4 Ways To Enhance Your LinkedIn Marketing Strategy

How much time do you dedicate to your LinkedIn marketing strategy? LinkedIn is a powerful tool that can benefit your business beyond simply connecting you with prospective hires. While I’m guessing that you’ve created a LinkedIn profile for your business, there is a very good chance that you are not using this site to its fullest potential.

Why Use LinkedIn?

LinkedIn can offer your company the potential to connect with more than 65 million business professionals from around the world. To demonstrate how quickly this social media site for business professionals is growing, two new LinkedIn accounts are established every second.

Need another reason to be active on LinkedIn? The average annual income for LinkedIn members in the U.S. is $83,000, and they have twice the buying power that the typical U.S. consumer has.

LinkedIn is also useful for positioning yourself and your brand as credible. Have you ever searched for someone or a company on LinkedIn and had no luck? You probably didn’t feel too good about that person or brand’s authority in the industry. When you meet other professionals at a networking event or a conference, they would prefer to be able to connect with you on a business-friendly site like LinkedIn versus Facebook or other more personal-geared social media sites.

4 LinkedIn Features and Tools That You Should Be Using

So now that you know why LinkedIn should be a critical component of your social media marketing strategy, how can you enhance your LinkedIn marketing efforts? While you’re probably already familiar with the basic features and benefits of LinkedIn, we wanted to share a few of the most important tools that you can use to give your marketing efforts on this site a boost:

1. Showcase Pages

Think of this as an extension of your LinkedIn company page. Having an individual LinkedIn showcase page is a great way to expand on a particular product or service that your business offers. These pages are intended for a much more targeted audience and is useful for sharing the aspects of your business that they are most interested in. It’s a helpful tool for further building relationships with existing and prospective customers, and it can also be useful in developing targeted lists for campaigns and promotions that your business is offering.

Microsoft is a great example of a company that embraces LinkedIn showcase pages. While the company itself has a LinkedIn page, the various units of its business (Microsoft Office, Microsoft Dynamics, Microsoft Lync, etc) all have individual showcase pages to deliver content to consumers that are specifically interested in those areas. You can visit Microsoft’s LinkedIn profile to see how these showcase pages are displayed.

2. Professional Gallery

If you want to really make your business stand out, take advantage of LinkedIn’s professional gallery feature, which allows you to upload visual images, video, and presentations to highlight your work. Follow this easy step-by-step guide for creating a LinkedIn professional portfolio.

3. Advanced People Finder Tool

LinkedIn is continuing to enhance its people finder tool, and you can now perform searches by typing in a person’s name, keywords, job titles, location, education, industry, etc. To be able to search using more advanced criteria, click on the “Advanced” link on the top right hand corner or the search results page.

4. Alumni Search Tool

Your alma mater is one of the easiest and fastest ways to build a professional connection with someone. The alumni search tool can help you to find people that are associated with a particular school, industry, or location. You can use this tool to find out where someone that graduated from a particular school works, what they do for a living, and areas of expertise.