In today’s business landscape, LinkedIn holds significant importance as a social media tool for brands. This is due to the fact that a large section of your target audience, including customers, potential customers, key stakeholders, investors, employees, and job seekers, actively uses LinkedIn. Therefore, managing your company’s reputation has become a fundamental aspect of the LinkedIn marketing strategy for many businesses.
Why is it important to grow your online reputation and brand on LinkedIn?
Hootsuite reported that LinkedIn is the leading social network for generating leads, making it a crucial platform to prioritize. Enhancing your online reputation and brand on LinkedIn can facilitate the organic growth of leads, enhance your professional standing, and boost the credibility and trust of your brand.
To enhance your LinkedIn strategy, it is essential to ensure that your Company Page is comprehensive and current. This is vital if you wish to expand your followers and achieve favorable business outcomes. Having a detailed Company Page on LinkedIn, which boasts over 722 million users, provides users with valuable insights into your brand, business, and available job openings. Moreover, it serves as an excellent opportunity to showcase your brand’s industry expertise to your audience.
Your LinkedIn Company Page won’t be able to attract a vast number of users if it is incomplete. Below are 11 recommendations to enhance your online reputation and brand on LinkedIn:
Tip #1: Ensure that branding is consistent across LinkedIn
To boost your LinkedIn online reputation, it is crucial to maintain consistent branding across the platform. LinkedIn is widely used by businesses and brands as a tool for enhancing their image. Consistency between your LinkedIn page and your company website branding is crucial. Be sure to feature your logo, company description, and a banner image to establish and sustain a professional presence on your page. This is key to attracting and retaining clients.
Tip #2: Incorporate rich-content features
Businesses and brands utilize LinkedIn as one of the primary social media platforms to showcase their knowledge and leadership skills. To sustain and amplify your presence on LinkedIn, it is crucial to assess and generate an extensive array of content to publish on your company page.
Which content will capture the interest of your LinkedIn audience and help increase your following? It’s important to continuously ask yourself what your followers are interested in. One effective strategy to boost your online reputation on LinkedIn is integrating rich-content features into your content plan.
Tip #3: Make use of your existing content streams
Are you unsure about the kind of content that can boost your online presence on your LinkedIn company page? Perhaps it’s time to be innovative! Take stock of the various platforms that you’re presently engaged in and republish the content that has received a positive response. What sort of content garnered more likes on Facebook or Twitter? Which posts had the highest number of retweets or responses? Repurposing content from your previous streams can contribute to enhancing your brand on LinkedIn and open up new avenues to reach out to a broader audience.
Tip #4: Experiment with sponsored updates
LinkedIn offers sponsored updates as an exclusive capability for companies seeking to advance their posts on the LinkedIn site. This feature presents a chance for said companies to extend their grasp beyond their followers. In the same vein as Facebook and Instagram paid advertising or boosted posts, sponsored updates on LinkedIn enable you to broaden your reach and pinpoint distinct target audiences.
Tip #5: Participate in key groups and encourage colleagues/employees to connect
To establish your online reputation and brand on LinkedIn, you must engage in a mutually beneficial relationship. Updating your company page with relevant content is not enough; becoming an active participant in the LinkedIn community is imperative. Participating in discussions within your network and niche groups can foster a stronger connection between your audience and brand.
To enhance your online reputation and brand on LinkedIn, it is advisable to motivate your coworkers and staff to interact and form connections on the platform. When everyone collaborates, your brand gains more visibility and garners a stronger image as colleagues and employees contribute to its upkeep.
Tip #6: Define your audiences better for better lead generation
Are you effectively reaching your desired audience? Identifying your target audience is crucial in maximizing lead generation and brand awareness on LinkedIn. The more clearly defined your audience is, the higher quality your leads will be. Conduct thorough research to determine the essential traits of your customers or clients in order to refine your audience definition.
Tip #7: Use images
Including visually compelling content in your text or article is essential to captivate readers and attract “likes” and views. This increase in engagement will drive more traffic to your LinkedIn Profile, ultimately boosting brand awareness and potential followers. You can easily integrate images within your article using LinkedIn Publishing Platform. To optimize your impact, choose images that are relatable and impactful for your target audience, prompting reader engagement and conversation.
Visual content receives more than six times the engagement compared to content composed solely of text.
Tip #8: Boost your content directly in your audience’s feed, using Sponsored Content
Utilize LinkedIn Sponsored Content to enhance your followers and viewership. Sponsored Content is displayed directly in the feed of your target audience and lets you customize content based on LinkedIn’s audience profile data. You can choose from four ad formats with Sponsored Content, including single image ads, video ads, event ads, and carousel ads. Every format empowers you to engage with your intended audience, establish brand recognition, and stimulate leads.
Tip #9: Use Native LinkedIn Video
The LinkedIn Native feature enables users to directly upload videos on the platform, with a duration ranging from 30 seconds to 5 minutes. Like images, sharing videos can increase the probability of enticing your audience and engaging them with your post. Furthermore, videos are prioritized by LinkedIn’s algorithm, positioning them at the top of user feeds and promoting your business, products, or services, ultimately assisting with brand growth. It’s recommended to include at least three lines of text in your video content to boost the likelihood of capturing viewers’ attention and increasing dwell time on your post.
