Marketing Your Business: Don’t Leave Out LinkedIn

It’s Not Just for Job Seekers Anymore

“LinkedIn is for finding a job. What does it have to do with marketing my business?” You may well be asking this question if the last time you visited LinkedIn was to update your resume. LinkedIn has changed as much as Facebook, and now offers huge opportunities for businesses to generate brand awareness, leads and sales … at much lower cost than traditional marketing media. It all starts with a well-planned company page, which can:

Acquire customers.

A network of your current customers, employees, vendors and partners provides the same incredible, ever-expanding reach as FaceBook; but better, because all these connections are business-related. And you can expect more and faster conversions from prospects who learn of you through LinkedIn referrals and recommendations than other media.

Although not strictly necessary, you can drive even more interested traffic to your page with LinkedIn’s paid advertising. These highly targeted ads are seen by the decision makers who need exactly what you sell.

Develop partnerships.

Forging alliances with businesses whose products and services complement yours benefits both organizations, whether by referring customers to each other or by creating joint venture products. And there’s no better place to find such partners than LinkedIn, which makes it easy to check up on reputation, performance and customer base.

Build public relations.

Your company page needn’t (and shouldn’t) be limited to “about us” type information. You can incorporate a wide variety of content to attract attention, expand brand recognition, position yourself as an industry authority, manage public opinion … and ultimately increase sales.

To achieve this particular goal requires a bigger investment of time, because you must update your page consistently with new content. To maximize your return on this investment, consider LinkedIn’s sponsored updates program, which puts your posts in front of a specified target audience and is paid for on a cost-per-click basis.

Go where your customers are.

Marketing has always been about reaching customers where they live. In the 21st century they live online; so, to effectively market your business, you need to live there, too. And LinkedIn is one of the hottest addresses you can have.