Today’s small businesses have fantastic opportunities for self-promotion and free marketing. Away from marketing you may be enmeshed in more red tape than ever, but online the resources available for growth and development are amazing. A resource that needs to be tapped into is LinkedIn. You may think of this site as a place to host your static CV but it is actually one of the social networks with a good many million users.
LinkedIn has clear benefits for people who are already familiar with old fashioned networking. However there are some nifty features need harnessing before you can find the websites true potential.
Engage People
To get the most from LinkedIn you cannot see it as a passive platform. Engage with other users by offering a more personalized consumer experience. This concept goes beyond brand interaction and into the realm of customer to employee relationships. If you let your customers have meaningful interactions with the people who work for your company their trust and confidence in your brand will grow.
LinkedIn lets you watch your target audience as they go about engaging in two-way conversations. By opening up to casual conversations and spontaneous relationships you will benefit from the business to business engagement on this social network. Everybody who is interacting with LinkedIn is doing so in some form of business capacity. This is a captive market that you need to engage.
Educate Your Audience
LinkedIn is a great platform for satisfying your customer bases need for information. Before people make consumer choices they almost always research online first. This is true in the business to business world as well. LinkedIn is a shop window for your product and your services
By having a status update strategy and engaging with the groups portion of the site you can give a steady stream of useful content to your potential customers. By educating your target audience, in the subjects that you have discovered they are interested in, you will gain lasting attention.
Establish Your Authority
Not only can you educate your customer you can also establish yourself as an authority in your current niche. You can offer your views on the topics that your potential clients are searching for.
This is done most effectively from within LinkedIn group sections. When you become an authority in the eyes of your customers you will improve brand awareness and massively increase consumer confidence in your work. When you speak out in a public and knowledgeable way your target audience begins to associate your brand with quality and integrity. You become someone who knows what they are talking about – but more importantly you are someone who is not afraid to voice a strong opinion. As long as the content you post is credible this is an excellent way to improve sales.
As with any new tool, you will get out of LinkedIn what you are able to put in. Create a profile and plan your content strategy. Millions of small businesses are waiting to hear your voice.