The Best Ways to use LinkedIn to Expand Your Business

As a business owner, you are probably always looking for new connections, acquaintances, and partnerships to grow your company. But finding new ways to make new connections is not easy, and limited resources to do so is usually one of the significant obstacles to growing your business.

You can only connect with so many people in your circle, even if you are a top-notch networker. It takes time to make contacts, even more time to generate leads, and on top of that comes the next step — partnering.
However, today's fast-paced technology society has platforms for everything. LinkedIn is a business owner's sourcing and networking tool that integrates your networking goals and provides B2B and B2C marketing opportunities.
The future is online, and LinkedIn is ready for you, optimized for easy incorporation into your new marketing campaign. From building brand awareness to strengthening partnerships, the platform provides you with various new leads, paving the way for further success. In this guide, we'll walk you through four ways to use LinkedIn to grow your business.
Here are ways to use LinkedIn for business:

Create an attractive company page

Creating a company page should be far from robotic. It should be filled with exciting and helpful information. With the right content, everyone who views the page feels like they have an informed view of your business. They have all the information they need to make a decision about whether or not you are a good fit for them.

Focus on the «About Us» section

The «About Us» section is your opportunity to talk about the overall tone of the business and the people who work in it. There are many ways to make it effective, but whatever you decide, don't forget to optimize the section with keywords.
If your team is small, you can highlight key members. Perhaps you have personal stylists, accountants, or other employees who work one-on-one with clients through your service. Give them a chance to shine here. Then when the client contacts you, they'll already have an idea of someone on your team.
Another way to use this area is to tell the story of your business. Did you have an inspiring start? Did you have obstacles that you overcame along the way? Does your motivation for starting a business lift your spirits? Highlight these themes.

Add eye-catching visuals

LinkedIn has several sections where you can use visuals. Make sure your profile picture looks professional and describes your business tone well through the image. If you choose to use a background image, make sure it is not pixelated and complements your profile picture and your business.
Highlighting specific works and projects is possible through LinkedIn. It allows you to use photos to draw people's attention to these works or accomplishments. Make your selection blend in with other visuals on the page and work for the project.

Capture the audience in the «Review» section

The «Review» section doesn't have to be a compilation of everything you already have on your profile. Briefly touch on certain accomplishments or describe why and how you achieved them. Don't dive deep into the company's history or repeat the headline. Instead, tell the story and introduce people to the life and passion behind the business. As always, don't shy away from keywords.
Create a follow button
Not all LinkedIn profiles are automatically equipped with a follow button. Go in and add one to make it easier for people to follow your business. Making it harder than a single click will discourage a large percentage of people from following you.
Optimize your profile to maximize your networking efforts
Optimizing your profile to maximize your networking efforts is key to the success of your brand; here are the best ways to do it:

Customize your LinkedIn URL

Much of your LinkedIn profile is customizable. From background images to achievements, everything is customizable to your business. That goes for your URL, too. If you've taken the time to design your profile, put it out there! Make it obvious that this link belongs to your business.
The URL that LinkedIn assigns to a new profile is often a mixture of a name and a set of numbers. During the editing process, there is an option to make it unique. This will let you know if someone else has already used such a URL until you find the right one for your business.

Make key headlines and descriptions easy to look at

Catching someone's eye and keeping them on the page is key when it comes to increasing conversion rates. This means that your headline and description should make a strong first impression.

Set yourself apart from other companies that use boring headlines and keywords. Most importantly, make them unique.

In addition to description, headlines often act as the first call to action on the page. Being succinct and descriptive helps new people understand exactly how your business can help them.

Keep your profile up to date

A LinkedIn profile should be viewed as a living asset. Once you've created it, you shouldn't cross it off your to-do list and walk away. Instead, continue to update it at least once a week, adding needed information. Even if you don't post blogs or long-form content, post photos, announcements and weekly news summaries to make your interlocutors feel part of the team.

It also helps if a new customer comes to your page. Seeing recent activity will make sure they know you're ready to go, rather than being the last word in startup history a few years ago.

Look for other ways to get updates besides your own content. Ask satisfied customers to use the link and share a review of your work for them. Get permission, if necessary, to post photos or videos of successful projects.

Use professional photography

Your photo is another part of a newbie's first impression of your page. It is perhaps the most important because it is visual, and the eye instantly goes to it before the words.

