You may have a LinkedIn account for your industrial business but are you using it? A stagnant page is not building your relationships or your business. Let’s take a look at why you need to be active on LinkedIn and how it can make a huge difference for your company.
LinkedIn’s Reputation
LinkedIn has a reputation as the world’s largest professional social networking site. Professionals and companies are the ones using LinkedIn. It is not the place to share what you had for breakfast. It is a professional site and should be used as such.
“Social Media Usage in the Industrial Sector,” cites that 65 percent of engineers and technical professionals maintain an account on LinkedIn and use it as their preferred platform for researching a work-related purchase.
What exactly are professionals using LinkedIn to do?
According to the report they use the program to:
- Search for contact information
- Follow companies and groups
- Seek recommendations on products and suppliers
- Consume content that provides business-related thought leadership
- Expand professional networking
- Find job opportunities
The above list provides unique opportunities for industrial and manufacturing companies to reach their audiences in a professional context.
Leveraging LinkedIn’s Opportunities
The B2B Manufacturing Content Marketing 2017 report found that 78 percent of industrial marketers rely on LinkedIn as part of their overall content distribution strategy. Are you using it as part of your strategy? If not, perhaps it is time to start integrating it as part of your overall marketing efforts.
This is a great time to share company news, product announcements, blog posts, gated-content offers, etc. Anyone that follows your company already will see your company updates in their news feed; your “recent updates” section on your Company Page is the timeline where all your company updates will live.
Updating a Company Page
These tips will help you keep your page in front of your followers:
Short and sweet updates are best.
LinkedIn recommends using 150 characters or less, including the landing page URL, to avoid truncation across most devices. Use the introductory text in the company update to ask a thought-provoking question, share a compelling statistics or quote, or offer a solution to an industry-specific problem—all within the 150-character limit.
Use clear and engaging calls-to-action (CTAs) in your updates.
The CTA can be a text, a visual, or a combination of the two that drives your readers to perform the desired action after reading your update—whether that’s downloading an eBook, watching a video, signing up for a free demo, requesting a quote, or reading a blog post—and move them further along the conversion funnel.
Embed rich media into your updates.
LinkedIn supports images, videos, GIFs, PPTs, among other rich media formats. The recommended image size is 1200 (w) x 627 (h) pixels for both organic updates and Sponsored Content (discussed in-depth in the next part of our guide-series).
Keep your target audience in mind.
When you create an update, you can decide whether to share it with “all followers” or a “targeted audience.” Choose the second option to send your update to a subset of followers based on geography, job function, industry, company size, or seniority. In order to send targeted updates, you’re required to have a minimum of 300 Company Page followers.
Consistency in posting updates encourages engagement and fosters brand familiarity.
The ideal market strategy for LinkedIn includes one update per day at a minimum—averaging 20-30 organic updates per month. Use your Company Page analytics as a guide, pick the best performing updates, and sponsor those. The key is to post relevant content and not just any content.
We are halfway through 2019, are you meeting your marketing goals? Whether your goals are raising brand awareness or generating traffic to your site or driving lead conversions, LinkedIn can help.
