How to Start Promoting Your Business on LinkedIn (A Guide for Beginners)

LinkedIn is the world’s largest online professional networking tool. Using its social interface, users can find jobs (or employees), post resumes, schedule interviews, and even take classes to earn professional development certificates. With both free and subscription options, LinkedIn has something for businesses of all sizes, including messaging features and tools for tracking page visitors and marketing analytics.

Many workplaces now look to LinkedIn as a sign of credibility of the people/businesses with whom they are hoping to partner. LinkedIn is trusted over other social platforms (such as Facebook and Instagram) and people may even prefer to visit LinkedIn over a company website. Business News Daily, for example, noted that LinkedIn is responsible for 80% of B2B marketer’s social media leads.

While LinkedIn holds great power, many businesses are not utilizing it to its full potential. If you are a business owner wanting to use LinkedIn more effectively or try it out for the first time, here are 5 tips to help you start promoting your business. Read on, and get ready to take your business to the next level!

5 Tips for Promoting Your Business on LinkedIn

1. Update Your Profile

Although a basic LinkedIn profile takes only 5-10 minutes to make, keeping it current will draw in more clients. This is because your LinkedIn profile is essentially your business’s resume. It is the place where you tell clients who you are, what you’re all about, and how you are the one they are looking for.

While it may be tempting to skip over some sections, do your best to fill out the complete profile. Add pictures and use wording that represents your brand. Include any awards your business has won, significant accomplishments, and client referrals. The summary section is especially important to fill out because it is there that you can connect with clients more personally by telling the story of your brand. In every section, use keywords to make sure your profile is SEO optimized and more likely to be found.

Make sure to update your profile often as your business grows and changes. Keeping things current will attract the right clients to you at the right time.

2. Make Connections

Similar to Facebook’s “friends” or Instagram’s “followers,” LinkedIn allows you to add and receive “connections” to your network. While you are free to connect with anybody on the platform, business owners should specifically focus on the following groups:

• Your target audience
• Possible business partners
• Like-minded LinkedIn groups
• Possible employees
• Experts in your field

Connecting these groups will create a solid networking pool within which your business can grow. Maintaining an active presence on LinkedIn and doing some research will help you find these groups.

Make your communications more personal by using the messaging feature to directly contact individuals, businesses, or entire groups. Some companies prefer to make and save specific lists so that they can send out emails, newsletters, or web event invites to specific audiences.

Another great way to establish connections is to use LinkedIn’s endorse feature. This feature allows you to promote an individual or a business that you highly esteem. Doing so will not only bring more work to that person or business, but it will also return the favor to you; making an endorsement publicly connects you and the other party, which ends up drawing positive attention to you both.

3. Share Helpful Content

LinkedIn is not primarily a sales site; it is a place for connection. Rather than pushing your business’s services, provide helpful content in the form of posts to LinkedIn’s feed. This will bring more people to you – and the kind of people what you want. Providing helpful, relevant content will make people more likely to read it and to want to follow you.

The following are suggestions for making your posts matter for your business:

• Share often (the more you post, the higher you appear in LinkedIn’s feed)
• Provide relevant, fresh content
• Include images in your post (this is known to result in a higher comment rate)
• Regularly respond to other's posts as well

Tips and tricks, market explanations, healthy working suggestions, etc. are examples of worthwhile content that you can post. Michael Riley, the co-founder of Boxter, suggests that you develop and post content that “establishes you as a thought leader in that space”. By presenting yourself as an expert and a voice in your field, people will come to know your brand as a reputable source.

4. Run Ad Campaigns

While an updated profile, solid connections, and frequent posts are essential, running ad campaigns is also necessary if you want to grow your business.

You will need to put some money down for the campaigns, but the cost is significantly less than that for traveling to and attending trade marketing and business networking conferences (plus, you can run your campaigns without leaving your office chair!)

LinkedIn makes the process easy by offering filters to help you market your target audience within your desired time frame and budget. There are also options to “boost” your campaign in ways that make sense for your current and long-term goals.

5. Post your link everywhere!

As easy as this tip sounds, businesses often overlook the marketing power of posting their LinkedIn profile. Include a hyperlink to your LinkedIn page wherever you can both within and outside of your company. Here are some places to consider putting it:

• Business website
• Beneath your email signature
• Beneath the email signature of each of your employees
• Your other social media pages
• Human Resources Department
• Any other business promotional materials (business cards, blogs, etc.)

Successful marketing is often dependent on who has the most internet presence; you never know when even an accidental click might lead a new client to you.

Final Thoughts

These tips are not one-time steps; for ultimate success in growing your business, they should be done regularly (perhaps as a part of your daily or weekly business plan).

Once you master these 5 tips, you can go on to explore more advanced features that LinkedIn has to offer. For now, these steps are a great place to start building your business on LinkedIn and see growth results.

So, what are you waiting for? Get to work on updating that profile, and we’ll see you out there on the feeds.

WRITTEN BY: KATIE BARNETT