Use a photo that matches the tone and message of the rest of the page. More often than not, it should be a professional photo, perhaps a logo or a picture that worthily represents you or your business. Since this is a professional platform, the logo must match or it will be below standard.

Link to your profile from your other online assets

While it's essential to get your keywords right on the page, as we'll discuss next, one of the best ways to make sure people find your account is to share a link. Attach it to the end of your email taglines. Put it in your bio or description section on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.

It may not be as convenient as a quick click, but consider copying it on your business card, too. (This is where a concise custom URL is a huge advantage!) If people are really interested in using your services, LinkedIn is the most professional and descriptive source of information, except perhaps for your website.

Keyword research

Optimized keywords are the gold of online marketing. Using the right words can increase your chances of being discovered by newcomers more than tenfold. There are several ways to find out which keywords work best for you.

The next is to look directly at the consumer side of things. What do people enter when they look for companies or services similar to yours? How do they phrase it? Who is at the top of the search results and what did they do to get there?

Discover these keywords through third-party apps and platforms. Because SEO has become such an influential element of marketing, many useful tools have emerged. Use one of these keyword research tools to start your search. Still, feel like it's incomplete? Consider working with a freelancer to expand your list further.

Once you have a list of those keywords, scatter them over the significant areas such as the headline, description fields, work experience, and other text-oriented areas. If necessary, continue to analyze the results to replace others that may work better.

Optimize your resume

A user finds your profile and clicks on it. Their interest is piqued by an attractive professional photo and a catchy headline that convinces them that your business can meet their needs. The next thing most people start looking at is a brief description of the company.
This area is often one of the most text-rich parts of the entire profile. You should make it exciting and keep it short and easy to scan pieces of text. Don't forget that many people can view it on a mobile device with a small screen.
Optimize your resume by using a lot of keywords. Keep naturalness in mind, as too many keywords can make your resume look like jargon and uninteresting to the average reader.
Personalize it to make it easier for readers to understand, and add your motivation. Why did you start the business? What is your goal? What direction are you trying to take it in?
Make contact easy
Once potential clients or connections see that you are currently active enough to realize that they are interested in your industry, you need to make it easy for them to contact you.
Don't spend all your time on a profile so you don't lose potential clients who don't show enough interest to delve into the profile to find out how to contact you. Instead, make your contact information obvious to those you know. It's also desirable to give them several easy access options. That way, they can choose what they like best.

Create a LinkedIn marketing strategy

The connections you make on LinkedIn are often of great value. This is because influencers in their industries often frequent LinkedIn, thought leaders, and high-level executives. But don't expect these leaders to stumble across your profile. Instead, you must actively work on your LinkedIn marketing strategy to target those connections. If you don't know where to start, check out our tips below to increase those connections.

Understand your target audience in depth

Every product and service you offer appeals to specific people or groups of people. Marketing your product to a broader group of people often leads to nothing but more money.
Instead, find out what your target audience needs and why they need it. Then use marketing to tailor your ads directly to the needs of your target groups.
Define your goals
Even if you know your target audience and what they need, you should still have goals for your business. Whether it's a financial threshold you want to reach or more people you'd like to reach, having attainable goals constantly pushes you to improve your business strategy. Ask yourself:

What is the goal(s)?

What does success look like to you?

What is my motivation?

What is my business' greatest strength?

What is its greatest weakness?

What would be my greatest accomplishment?

Knowing the answers to these questions will help you understand your motivation. They also guide you toward satisfaction because they help you determine what success looks and feels like for you and your business.
Businesses with a clear purpose and motivation look more robust and collected than others. This is often quite obvious to new customers who are in the process of deciding on brand loyalty.

LinkedIn is currently the most used platform for professionals and business owners. Here, B2C companies are finding new networking opportunities with a platform that has done most of their hard work. Increasing brand awareness, attracting leads, sharing content, driving traffic to your website, and making connections or business relationships and partnerships are all things you can achieve with Linkedin marketing.

Below we've listed a few practical ways to use LinkedIn marketing to grow your business:

Invite users to follow your page. Connections from personal and employee pages are all prime candidates for building an initial audience on your company page. Go into settings to personalize the message for new subscribers. Make it applicable to as many people as possible and send it out.

Link employee profiles to your page. Linking employee profiles to a business page gives it much more reach than before. If you're a recruiter or want to expand the reach of your content, working with employees will give you access to a whole new audience.

