Business leaders have capitalized on digital marketing since the early 1990s. Still, the current level of recognition of online marketing platforms has been unprecedented—here in Europe and around the globe.
Many people have become accustomed in the first half of 2020 to include online communications and transactions in their business dealings and consumer behavior. Many experts agree that the pandemic has decreased physical encounters and increased online marketing to the role of a vital survival tool, i.e., shielding companies from the complexities and threats of the present and the future.
Although many businesses and clients have joined the online space, LinkedIn has emerged as a trusted forum for networking, lead generation, and sales. It can be the perfect place to get started, set up your flagship generation, and make your company future-proof. That’s how I help my clients to ensure that their company remains resilient:
1. Obtain digital trust.
You can use some of the same principles to gain digital confidence for your professional profile and your company page. The goal of creating a digitally trusted brand transcends all the tips and strategies of LinkedIn marketing.
It results in brand loyalty through engagement in the online community, relevance and sharing of content, and the overall user experience of accessing knowledge and engaging with your posts and papers.
2. Create the best network for you.
Like offline marketing, LinkedIn also relies on referrals and endorsements. Unlike offline activities, the interactions are open to the public and can immediately contribute to a constructive relationship with decision-makers, opinion leaders, and influencers.
3. Strategic input sources.
The main input to future-proofing is to have the right plan for the times ahead. Luckily, LinkedIn is home to useful content shared daily by trusted industry experts and thought leaders.
Many influencers post random versions of their posts on LinkedIn before working out and re-purposing them for journals. Timely and unsubscribed access to this information could provide useful feedback to your business strategy and content marketing.
4. Combine verifiable data with your insights.
Verifiable data invites viewing, and unique perspectives are instrumental in attracting engagement. If your content is accessible to the right network of contributors—i.e., experts, influencers, and target audiences—you not only gain their confidence and informative responses, but you also begin to create a follow-up that can help grow your net distribution exponentially.
As LinkedIn is a content-driven social network, many of the data can be sourced from content within LinkedIn and combined with your own insights to create original content.
5. Optimize the content for searchability and usefulness.
There are easy ways to customize the search engine (SEO) for any form of content, such as profiles or company websites, text or video, data-driven or heart-warming, or how-to posts. Although anyone can acquire the features to be SEO friendly, you must also build and customize your content so that it is refreshing, consistent, and useful.
In a few weeks, this will help refine the criteria of identifying your target audience and marketing your content to them. Assess where you fit and how your brand could be more attractive. If you want to save time and effort, you can opt for a paid subscription package like the Sales Navigator and seek advice from a LinkedIn consultant like myself.
Curate your feed by following and unfollowing people to “train” the LinkedIn algorithm to show you only posts that you’re interested in or from your “ideal client.”
6. Promote the distribution of P2P content.
LinkedIn Marketing is not just about building a network of people who consume your content. It’s all about building a group of users who are distributing your content.
In other words, you need to cultivate a person-to-person (P2P) network by stimulating a quid-pro-quo relationship with active influencers and also by promoting the participation of followers who enhance your visibility in their network. Even a like or comment can increase your exposure, and if a follower sees interaction from their network, some of them may choose to re-share or distribute your content.
The inimitable “golden hour” in which you have one hour after the post has been published to gain the most traction, has just been abandoned by LinkedIn, and updates are only seen on your network for up to a week after publishing.
Remember: the future-proofing of your social business is all about being involved in a long game. Build your plan now to help ensure your potential viability and exposure.