By now we know that social media marketing is essential to getting your company known. We often talk about how important Facebook, Instagram, and even Pinterest are, but today we will talk about an unfortunately neglected social network, namely LinkedIn. Why should you have LinkedIn for your business? What kind of social network is LinkedIn and how to use it to your advantage?
As of 2021, LinkedIn’s user base in Italy totals approximately 15.06 million. The number of LinkedIn users in Italy is expected to reach 15.68 million users by 2025.
source: Statista’s main reason? To expand your professional network. For individuals, it’s a great place to stay in touch with old colleagues, find leads for new companies, or look for a new job.
But how do you effectively promote your business on LinkedIn?
We’ve rounded up everything you need to know about marketing your company on LinkedIn. If this interests you, continue reading this article.
Why should you have a LinkedIn page for your business?
1. To improve the image of your business
By creating a LinkedIn page for your company you will also create a digital place, so by doing your employees, who have a LinkedIn profile, can add the company they work for on their personal profile, this will act as practically free advertising.
Your employees can in turn share company-related elements such as articles, projects, photos, and webinars on their profiles. It is also important that you post content related to your employees in your business profile, such as photos of an event or a fair, so as to make your employees feel an essential part of your business and to show the “human side” of the company.
2. Because it is a more professional platform
LinkedIn serves not only as a social media outlet but also as a channel for keeping up to date with company news. Thanks to its professional aspect, LinkedIn is often used by various businesses to keep their customers and partners updated on the latest news. You can post projects, share articles and even post job postings.
It is less likely that individual products will be advertised on LinkedIn, this type of content is left to social networks such as Facebook or Instagram. LinkedIn is more about showcasing all the milestones your company has accomplished, and it’s also a great tool for keeping an eye on the competition.
3. To generate new leads
This platform is the perfect place to generate new leads. There are a number of actions that help you both generate leads and make your page more known.
- You interact in various ways with both your content and page content that is relevant to your business. You can like, comment, or share, all these actions are helpful in making yourself known. To be successful on this platform you need to be active, even simply by liking a post.
- Join groups related to your business. There are groups for any topic and your participation not only helps you to get known but also to become an expert in your field. One thing to keep in mind is not to interpret this opportunity as a time to advertise, don’t talk too much about your business, instead try to be an active part of the discussions that happen in the group, asking questions or answering the concerns of others.
- Remember that since LinkedIn is always a social network, it is important to remember to post content regularly, which is always important to interest the public in your company and create leads. You don’t need to create new content specifically for LinkedIn, you can also share information about a webinar hosted by your company or share articles from your blog to drive traffic to your site.
- If you only want to use LinkedIn to advertise, even if it would be a missed opportunity to improve yourself, you can turn to LinkedIn ads. We’ll show you how LinkedIn ads work later in this article, so read on if you’re interested.
As we mentioned in point 2, LinkedIn is a great platform for posting job postings. It’s not only useful for advertising the newly open position in your company but after publishing the job offer, interested people can apply directly on LinkedIn, without lifting a finger. Your employees will also be able to share the open position in their profile and by doing so they bring more attention to your company.
How to create a LinkedIn Page for your shop
Create a company page
To access LinkedIn, you must first have a personal account. This will also be the admin of your Company Page (you can add more Page Managers later). We recommend signing up with your work email.
After creating your personal account, you can create your business page.
- Please log in
- Click on the ” Work ” icon at the top right of the browser
- Scroll to the bottom of the menu that appears and select ” Create a Company Page “.
- Select the type of page: company, showcase page, or educational institution.
- After selecting the page type, tick the checkbox confirming that you have permission to create the LinkedIn page. Afterward, start filling in your details.
- Finally, click on ” Create Page”.
Optimize your page
Now is the time to optimize your new page to get noticed and build your audience.
First, scroll down and click the “Edit Page” button.
Fill out all the fields in this additional information section. This will make it clear to users what you do and help you improve your SEO on LinkedIn, i.e. appearing in search results.
Tips to optimize your page
Use translations
Are you lucky enough to have a global audience? You don’t have to create a different Company Page for each language, you can add translations instead. The page can contain translations of up to 20 languages and includes name, tagline, and description fields.
Add a cover image
Use this space to draw attention to your latest product launch or other news. Remember to keep an eye on simplicity.
If, on the other hand, you don’t want to advertise a product on your cover, you can simply create a cover with your business logo, the important thing is not to leave an empty space and not to use an “anonymous” cover, i.e. one that does not recall your company, this the latter give an idea of little professionalism.
Add keywords in your description
Your LinkedIn page is indexed by Google, so enter keywords that are not too forced, in the first paragraph of your company description. Limit yourself to 3-4 paragraphs maximum about your vision, values, products, and services. Always remember to aim for simplicity.
Creating a page is the easy part. Keeping it going with content that your audience wants is the hard part unless you have a strategy for posting on social media.
Richard van der Bloom, the trainer in social selling, recently released his annual LinkedIn algorithm report. Below we’ve rounded up the tips for your social media marketing strategy to consider when you want to grow your audience or increase their engagement on your LinkedIn posts.
- Pay attention to how often you post as it may have a negative impact on your posts. This means that posting two posts back to back can reduce the “growth” of both. Publishing a post within 18 hours of publishing the previous post can reduce the potential growth by 15% to 30%.
- The ideal length of a LinkedIn post is between 1200 and 1600 characters.
- The best-performing post types are polls (with no maximum of 4 response options), carousel posts, posts with documents, and posts consisting of text and more than one photo.
- The worst-performing post types are posts with videos and one or more external links.
- If you want to post a video on LinkedIn there are a couple of things to consider: Upload the video directly to the LinkedIn post – instead of adding the video link in your post, videos with a square format perform better than other types of formats and, finally, videos where you are present in first person perform better than videos where there are other people or videos without people.
