Social media is an equal platform for all types of businesses and the size of the businesses. Small businesses can attract the same audience as a largescale business with the correct strategies and approaches. Since small businesses are usually on a restrained budget, social media marketing can highly benefit them as it is a cost-effective strategy. Small businesses need to understand and analyze the social media platform, and their target audience to develop resonating content to grab attention.
Every social media platform has its own competitive advantage and a unique audience segment, and understanding the same can benefit businesses.
Facebook can be used to market products and services through personalized ads, and posts and analyze their reach, and interact with communities and their customers for feedback.
Instagram can be used for the same for an equally large but much younger community that can be attracted by posts, videos, reel formats, and ads. Both these platforms have their own features for e-commerce that benefit businesses.
LinkedIn for Small Businesses
However, LinkedIn for small businesses can be used for various reasons other than attracting an audience, and building brand awareness and conversions to build relationships. It focuses on growing professional connections within and outside the community, adding authenticity, and growing businesses. It is a platform for business professionals to network, providing small businesses the opportunity to showcase their strengths, vision, and mission to the professional communities.
It has a regularly active audience base that is beyond job seekers and recruiters, it has customers, partners, and business professionals. When LinkedIn is utilized as a digital marketing platform, it allows for holding industry discussions, and business-related activities, driving traffic to the website, and access to analytics providing insights for visitors, followers, competitors, leads, and more.
Why LinkedIn is Important for your marketing strategy
Strategizing for LinkedIn marketing is slightly different compared to other social media platforms as it cannot be used to directly sell products and services. Still, it can be leveraged to grow the business, and connections and take the business to the next level.
Even though a sales pitch doesn’t work well on the platform, it can be used to appeal the connections and other businesses in similar fields.
As per a survey, business marketing on LinkedIn we able to generate 277% more leads on average compared to businesses that engaged in one social media platform marketing alone.
How to leverage LinkedIn for small businesses
- Focus on growing connections: Growing LinkedIn connections means growing the opportunities for businesses to grow within professional communities. Even though quantity is important, focus on the quality of connections as well. Businesses can target and make connections within the exact industry and its business professional that would highly likely be interested in the products and services.
- Stay consistent with relevant content: Similar to other social media platforms, Linkedin also requires content resonation and consistency, except it has different ways. For LinkedIn, consistency does not require posting and interactions throughout the day, it requires a schedule for a week or month suitable to the business. It can be modified as per the analysis of the interactions. Consistency can lead to connections in the network to build trust and credibility and expect content from the business.
- Create LinkedIn’s Publishing Platform and Stories: Since sharing sales pitches on LinkedIn might be futile, sharing useful and knowledgeable information works well for businesses. It showcases the company’s capabilities and originality by publishing articles on LinkedIn’s publishing platform. A survey states, 6 out of 10 LinkedIn users are most interested in reading about insights into their business industry.
LinkedIn stories are another source of providing connections with insight from within their industry, although they are a raw glimpse and less polished or scripted compared to photos and videos. - Socialize within communities: LinkedIn has various communities with nearly 2 million different groups. Socializing and engaging within these communities can help the business find answers, an audience, interact or establish themselves as industry experts, and find partners, and connections.
- Invest in LinkedIn ads: LinkedIn ads are a great source to promote brand awareness and recognition. They are useful to share information and useful content targeting a specific audience like certain job titles, businesses, and industries. Utilizing LinkedIn ads effectively can increase the business’ content reach. When surveyed, B2B marketers said they received 80% of their social media leads through LinkedIn.
LinkedIn has enormous potential to promote small businesses optimally. Even spending 10 minutes on LinkedIn daily can have a positive impact on businesses. It can help businesses with their growth, traffic, and growing audience segments as it holds an audience of the most professional decision-makers.
