Transform Your LinkedIn Account into a Marketing Machine

Does this sound like you?

1. Log in to LinkedIn
2. Congratulate former co-worker on job promotion
3. Like a post
4. Repeat

For too long we disregarded LinkedIn like the boiled brussel sprouts at thanksgiving dinner. You know it needed to make an appearance, but it’s really just taking up valuable space on your already crowded plate.

But what if we could tell you with 5 simple strategies you could elevate LinkedIn to the star performer of your marketing arsenal (— move over mashed potatoes and gravy!).

With the right strategy, the connections you make on LinkedIn could turn into leads for your business. For B2B businesses, LinkedIn is a goldmine to find new qualified clients without having to spend a ton of money on LinkedIn ads.

Leveraging Your Personal LinkedIn Account

You probably know LinkedIn as just a social media platform for professionals, but it’s also a great place to build your business, get new leads, clients, and sales. LinkedIn is widely known by employers as a tool to look for people to hire, or for students to get to land their first big job. Essentially, people use LinkedIn as an online resume. This is great, but LinkedIn has a ton of potential as a networking tool that people have not unlocked yet.

Your personal LinkedIn profile is a huge asset for your business and it can carry a huge amount of influence if leveraged correctly. While maintaining a company page is important for your business, keeping your personal profile active and updated can help build trust and rapport with your connections. 

Building a relationship can turn them into clients that trust you. At the end of the day, nothing sells your business better than yourself. The relationship you build with clients is a big part of the way they perceive your business!

Use the “$1.80” Strategy

No don’t worry, there is no money involved in this strategy. This is a popular Instagram marketing strategy that was created by Gary Vaynerchuk that also applies to LinkedIn. In a nutshell, this method aims to boost engagement with new potential connections. You’re creating exposure for yourself by leaving your 2 cents on someone else’s post. 

The Instagram strategy is to find 10 hashtags and leave your 2 cents on the top posts of those hashtags (Instagram has 9 “top posts” per hashtag). All this adds to 90 comments, leaving your 2 cents with each, equalling $1.80. The catch for this method, however, is that it can be time-consuming as the comments you leave behind have to be valuable.

For LinkedIn, instead of going through hashtags, you want to go through the “What people are talking about” or “Today’s news and views” sections and leave your valuable comments on the post. The reason for choosing this over hashtags is that the topic is trending, and riding the trend wave is an effective way to gain exposure. In order for this to be effective, your comments have to keep people engaged.

Get Your Team on LinkedIn

Marketing on LinkedIn is a team effort.  Let’s take a look at the numbers:

• 42% of LinkedIn users have over 500 connections on average
• Multiply that number by how many people are on your team

That number is the potential reach your post will have if your entire team shares your company’s content. It’s free advertising without having to spend a ton of money on LinkedIn ads. LinkedIn has over 260 million active monthly users so there is no shortage of potential growth.

If your team isn’t already on LinkedIn, get them to sign up for an account. It’s free! Getting your team to build up their LinkedIn profiles is low effort with minimal resource cost but the results would be powerful for your company. 

Whenever you or your company shares a post, encourage your team to engage with the content. Whether that be liking, sharing or commenting on it, anything will help give it a boost and syndicate it to their own audience. To make it even more hands-off, you could let them automate that task (more on that later).

Strategizing Your LinkedIn Posts

Posting regularly keeps people interested. As long as your posts provide some value or provoke thoughtful discussions, posting regularly is a great way to get people engaged with you and your posts. 

Keep shareability in mind. If your content is shareable, your connections can repost your posts, and their connections will see your post. Your organic reach will have the potential to increase exponentially. Here are some ways you can optimize your posts:

Links in the Comments

When you post a link, get rid of the preview link. People tend to avoid clicking links because it’ll come across as an ad, or an obvious way for someone to promote their own website. Leave your link in the comments right after you post so your post viewers can enjoy your content without being disrupted by a link. 

Not only that, you are actually being favoured by LinkedIn’s algorithm if you leave your links in the comments. It may seem to make more sense that link previews would result in more clicks, however, a study showed that links in comments resulted in 2.9x more reach and links were clicked 2.7x more.

Tag People

Tagging people is a great way to increase your exposure and reach. However, don’t tag just anyone; only tag people that you have referenced in your post. The reason why you want to tag people is because your post shows up in the feeds of the tagged person’s connections.. Another great time to tag someone is if you personally know a connection that would love the topic your post is about.

Hashtags

LinkedIn allows it’s users to follow hashtags that they may be interested in so that they can receive relevant and interesting content in their feeds. People that aren’t connected to you, even at the 3rd level are able to see your posts if they follow a hashtag that your post is on. LinkedIn even auto-suggests different hashtags to use when you post content.

