LinkedIn Client Building Hacks for Small Businesses and Startups
The pandemic has given small businesses a much-deserved stage socially. With big corporations taking a hit for several issues, ethical and otherwise, the current public prefers to invest their time and money in small businesses.
Even though the economic issues persist, the value vested in startups has increased due to their personalized approach to customers. Such an ethic is in stark contrast to big corporations whose ideas are money grabs more than being customer-centric.
Social media can be your golden tool to bolster your company’s growth if you know the proper techniques. LinkedIn being the more professional option of all, it can make a positive difference in terms of gathering clients, investors as well as employees!
From finding your dream jobs on LinkedIn to attracting top clients as a small business, LinkedIn bags everything under one roof.
LinkedIn Marketing
Statistics show that LinkedIn generates 277% more leads compared to Facebook, which is a clear sign of where you should invest your time. As a social media platform that helped around 45% of their marketers with customer acquisition, the right marketing techniques can bolster your growth.
With users worldwide, you can carve your niche and target your demographic by generating unique marketing stints. Small business entrepreneurs can either market through their own profile or set up a business page with a plethora of valuable features.
Through live streams and posts on LinkedIn, you can significantly increase your reach to users who value your content. For this, you need to evaluate what your brand stands for and build your marketing campaigns accordingly.
Set-up a Business LinkedIn Page
LinkedIn is a business-philic platform that has several features to promote small businesses. If you want your brand to have an image of its own, you would have to do more than run it from your personal account.
To set up a business page on LinkedIn:
Go to the top-right corner of your homepage and click on the Work icon
Select Create a Company Page
Choose your page type from the options:
Small business
Medium to large business
Showcase page
Educational institution (high school or university/college)
Add your page identity, company details, and profile details
Click on the verification box to confirm that you can control the company’s account
Finally, click Create page
Select Start building your page! to build out your business profile
After making your page, note the best practices and make sure that you follow the etiquette on running business profiles.
Advertisement Campaigns
The easiest way to target potential customers is by running advertisements and starting a conversation on your services. With LinkedIn’s advantage of a self-selected user base who are conscious about the content they consume, you have the opportunity to reach out to valuable users.
Research statistics show that an advertisement on LinkedIn can reach 13% of the world’s population, which is a market that you can explore to endorse your services.
Here is how you can start your advertising campaigns:
Choose a Campaign Objective
They can be one of the following:
Awareness: to increase brand awareness.
Consideration: to increase website visits, engagement, and video views
Conversions: for lead generation, website conversions, job applicants
Select Your Audience
When you reach this step, you need to assess who you want your audience to be. This feature will allow you to explore the repository of LinkedIn users by several factors.
You can choose your audience either based on the connections you have on other platforms or by parameters such as demographic, work experience, education, etc.
Aside from that, you can choose which attributes you want to target immediately and which ones you want to save for later, such as demographic AND education, and on the other hand, demographic OR education.
Launch the Campaign
For the next step, you can select the audience size, add creatives, and fix a budget. Keep in mind that exposure to advertisements on LinkedIn can increase purchase intent by 33%, and you can capitalize on that by creating high-quality creatives.
Post Regular Content on Products
Once you amass your desired count of connections, you need to initiate strategies to retain them and possibly draw even more. The most effective of all is posting regular high-quality content that is relevant to your supporters and target audience.
Evaluating the current trends, videos tend to do better than articles as people prefer to consume visual content than go through the hassle of reading a 2-pager article. LinkedIn has exceptional features on video marketing that you can utilize to capitalize on human’s short attention span.
Whatever it may be, consistency is key. You can use your LinkedIn page to promote your services, answer queries from customers, and make content on the specifics of your services, sort of as a repository of well-rounded explanations on your products/services.
Chase Trends
As trends get recycled with new trends to come every week, you can seize any room for innovation by utilizing the entertainment factor of trends. The idea here is to find room for something out-of-the-box and innovative on your page when your content starts to get mundane.
In no way does this mean that you follow trends and let that be your brand image. You can always find room for change within the trends and bring your unique elements to make it more special. Aside from this, you can put out entertaining videos on your own accord that you think will strike a chord in your target audience.
Network
With a user base of 740M people, there is just too much room to network for you to be a loner page. Interacting with important personalities on LinkedIn is not only a way to get more connections or increase brand awareness but is also a solid way to gain more knowledge.
You can start by engaging with other companies or personal pages by commenting on their feeds and lauding their work or post content in collaboration with other people. Other than that, you can join LinkedIn support groups with shared interests and network with valuable personalities.
Key Takeaways
As a small business entrepreneur, the opportunities are endless for you to make a positive change in the business atmosphere. With the plethora of features that LinkedIn offers, you can utilize it to your creative freedom to grow your business by manifold:
Use innovative marketing techniques on LinkedIn to bolster the growth of your business
Create a business page separate from your personal account for your small business and use it to create a brand image
Start advertisements campaigns to get the help of LinkedIn to reach out to valuable customers
Be consistent with uploads and make sure that you assess the interests of your target audience to appeal to them better
Keep track of social media trends and use them to your advantage by making trendy videos with a unique touch to provide a factor of entertainment amidst other content
Engage with other business pages and personalities to build a community as well as gain valuable knowledge from their business ethics
Growing a business venture from an idea to achieve success can be a time-consuming process. Use these LinkedIn client-building hacks to optimize it and make your process more enjoyable!