- The optimal number of hashtags is a minimum of 3 and a maximum of 5.
- Comments on your posts can be a double-edged sword. If the first comment below your seat is yours, it will hurt the performance of your post. Conversely, responding to others’ comments under your position within the first hour of posting will improve your post performance by 20%. Furthermore, each comment under your post improves its performance by 4% and if you add comments (between 2 and 4) under your command, 24 hours after posting it, it will breathe new life into the post and improve its performance by 25%.
- Tagging you in your own posts doesn’t improve their performance.
How ads work on LinkedIn
LinkedIn Ads works in five steps, once you have LinkedIn Campaign Manager :
- You must choose a goal (awareness, consideration, or conversions)
- Select your targeting criteria
- Choose an ad format (sponsored, message, dynamic, or text ads)
- Set a budget for your ad
- Track the success of the ad
Create a LinkedIn advertising campaign
Your LinkedIn advertising campaigns will be on a separate LinkedIn platform aka LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. Visit this page to start your campaign and select Create Ad.
From here, you’ll be prompted to create a LinkedIn Campaign Manager account. Be sure to include your LinkedIn Company Page. Then, you will be taken to your dashboard.
If you haven’t entered your billing information yet, you’ll need to do so to “unlock” your account and start using it. Don’t worry, you won’t be charged until your campaign is active. In your dashboard, you will see a Create Campaign button. Click it and you will be redirected to a page where you can start preparing your campaign.
First, choose a campaign group and give your campaign a name. As for the name of the campaign, this is only visible to you and the other members of your team, so it is recommended to choose a very informative name, especially if several people work on the campaign. Once you’ve chosen your campaign group and name, you can start setting up your LinkedIn campaign.
Set the goal of your advertising campaign
It’s time to choose your campaign objective.
The lens is what you want people to do when they see your ads. Choosing an objective helps personalize campaign creation, deliver the best ROI for the objective you set, and show you relevant reporting.
LinkedIn Goals support three levels of the markup funnel: brand awareness, consideration, and conversions.
There are eight lenses to choose from:
- Brand Awareness: This format optimizes the reach of your ads with the aim of making your business more popular.
- Website Visits: This encourages your target audience to visit your website.
- Engagement: Increase engagement on your content.
- Video Views – Encourage people to get interested in your company by watching your videos.
- Lead generation: Customers who click on your ad can access a lead generation form pre-filled with their LinkedIn profile data.
- Website Conversions: Choose this goal if you want to capture leads on your website.
- Job Applications: This goal promotes job opportunities.
- Lead Talent: Only available to companies with an active LinkedIn Recruiter contract. It allows you to generate potential candidates interested in career opportunities in your company.
Choose your audience on LinkedIn
LinkedIn allows you to choose your target audience by setting different characteristics of your audience such as language and location, education, work experience, and interests.
You don’t need to use all of LinkedIn’s targeting options, but the more specific your targeting criteria, the more likely they are to be relevant to your selected audience. And as a result, more likely you are to get a better ROI.
Choose the ad format
We can choose from ten ad types, and different ad types can be used for the same goal. The formats available are:
- Single Image Ads – Include an image and appear directly in the LinkedIn feed of the professionals you want to reach.
- Form / Carousel Format Image Ads – Display multiple images in succession in a single carousel-style ad format, helping make your feed more interactive.
- Video Ads: These allow you to tell your company’s story or present a project via video.
- Event Ads: This format is simply for promoting events.
- Text Ads: These are like a post, they consist of a title, a short text and an image.
- Message format ads: I allow you to show your ad in message format sent to your target audience via LinkedIn messaging.
- Follower Ads – Encourage people to follow your LinkedIn Page.
- Spotlight Ads: These are dynamic ads that redirect anyone who clicks on them to your website.
- Job Postings – Encourage people to respond and/or interact with your job posting.
- Document Ads – These allow you to promote documents directly in your feed.
As you switch from one ad type to another, we can see that the results panel on the right-hand side will change. This feature analyzes campaign metrics (bid, budget, targeting, start/end dates, etc.) and takes into account similar campaigns and advertisers. By doing so, it takes into account other ads with the same format to generate more accurate metrics.
Keep an eye on this box while choosing your ad type on LinkedIn, especially if you’re just starting out and the choice of ad type may depend on your budget. Thanks to these parameters, you’ll be able to understand which ad type is best for you.
Choose your ad placement
Depending on the format of your ad, it will appear in different places on LinkedIn. Below we see the various formats specifically:
- Text ads: Appear on desktop only and not on mobile or tablet devices and in the ‘Ads you might be interested in’ section.
- Single image ads, form/carousel image ads, video ads, job postings, event ads, and document ads: Appear in the target audience’s LinkedIn homepage feed, on desktop, and on most mobile devices and tablets.
- Message Ads: Appear in users’ LinkedIn messaging on desktop and mobile.
- Spotlight Ads and Follower Ads: Appear on the right side of LinkedIn Pages on the desktop.
Set a budget
Set a daily budget for what works best for your company’s marketing spending. Before investing heavily in a campaign, test and measure the success of each campaign and advertising variation. Thanks to its extensive targeting possibilities, LinkedIn Ads can successfully address niche markets. But experimentation is key to doing this early on: if you see that a campaign is performing well, then you can allocate more budget to it.
Plan
Choose a date for the start of your campaign. You can set your campaign to run continuously or until end date.
Conclusion
LinkedIn is a great tool to increase the visibility of your business and to keep an eye on the competition. LinkedIn offers the opportunity not only to get to know other businesses similar to yours but also to advertise new open positions in your company and acquire new employees.
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