LinkedIn’s popularity has exploded in recent years. The professional social networking site continues to attract top tier human resources and related professionals in search of connecting with quality companies. It’s a misconception to assume LinkedIn is only a recruitment tool.
It can also become a powerful networking tool for businesses in search of new partnerships and collaborations. Whether you’re looking to target new distributors or suppliers or execute your B2B strategy, LinkedIn can help you take your business into the future.
There are numerous reasons why you should include LinkedIn into your digital marketing strategy but before we dive into those, we’ll first discuss business objectives with LinkedIn and the importance of measurement and tracking of your campaign.
Defining Your Business Objective With LinkedIn
With setting up any campaign, you’ll need to start off by defining what it is you’re wanting to achieve with the campaign. If you’re making use of LinkedIn for lead generation, your content piece should include a call to action that sends visitors to either a landing page or your website to convert them.
There’s also the option of making use of the platform for brand awareness, if this is your business objective, be sure to put together content that can attract a bigger target audience. This can also be done by publishing content that’s unique addresses industry issues.
What is important to note is, these business objectives don’t have to be achieved in silo. A company that can put together a strategy that can ticks off more than one business objective in a campaign will be able to set themselves apart from their competition.
The Importance of Tracking and Measurements to Determine Your Return on Investments
When planning a campaign, it’s also important to define what aspects of the campaign it is you wanting to measure. By doing this, you can ensure you set up the correct tracking by adding unique utm parameters onto your campaign so it feeds through to the relevant programmes you use for campaign tracking. This will also assist you in setting up a dashboard for your campaign where you’ll be able to monitor the performance of the campaign across the board.
Tracking the performance of your campaign is a crucial component as you’ll be expected to produce reports for your superiors with a high return on investment for the business. If you’re running the campaign on a number of platforms, and not just LinkedIn, by ensuring you have your tracking set up, you’ll be able to see which platform performs the best.
By adding tracking to your campaigns, you’re also provided the opportunity to conduct testing on different variations of the campaign adverts as well as the copy used within it. By doing this you’ll soon after the campaign has commenced be able to see what your target audience respond to better and keep your adverts fresh.
Reasons Why You Should Include LinkedIn Advertising Into Your Digital Marketing Strategy
#1 The Opportunity to Build a Long Lasting Company Page
If you didn’t have a company page before then this can be considered to be the perfect opportunity. As the business page can be seen as being an extension of the website, it can be used to replicate certain information you have on your website.
By doing this, you’re able invite your employees as well as your vendors and other working professionals to follow your page. As you build up a big enough following, you can use your followers as the base of your targeting for your marketing campaign.
As long as you have your company page running, it gives you access to some important metrics. Here you’ll be able to see page views, which is the number of times your company page was visited. You’re also able to analyse visitor demographics. Within this section, you can access the following: job title or functions, country, industry and company size.
#2 Reach a More Professional Target Audience
With one third of working professionals accessing and making use of LinkedIn on a daily basis, this platform provides a more professional and qualified target audience. As this platform is more of a business orientated platform, the ability to post random pictures and videos becomes more limiting.
What shows promise for the LinkedIn platform is 13% of Millenials are currently using it. These are people between the ages of 13 and 34 and are for the most part active on social media platforms and active on them.
With one of the sole purposes being to increase and build their professional networks, LinkedIn allows for businesses to build their own image. You also have the ability to build up a potential client base from all over the world with having the option of targeting a group of 106 million active monthly users.
#3 Build Traffic For Your Company
LinkedIn offers businesses so much promise if they are included in their digital marketing strategies. LinkedIn has a similar feature to other platforms in the sense it offers people the ability to share content and updates that have been made on your company page. If your company is apart of LinkedIn Groups, your content can be shared there too.
This works particularly well for content that’s often business and industry related. When comparing the statistics, LinkedIn users are four times as likely to visit your homepage of your website when comparing them to Facebook or Twitter.
#4 Capitalising on LinkedIn Groups
The beauty of LinkedIn groups is that users choose the groups they want to be apart of or are even invited to be part of a targeted community. As LinkedIn have recently removed the ability to join any groups, members will need to request to join the groups. This contributes to making LinkedIn a platform that should be considered for your marketing campaigns.
With over 71% of working professionals that make use of LinkedIn considering it to be a credible source when reading and sharing content, by making use of this platform within your strategy, you can almost guarantee that your content will be shared.
There’s Life After LinkedIn Marketing Campaigns
The long lasting effects of making use of LinkedIn for your marketing campaign is your business page can continue to run once the campaign has come to an end. To ensure you keep your followers engaged in your brand and offering, be sure to share and upload relevant content on a regular basis. This can be seen as being an opportunity for you to further analyse your page followers and their interests to make for a more targeted campaign.
Author Bio: Grant Scheffel is one of the original management trio at Netgen.co.za, together with Hardy Esterhuizen and Matthew Vreenegoor boast a combined experience of over 50 years in the IT industry! Netgen specialize in custom website design, WordPress design and Custom Application Development with offices in Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa.