Collect and make recommendations.Everyone can list skills and talents related to the services they offer, either on a company profile or a personal profile. To endorse them, others can endorse them, actually testifying that they do excel in these specialties. Endorse employees and other community members with whom you have interacted, and they are more likely to endorse you back. You can also ask former clients to do this, especially if they don't have time to write a full review.

Join or create your own LinkedIn group.LinkedIn is about professional communities and developing connections in industries and related niches. They have created LinkedIn Groups to continue and enhance this goal. Become an active member of some of these groups to get the community's attention. If you are ambitious or have exceptional influence in your niche, take the opportunity to create your own group by forming a community centered around your business.

Add your Twitter account to your LinkedIn profile. As useful as LinkedIn is, it's not the only form of social media that people use. Often, different types of content are posted on different social media platforms. Add a link to Twitter and other resources to your LinkedIn profile so potential clients can follow you on all the platforms they use.
Create LinkedIn showcase pages. Showcase pages are an extension of your main page. They are linked to the main page and, once created, are called «affiliate pages.» You can use them to highlight specific initiatives, related brands, related lines of business or leading employees. By connecting them, interested followers will find them much easier to find.

Complement LinkedIn's marketing efforts with paid advertising. Gathering organic leads and conversions is great and is the main goal of LinkedIn's strategy. However, once you start seeing success, don't be afraid to use a well-designed page with an effective conversion rate. Attract more people to it with paid advertising. LinkedIn offers many methods to start your efforts, including LinkedIn Sponsored Content, LinkedIn Sponsored Inmail, LinkedIn Text Ads, LinkedIn Dynamic Ads.

Write compelling updates for your company page. Updates posted to your company page should be thoughtful and targeted. Think about the type of material that interested people in your business in the first place. Give them useful content, tips and applicable information about company changes. Create a community and engage people by telling a story.

Expand your network of influencers.The whole point of LinkedIn is to build relationships with people. As you build connections, you go from knowing about each other to trusting each other. Through this growth of engagement, there will be no areas of sharing, either products or services, that you can experience. It takes time and effort, but it pays off.

Keep track of developments on LinkedIn.When a connection is made in real life, take the opportunity to expand your connections on LinkedIn. After a business meeting or business card exchange, decide to continue connecting with them on LinkedIn.

Position your brand as a thought leader by sharing and publishing content.

A thought leader is recognized as an authority in their field of expertise. They are approached for their opinions. Building your business on LinkedIn gives you a higher level of professionalism than is possible on most other social networks, and continually sharing helpful and highly authoritative articles can only help you achieve that.

In fact, there is a vast content gap on the platform that companies should take advantage of. Of the millions of active monthly users, only 4% share blog posts.

In a B2B context, 6 out of 10 users use LinkedIn to find industry information. If your business is willing to actively provide this knowledge, you'll get even higher conversion rates.

Taking advantage of your audience on LinkedIn is sure to increase engagement and interest in your business. Publishing useful content, perhaps in the form of a lengthy «how-to» or «list» article, is a great way to do this. Here are some best practices for publishing content on LinkedIn:

«how-to» and «list» type posts, also called «listicles,» are the most popular.

The headlines are good. Aim for 5-9 headlines and subheadings, depending on the length of your post.

Title your articles in 40-49 characters to optimize them for LinkedIn.

Upload videos directly to LinkedIn, not articles.

Publish articles about 20 times a month to reach about 60% of your audience

Add hashtags to increase discoverability

Use multimedia to stand out

Use LinkedIn to grow your business

Over the past five years, LinkedIn has become a vast source of additional engagement, connections, and discoveries for both B2B and B2C businesses. It's a resource that attracts hundreds of thousands of users each year, about two per minute. LinkedIn has become the new marketing channel for all businesses.

Creating a LinkedIn profile allows you to take the next step in networking, but that's not all. It helps increase organic traffic to your website. After that, it helps dramatically increase conversions and sets you apart from many similar companies by allowing you to connect with a vast network of professionals.

A complete profile gives you a sense of respectability for incoming clients as well. It doesn't end there, as the platform also provides you with data and measurable metrics to improve the quality of your content and increase engagement.

What's stopping you from growing your business? Start simple, take small steps until you can grow your time or team. After that, you can watch your business grow.