Reshare Old Posts

If you’re running out of things to post, try resharing old posts that have previously performed well. As a caveat to this, you should only reshare posts that are relevant today. If it performed well when you first posted it, chances are that it will perform well again in the future.

Post Engaging Content

Giving people value is a powerful way to increase engagement and grow your audience on LinkedIn. People in every industry have pain points and problems they’re looking to solve. On LinkedIn, people aren’t looking for a sales pitch, they want to build connections, so any content that sounds even a bit salesy won’t do well.

Instead of focusing on the end result, it would be more engaging to talk about the approach to the solution. People would want to know your thoughts on solving their problems and are open to fresh perspectives.

Freeing up Your Time with Automation Tools

Using LinkedIn automation tools can save you tons of time and give you great results if implemented correctly. The use of automation isn’t supported by LinkedIn. In fact, it goes against their rules and terms of service, but regardless of which tool you choose to use, it is important to keep your actions looking as natural as possible and not use an excessive amount of automation. Here are a couple of LinkedIn automation tools you could try out.

Lempod

Engagement pods are groups where people share their LinkedIn post, and each member of the group has to engage with the post in one way or another, whether it’s commenting on the post, sharing it, or giving it a like. The purpose of engagement pods is to boost your post’s organic reach. When you like or comment on a post, your connections can see that you have engaged with that particular post. This makes the post visible to the engagement pod members’ connections.

Engagement pods tend to be large so this process can be extremely time-consuming. Fortunately, there is a chrome extension called Lempod which automates the engagement for you and your Lempod pod members.

Best of all, it’s extremely simple to use. You either create or join a pod, and whenever you have a new post, share the URL in the pod and Lempod does the work. Lempod will act on behalf of the members of the group and give your post some engagement. If someone shares a post, Lempod uses your LinkedIn profile to give that post engagement, saving you tons of time, and in order to fight spam and keep things fair, users can only post once every 24 hours.

Duxsoup

Finding new connections on LinkedIn can also be time consuming, but it is an important process to do if you’re trying to prospect for new leads. DuxSoup is a chrome extension that automates the connection building process for you. 

For example, if you have a business that provides business development services for restaurants, here’s how you can use DuxSoup to gain new connections and potential leads:

• Set filters on DuxSoup so it finds certain words on people’s pages such as “owner”, “CEO”, “Manager”, etc… and add your industry. Ie “restaurant owner”
• Create a message template that gives a connection message when a connection request is sent i.e. “Hi {firstname}, would love to connect with restaurant owners in the city”
• You can also set up a followup autoresponder to send a message when they accept your connection request i.e. “Thanks for the connection {firstname}! 
• Along with that initial message, you can give value by adding useful information to help them with their restaurant needs to build rapport. 

After the initial messages, if they seem reciprocal, you could work in your sales pitch for your services.

Making Your Profile into a Lead Generation Funnel

Most people use LinkedIn as a resume and a social media platform, but you can transform your LinkedIn profile into a sales page.

Headline

Your headline should be attracting people to click on your profile. Make your headline sell yourself. It’s a place to show what you can do and provide, rather than show your role. Example “I help people bring traffic to their site without the use of ads” vs “SEO expert”

About/summary

The about part of your page should be your sales copy. Think of it as writing a Facebook Ad. Most people use it to talk about themselves and what they’ve accomplished but instead, use it to sell your services.

Work Experience

Just like a resume, use this section to talk about your previous roles, but emphasize on the skills you got from your previous employment. Emphasize how those skills brought results, and how it applies to your current business.

Don’t Neglect Your Company Page

While building up your personal LinkedIn profile is a powerful tool for your business, you shouldn’t neglect your company page. Your LinkedIn company page plays an important part in your LinkedIn marketing strategy. 

When people search up a service or industry on LinkedIn, company pages are shown in the search results and they usually outrank personal profiles. You can significantly increase your company page’s visibility by optimizing it for search.

You can give your LinkedIn company page an SEO treatment. Add keywords to your company’s profile information. Think ‘what phrases are my prospects searching for?” 
When possible, link your LinkedIn company page in different forms of content. Whether it’s on a blog post or your website, you want to give some links to your company page. Make sure your team’s profiles are up to date. When their latest work experience or current employment is your company, your company page receives a link.

Doing these things will help optimize your LinkedIn company page for search results, whether it’s directly on LinkedIn or Google.

Growing Your Business with LinkedIn

Your personal LinkedIn account is valuable to your business and could be a great addition to your marketing toolbox alongside with SEO, PPC and other social media networks. LinkedIn marketing shouldn’t be limited to just company pages! Turn yourself and your team members into influencers that represent your business.