Let’s start with two basic suppositions – you’re on LinkedIn and you’ve done a decent job of filling in your personal profile. Then you probably know that LinkedIn has its pros and cons. On the con side, it’s a little spammy these days. Requests from random strangers, lots of Facebookish updates about personal stuff in the feed, and the occasional inappropriate request.
Butttttt…don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. Here are some reasons why it’s still one of the most valuable and targeted marketing tools out there – especially for B2B:
- It’s the world’s number one professional network with 433mm+ users.
- It’s growing like mad in Asia – 4 years since launch of their Singapore office and the Asian audience has grown from 18mm to 78mm. source: LinkedIn on Bloomberg
- India and China now make up LinkedIn’s two biggest markets after the United States.
- [highlight]Hong Kong had 1m+ registered users in Q12016 – 26% of the labor force, 70% of professionals [/highlight]. source: HK Gov (pdf)
BETTER MARKETING STEPS
#1 Personal Profile
Publish content on your Profile to establish your knowledge in an area and promote your personal brand and company.
#2 Company Page
Get your Company page running like your website, publishing content regularly (e.g. new service offerings, expert tips, employment opportunities, work environment – depending on your needs). Get started here
#3 Recruitment
According to LinkedIn 70% of talent pool is passive, meaning they’re not actively looking for a job but can be tempted. Treat your Company page as a place to promote working with you and for you before you even start advertising.
#4 Target to Very Specific Audience
The best thing about LinkedIn is the ability to target professionals more effectively than probably any other platform. You can select by country, industry, company, job title, company size, seniority, etc. This applies to sponsored content, display ads, and even your own Company page.
Granted the free Company page targeting option only allows you to target your own followers, but if you have a large base it means you can target the right message to the right person which is the key (e.g. Hong Kong new services launch targeted at property professionals in mid-size companies, Singapore branch opening targeted at hiring marketing managers in the retail industry).
#5 Pay for Something
There are a number of paid solutions for marketing, sales, recruiting, etc. on LinkedIn. These are the ones I think you should experiment with first.
- Display Advertising – banner ads, just like the ones you probably run already but very focused on the targetting we just talked about. A good transition phase to use knowledge you already have from places like Google Display Advertising.
- Native Advertising (Promoted Content) – This is using content that you’ve published on your Company page and paying to have it appear in your chosen targets’ news feed. This will feel very familiar to users of Facebook’s promoted posts.
- Direct Sponsored Advertising – These also appear in the LinkedIn feed where users actually look but can be produced with a link (not published on your Company Page).