Tip #10: Take advantage of LinkedIn’s additional features
Businesses can utilize various features offered by LinkedIn not only to grow their brand and promote their products or services but also to gain more followers for their brand.
Tip #11: Grow your voice as a thought leader in your industry
Positioning your brand and establishing industry credibility are significant through thought leadership. It enhances visibility and enables you to connect with your target audience. Delivering value and building connections with them is essential to becoming a thought leader.
BONUS: How to Choose the Right Digital Marketing Strategy for Your Business
Achieving a prosperous digital marketing plan does not involve experimenting with the latest digital marketing trends or making assumptions about customers’ preferences. Rather, it depends on leveraging insights supported by data.
According to Jess Reilly, chief marketing officer at Rebel Interactive Group, the key to truly scalable digital marketing is now centered on people-based advertising. This means having the ability to deliver the right message at the right time and on the right platform to the right individual.
Constructing buyer personas, defining objectives, selecting suitable digital marketing tools, and evaluating the effectiveness of the plan are all significant considerations when deciding on a digital marketing approach.
1. Build buyer personas to understand your target audience.
Fictitious characters embodying typical consumers who may be drawn to your brand are known as buyer personas. These personas are useful for promoting your offerings to this particular demographic.
According to Reilly, the creation of buyer personas is essential in guiding your marketing tactics as it sheds light on your buyers’ identities, predicaments, and particularly the objectives they are striving to achieve, enabling you to devise an appropriate messaging approach.
When creating customer personas, take into account the following details pertaining to your intended clientele:
- Job type
- Interests
- Age
- Gender
- General demographics
- Most-used social platforms
- Beliefs and values
Afterwards, tailor your approach according to these specifics.
Suggestion: To comprehend the pain points and desires of a certain market, it is advisable to gather opinions and client feedback by conducting surveys online or through email or text.
2. Identify your goals, and align them to your strategy.
Can you provide details about your marketing objectives? These could include establishing brand recognition, boosting product purchases, or expanding your social media audience. Clearly defining your goals will help ensure efficient utilization of your resources. Let’s examine a few concrete illustrations.
If your goal is to heighten brand awareness:
Do reputable brands influence your target customer’s purchasing decisions? Is your brand familiar to them? Do they trust your brand enough to make a purchase?
If your top priorities are to establish brand recognition and enhance your organization’s reputation.
If your goal is to raise consumer awareness:
Your business may experience low search volumes for your targeted keywords due to the fact that some customers fail to realize how your product or service can benefit their lives.
If your sales process and website traffic are not the issue, you might be facing a lack of consumer awareness. In such a case, your aim with the digital marketing strategy should be to inform potential customers about a particular problem they face and present your solution to them.
If your goal is to increase traffic:
The most desirable key performance indicator (KPI) in business is traffic. As it generally leads to an increase in sales leads and conversions, it is not surprising that traffic is prioritized by business owners.
The most effective areas to concentrate on for generating traffic are pay-per-click advertising, a well-executed search engine optimization (SEO) plan, and email marketing, if your main objective is driving traffic.
If your goal is to increase leads:
Generating leads should be the priority for businesses with expensive or intricate products, as it would be unreasonable to anticipate customers to make a first-time purchase online. The sales team can then work on pursuing these leads.
If your goal is to increase sales:
Strategic utilization of email marketing and an increase in traffic to your website’s landing page are likely necessary measures to boost sales.
3. Choose digital marketing tools based on your primary goals.
Different marketing instruments such as content marketing calendar templates, social media, and email marketing software are available. Each has its own benefits and objectives, making the ideal instruments reliant on your objectives.
Prentiss stated that each business has unique requirements or areas where they are deficient, such as inadequate reviews, low Google ranking, or a badly-designed website. Therefore, every business demands distinct resources to address their individual needs.
Arrange your objectives in order of importance and review your finances in order to assess your most beneficial investments. If you are a long way from making a sale, consider utilizing cost-effective options such as email and social media posts as there will likely be a significant loss in your sales funnel. You may revisit and try out alternative tools at any time.
4. Audit your current digital marketing strategy.
Evaluating your digital marketing plan involves analyzing past successes, experimenting with current approaches, and identifying necessary modifications.
- Discover the true ROI of past efforts. You’ll need to measure ROI for digital marketing campaigns you ran in the past. Reilly advised business owners to ask how much “lift” each marketing channel provided in previous seasons. “Using a combination of customer purchase data, digital tracking data and any traditional media buys you have, you can dive into the data to discover what your true ROI was in the past and opportunities to grow in the future,” Reilly said.
- Test new strategies. Before going live with your new strategy, test it to see what might work and what won’t. Spend time figuring out if there are aspects of your strategy that can be fixed or improved.
- Determine what needs tweaking. Prentiss recommended monitoring your progress to determine what might need shifting. “We set daily, weekly and sometimes even monthly reminders to check on the progress we made,” Prentiss said. “The daily and weekly check-ins on what we created are very important in the beginning so we can adjust what we are doing. This truly ensures the success of the campaign.”
In essence, if the cost per lead exceeds your earnings upon finalizing the sale, your return on investment is unacceptable and requires adjustment.
