5 Ways to Use LinkedIn as a Powerful Marketing Tool for Your Business

By Aaron Agius

When you're marketing a business, one of the most important decisions you'll make is determining the best channels for communicating your message. Given that 80% of B2B social media leads come from LinkedIn, you absolutely must be using this platform if you’re selling to other businesses.

Most people use LinkedIn to network, stay in touch with people in their niche, and find new jobs, but LinkedIn is actually an incredibly powerful marketing tool. Here are some of my favorite tactics you can use on LinkedIn to market your business and generate new B2B leads:

Educate instead of sell

I know this sounds harsh, but people don’t care about your products or services. What they care about is finding solutions to their pain points.

However, most businesses use LinkedIn to post about how wonderful their products are, hoping that the right person will read it and convert for a sale. You can do a lot better than this approach by taking the focus away from yourself and onto your customers.

Instead of selling at every opportunity, provide value by contributing to discussions, publishing educational content, and using your expertise to help people solve their problems. And I know, you’d much rather reap the SEO benefits of publishing an article on your website compared to LinkedIn Pulse, but if your buyers are on LinkedIn, then it makes sense to use the platform for content marketing.

Likewise, aim to provide value in the groups that are relevant to your industry. Helping someone to solve their problems isn’t a guarantee that you’ll get them as a customer, but they’re not the only ones reading the discussions. Every time you help someone on LinkedIn, you’re promoting your brand to a far wider group of people.

Utilize tagging

Tagging is a great way to draw additional attention to a post. While you should never use tagging excessively, you should approach it strategically.

First, when publishing content on LinkedIn, type "@" and add connections that you want to tag in the post. When you’ve tagged someone, they will receive an email notification; your other connections will see it in their news feed.

Also, consider the influential LinkedIn users in your network, then research quotes from them that you can incorporate into your articles. When they receive a notification, they’ll be delighted to find that someone has mentioned them, as this helps to validate their position as a thought leader.

I know that whenever someone says something favorable about me in a post, I always try and share it to give it as much exposure as possible—not only as a sign of thanks to the author, but because it boosts my reputation too.

Consider sponsored updates

With sponsored updates, you have the ability to define the audience who will see your posts, so if you want to get your content in front of specific influencers, the cost of a sponsored update is more than worth it. LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager provides comprehensive metrics, so you can thoroughly examine whether you’re getting a good bang for your buck when you run a sponsored post.

While it’s not financially viable to sponsor everything, I recommend paying money for your best posts—the ones that deliver the most value to your target audience—to give them a boost.

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Incorporate visuals on your profile

I can’t stress this enough, but people adore visual content. Instead of creating a bland, text-only profile for your brand, use images, infographics, and videos to create an awesome visual display and impress your connections. SlideShare integrates seamlessly with LinkedIn, so if you have a colorful presentation that would provide valuable information to your LinkedIn audience, don’t be afraid to feature it on your profile.

People want to do business with other people, not faceless corporations. Displaying images and videos of the people who work tirelessly behind the scenes is an amazing trust builder and will help humanize your brand. You may also want to feature video testimonials from your best clients on your LinkedIn profile to build even more trust.

Get your employees to help out

Don’t leave the task of posting content solely to your marketing department; get everyone onboard with posting high quality content on LinkedIn. When content comes from a brand’s employees as well as from the official brand profile, this not only humanizes the brand, but it conveys a united purpose. If employees love the company so much that they’re prepared to post content on their personal accounts, this makes the company look incredibly attractive to potential business partners and leads.

Not everyone at your organization, though, will be a great writer. While everyone has their own unique expertise and insights, I recommend you have an editor available to ensure the content is consistent.

Summary

It’s important to remember that LinkedIn is a social network for business professionals. People aren’t logging in for casual entertainment and fun conversation—they’re there to conduct business. Aim to deliver value in a professional manner and you will be rewarded with new leads.

As a side note, remember to include links to your LinkedIn profile on your website and embed a LinkedIn sharing button beneath any blog posts, so people can immediately access your brand’s page.

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