employee profiles you have engaging with content and prospects, the better. This builds your brand’s reach and authority.
Publish Valuable Content
Consistently posting content like articles, videos, and presentations provides value to your followers while positioning your brand as a topical expert.
Use Targeted Ad Campaigns
Leverage LinkedIn’s powerful ad targeting to deliver sponsored content, InMail, Text Ads, and Dynamic Ads to your audience to generate conversions.
Focus on Engagement
Don’t just broadcast content and messaging. Actively engage followers, prospects, and groups through comments, likes, shares, and messages.
Monitor Performance
Track metrics for your Company Page, content, and ads. Review what posts and strategies are working best. Double down on those areas.
Integrate With Your CRM
Sync your LinkedIn activity with your CRM platform. This allows you to turn LinkedIn leads into tracked sales opportunities.
Partner With Influencers and Groups
Partner with LinkedIn influencers and popular groups in your industry to expand your brand’s reach to new, targeted audiences.
Promote Your LinkedIn Presence
Let website visitors, email subscribers, and social media followers know they can follow your company on LinkedIn. Add LinkedIn buttons to your site.
Tips For Getting Started
Here are some recommendations for businesses just getting started with LinkedIn marketing:
Claim Your LinkedIn Company Page URL
Add a custom URL like www.linkedin.com/company/yourbusiness to make your page easier to find.
Optimize Your Page to 100% Completion
Follow LinkedIn’s guidelines to flesh out all key sections: overview, media, jobs, Call-To-Action buttons.
Start Small With Paid Ads
Allocate a small budget at first for sponsored posts and Text Ads to identify what resonates with your audience before scaling up.
Leverage Employee Accounts
Don’t rely solely on your Company Page. Have employees post and engage content to build authentic connections.
Ask For Recommendations
Request customers, vendors, and partners write LinkedIn recommendations praising your business. Display them prominently on your page.
Join Relevant Groups
Have employees join LinkedIn Groups related to your industry niche. Provide value by answering questions.
Publish Long-Form Content
LinkedIn favors more in-depth, long-form content around 2,000+ words. Optimize articles for SEO.
Repurpose Content From Elsewhere
Don’t just post natively to LinkedIn. Repurpose blog articles, videos, webinars, and other media from your website.
Integrate With Sales Tools
Connect your CRM, email marketing platform, and sales enablement tools with LinkedIn for seamless lead management.
Potential LinkedIn Marketing Challenges
While LinkedIn offers many benefits for business growth, it’s important to be aware of some potential challenges:
Requires Dedicated Effort
You can’t “set and forget” your LinkedIn presence. It requires continuous creation of new content and engagement.
Organic Reach Can Be Low
With so many members and businesses on LinkedIn, standing out among the noise as an unknown brand can be difficult.
Difficulty Measuring ROI
It’s not always easy to directly track sales that come via LinkedIn, making return on investment unclear.
Ads Can Get Expensive
LinkedIn advertising costs can add up quickly, especially for smaller businesses with lower budgets.
Many Users Not Active
While LinkedIn has over 740 million members, a relatively small percentage regularly check their feeds and engage.
Communication Restrictions
Unlike other social networks, you can only message people who are already connected to your account on LinkedIn.
Company Pages Have Limits
Pages don’t offer all the same options and customization as a standard LinkedIn personal account.
Frequently Asked Questions
Here are answers to some common FAQs about growing a business on LinkedIn:
How much time should I spend on LinkedIn each week?
To see significant business impact, plan to spend 1-2 hours per day on LinkedIn, including posting content, engaging your network, and prospecting.
What types of content perform best on LinkedIn?
Long-form posts, thought leadership articles, videos, infographics, and insights based on industry data tend to see the most engagement.
How do I get more followers for my Company Page?
Complete your Page, post consistently, run promotions, partner with influencers, advertise, and promote your Page on your website and other channels.
Is a business page or profile better on LinkedIn?
For businesses, a Company Page is always better than an individual profile. Company Pages offer more features for promotion, analytics, advertising, and recruitment.
Does LinkedIn advertising work?
Yes, LinkedIn currently has over 8 million active advertisers. Depending on your target audience and campaign strategy, LinkedIn ads can deliver great ROI across awareness, leads, and sales.
What types of businesses see the most LinkedIn success?
LinkedIn works especially well for B2B companies targeting professionals, SaaS providers, recruiters/HR, thought leaders/influencers, financial services, and higher-budget brands.
Conclusion
LinkedIn offers an immensely valuable platform for businesses to establish their brand, network with partners, share content, recruit talent, and boost sales. While mastering LinkedIn marketing requires strategy and effort, the broad targeting options, ad formats, content distribution capabilities, and audience engagement tools provide diverse opportunities to cost-effectively grow your business. If you invest the resources into building an authoritative LinkedIn presence and running multi-channel campaigns, you can drive significant measurable results.
