The Beginner’s Guide to LinkedIn Marketing

13. Check out who’s viewed your LinkedIn profile.

Learn a little about your audience members, potential leads, and customers who are viewing your profile and marketing content that you’re sharing on LinkedIn.

How? With the Who Viewed Your Profile feature.

This tool, which is accessible in the main navigation via the Profile dropdown, enables you to identify the exact people who have visited your page. You can see how you stack up against the profile views for your connections, other businesses like yours, and more.

14. Export connections.

Now, it’s no secret that you can use the connections you make on LinkedIn to drive traffic to your site and grow your base of paying customers. Exporting your connections — to a contact management system, for example — is a great place to start.

Under your Advanced Settings, you can start exporting your LinkedIn connections.

15. Customize your Connections to grow your professional network.

LinkedIn offers features to help you grow your professional network and make valuable connections. There are several ways to do this depending on what you’re looking to accomplish.

Here are some examples:

• Add, view, and remove connections depending on their level of value to your business.
• Control who can see your connections — maybe you do or don’t want your competitors to see that list of people.
• Leverage your second and third-degree connections to grow your network and build new relationships.
• Import and sync your contacts from your email and other sources to stay in touch with colleagues, partners, leads, and customers across the board. These connections will see your content in multiple places so they learn more about who you are as a business, deepening their relationship with your brand.

16. Join LinkedIn Groups.

LinkedIn Groups are a great way to make connections with people who are in, or interested in, your industry. They serve as a hub for you and other members to share content, grow your contact list, establish yourself as an expert in the field, and boost brand awareness.

There are a number of other benefits that come from joining LinkedIn Groups. For example, by joining Groups related to your industry and participating in discussions within those groups,  you’ll exhibit thought leadership in your industry.

Additionally, by joining Groups, you can view complete profiles of other members of the same group without being connected. Also, if you’re a member of the same group as another user, LinkedIn allows you to send up to 15 free 1:1 messages to fellow group members per month (typically, you can only do this if you’re a first-degree connection).

17. Create your own LinkedIn Group.

Consider creating a LinkedIn Group of your very own, like HubSpot did with the popular Inbound Marketers Group.

You can use your group to establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry, grow a community of advocates, generate new marketing content ideas, promote brand awareness, and generate new leads. 

18. Communicate with your LinkedIn Group.

And on that note, there are more reasons to create your own Group on LinkedIn. In fact, one of the perks of managing a LinkedIn Group is that LinkedIn makes it simple to interact and communicate with the members of the Group you’re in charge of.

You can either send messages to group members or create a group post. Sending messages allows you to write a member of your group directly, or share content with them, from your group’s page. This is great if you have something to share with a specific person in your group. Creating a group post allows you to share any content you’d like on your group’s page which is ideal for initiating a discussion.  

19. Share your LinkedIn status updates on Twitter.

Add your Twitter account to your LinkedIn profile so you can share status updates across platforms. This is also a great way to boost your Twitter follower and LinkedIn connection counts.

For example, if you’re posting an update to LinkedIn that you’d also like your Twitter followers to see, you can easily syndicate that update to Twitter by selecting the Public + Twitter option in the dropdown menu within the LinkedIn update composer.

20. Leverage @mentions in your status updates.

Want another LinkedIn user or company to see your status update? On LinkedIn, you have the ability to tag — or @mention — users and other companies in your status updates much like the way it works on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.

Include the @ symbol immediately followed by the user’s/ company’s name in your status update or post. As a result, that user/ company will be alerted that you mentioned them, and their name will also link to their profile/ page in the status update itself. This is a great way to boost engagement and interaction on your content as well as improve brand awareness.

21. Design all aspects of your LinkedIn page.

The design of LinkedIn pages has changed a lot over the years. Make sure yours is set up correctly and optimized for the latest layout, featuring a compelling and high-quality banner image.

Take a look at what HubSpot’s Company Page looks like for inspiration:

Use guides and templates to discover the best ways to design your LinkedIn page optimal business, marketing, and professional networking.

22. Create LinkedIn Showcase Pages.

LinkedIn Showcase Pages are niche pages that branch off your business’s page to highlight specific initiatives and campaigns or feature specific content you’re working on.

Think of Showcase Pages as extensions of your main page that allow you to promote specific products or cater to your individual marketing personas — this provides a more personalized and targeted experience for your page visitors. This is great way to expand your network on LinkedIn because other users can choose to follow your Showcase Page(s) even if they haven’t followed your main page.

23. Post company status updates and target them.

Publish Status Updates for your business on your LinkedIn page for your followers to see. This keeps your LinkedIn connections engaged and in the loop regarding your business’s latest developments, work, content, and updates. In your status updates, you can share written information, images, videos, documents, and more.

You can also post Targeted LinkedIn Status Updates tailored towards specific people and groups within your audience. To do this, use criteria such as company size, industry, job function, seniority, geography, language, or by including/ excluding company employees.

These targeted updates will appear on your page — or Showcase Page — as well as on LinkedIn for the targeted users (specifically, in their Network Updates feed).

24. Check out LinkedIn’s Content Marketing Score & Trending Content resources.

You can learn how impactful your organic and paid LinkedIn marketing content is with the platform’s Content Marketing Score and Trending Content resources.

Your Content Marketing Score tells you your impact on LinkedIn by measuring overall audience engagement with your content. Trending Content tells you which topics you are posting and sharing content about that are resonating with specific audience groups on the platform, allowing you to optimize your content for greater impact.

25. Experiment with LinkedIn Sponsored Content and Native Ads.

If you’re looking to complement your organic LinkedIn marketing efforts with some paid advertising, LinkedIn Ads are a smart choice. One of the biggest benefits of LinkedIn advertising: the targeting options.

LinkedIn’s PPC ads let you target specific job titles, job functions, industries, or company size, to name a few — you know, the people who are more likely to want/ need what you sell.

If you want to get started with LinkedIn’s advertising platform, check out our free guide to advertising on LinkedIn.

26. Share content through LinkedIn’s publishing platform.

Good news! You no longer have to be a LinkedIn Influencer to publish new articles to LinkedIn. Publishing is available to all users on the platform. Experiment with how this feature can support your marketing goals by creating content and promoting it on your your business’s LinkedIn page.

For example, you might experiment with syndicating content from your blog to LinkedIn — this way, you can promote subscription to your blog via LinkedIn.

27. Add a Page Follow Button to your website.

You can add the LinkedIn Company Follow button to your website to promote your company’s LinkedIn presence and the content you share on the platform. When your website visitors click to “Follow” your LinkedIn page via your site, they’ll automatically become connected to you and be able to view your company’s latest updates on the platform.

This is great way to boost your engagement and number of connections on LinkedIn by driving traffic to the platform directly from your website.

28. Analyze your LinkedIn marketing performance.

So … how are your LinkedIn marketing efforts faring? Analyzing your efforts and making necessary adjustments is critical to your success on the platform.

LinkedIn has in-depth page analytics as well as reporting tools for businesses to evaluate overall performance. There are specific data about how effective your status updates, content, and reach are as well as details about your page’s engagement and followers (like audience member demographics).

Begin Marketing on LinkedIn

Are you ready to get started marketing your business on LinkedIn?

With so many updates and additions to LinkedIn since its launch, we can’t wait to see how the network continues to make itself an integral resource and platform for marketers, job seekers, candidate seekers, and other professionals. Get started marketing on LinkedIn by experimenting with the best practices that make the most sense for your business.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in August 2017 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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