How to Make the Most of Your LinkedIn Profile and Organic Posts
LinkedIn is a growing platform for professionals to network. This platform is a great place to not only establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry, but it is also a great platform for businesses to market to other businesses.
Remember, it is important to understand that marketing to businesses is different from marketing to consumers. While your end goal of increasing conversions or engagement can be the same, how you communicate in your marketing is very different. So whether you are sharing thought leadership articles organically or your business is sharing product information on the platform, you want to make sure that you keep your target audience in mind as you craft and share your organic marketing campaigns.
Let’s take a look at some best practices for organic marketing on LinkedIn.
Why Organic Marketing is Key
Even if you do paid advertising on the platform, you can’t forget about organic marketing. Paid and organic go hand in hand. The benefits of organic marketing is building trust and positioning yourself as a thought leader in the industry.
Refresh
Organic marketing starts from the ground up so giving your profile a refresh is important. For your personal profile, make sure that you are using a professional headshot for your profile picture. Remember, you are representing yourself in your business and industry! For companies, make sure that your logo is high quality and that it matches your branding across your other channels to build trust and confidence in your brand.
Optimize
When filling out your personal or company profile, you want to optimize your profile for searches. Include keywords in your profile information to help you get found by the right people. You can use SEO keyword search tools to help you determine the best keywords or phrases, or simply ask yourself what other people are searching for in your industry.
Make Connections
LinkedIn is all about networking with other professionals. However, you want to make sure that you are connecting with the right people. Connect with people you know and those you don’t who are in your industry. For personal profiles, further your connections by joining LinkedIn groups. Make sure that you are joining industry-specific or relevant groups and don’t be afraid to share (though do it sparingly) or join in on the discussions. This can help build your reputation and promote your company. The goal of groups is to promote discussion and position yourself as a leader within your industry while driving traffic to your company.
Showcase
If your company is multi-faceted, you might consider adding showcase pages to your company profile. These showcase pages highlight the different subsets of your company and can help quickly direct your audience to the content they are looking for.
Content Rich
Once you have filled out your profile, updated your images, and made some connections, you’ll want to post regularly to your profile. Be sure that you are sharing rich content. In other words, you want to provide your audience with something of value. Some examples of rich content include your own thought leadership articles, product information brochures, industry trend articles, or even posing questions where others can share their knowledge.
Don’t Do This
While it can be tempting to sell your audience on the benefits of your product or services, these “salesy” posts don’t generally perform well on LinkedIn. Thought leadership content performs much better than sales pitches, and it makes sense when you think about it. People came to LinkedIn to make connections, not to be bombarded with sales pitches.
By focusing on organic marketing content that provides value to your audience, you can increase engagement and drive traffic to your site. This type of content also helps to build trust with your audience, which is more important than ever in this digital world. When your audience trusts you, that is what truly drives conversions.