LinkedIn for Business Owners – Build Your Network and Brand

Are you a business owner wondering if LinkedIn is really worth a try? Or why LinkedIn could be better than any other social media network to grow your business?

If you are nodding in agreement to either of the above-mentioned questions, you are in the right place. First of all, do not worry as you are not the first or the only one to ask these questions.

Why LinkedIn is a Powerful Tool For Business Owners

LinkedIn is the largest professional networking platform in the world today, with over 740 million members and more than 55 million registered businesses. This makes LinkedIn for business owners a platform to market and sell their products and services. Joining this networking makes you a part of the worldwide community – free to grow your authority, brand, and business network.

If you are considering jumping on board this global business networking platform, here is how it can prove to be ultimately beneficial and effective for you and your enterprise. You will be able to build relationships on a global scale while bridging the geographical gap to uncover new leads.

Moreover, you will be the first to know directly from legit sources and industry experts about the latest trends in marketplaces and consumers’ behavior.

So, without further ado, let us dive right in to explore why LinkedIn for Business owners is a good idea.

Why Your Business Should Use LinkedIn

While the reasons may vary as to your business’s nature, objectives, and goals, here are four reasons you should join LinkedIn as a business owner.

1. It is the Ultimate Dwelling Place for Professionals

If you want to become a part of the number one professional business network, LinkedIn is the answer. You will get an instant outreach to millions of businesses as well as professionals associated with your industry.

From co-workers to previous colleagues, head hunters to recruitment managers, business leaders to vendors, LinkedIn is the online digital hangout for business owners from all over the world.

2. Digitizing Your Business Collaborations and Customer Relationships

You can now track your favorite business partners, vendors, and loyal customers online. Moreover, you can ask them to leave you reviews and recommendations for others to know who trustworthy your business is.

3. Establishing Yourself as Business Leader

If you are a business owner, you can establish your image as a business leader or establish your brand’s image as the leader in your niche.

One of the best ways is to publish articles, do live sessions, or leave short video messages, educational and tutorial material to share your expertise.

This way, people will start looking at your business as a trustworthy guide to help them make decisions.

4. To be Found by Others

LinkedIn for business owners can help create a robust business profile by filling in strong keywords, accomplishments, and business achievements. This will lead to you and your business discovered by other companies, potential partners, vendors, and customers in your niche.

Moreover, you will also be able to find potential employees looking for better opportunities in the specific sector you serve.

How Does Your Business Benefit From It

Creating a LinkedIn Business profile will help you explore and network with prospect quality leads. Additionally, you will get to establish a solid, trustworthy and reputable brand image on a domestic as well as global scale.

Do you know that 84 percent of LinkedIn users generate many business opportunities? Amongst many of its benefits, LinkedIn allows you to tell your business’ story, the journey, and share your internal operations and values with followers, business partners, and professionals, and hope to boost your referrals as a digital marketing strategy.

 So, to explore further, here are five ways LinkedIn can help your business without spending a dime.

1. Giving Back To the Community Helps

As a business owner, you must give back to the community by sharing your expertise and knowledge. For this, you can produce shareable content on LinkedIn so your followers can see and share your valuable sights with others.

You can also make sure to provide this content in various formats, including SlideShare presentations, infographics, blog posts, vlogs, webinars, short clips, testimonials, and podcasts. This will increase your loyalty amongst the audience as they will see that you care to provide information in several preferable options.

The higher your posts’ frequency, the more chances you will have to extend your business’s outreach.

As a part of your content marketing strategy, you must strive to publish relevant and authentic posts for shares and viral likes. However, do not overdo it as you do not want to alienate your audience by spamming them.

2. Showcasing New Products and Services

LinkedIn for Business owners can help if you are about to launch a new service or product. According to a survey, half of the vendors on LinkedIn generated sales due to running their new product promos and discount offers on the platform.

While running your promotions on a LinkedIn company page, you can leave a call-to-action (CTA) for the target audience to visit your website. This, in return, will boost traffic to your website, generate more leads and increase your chances to convert them into sales.

3. Standing Tall Amongst Competitors

Being on LinkedIn gives you a competitive edge over other competitors. You can use the company description section to explain why your business is better than others. You can share company news, values, vision, and mission to keep your audience in the loop.

Sharing information on a frequent basis will establish an authentic, cheerful, and transparent image of your business, and customers love it.

Creating visual content will give you an opportunity to tell your audience the story of your company. You will be able to strike an emotional chord with them as they get to know how your business thinks and acts.

4. Fishing for Potential Talent to Contribute to Your Business Success

Your LinkedIn profile will help you look at valuable information of potential candidates seeking professional opportunities in your sector. You will be able to look at their previous jobs, performances, accomplishments, training, etc.

Think of LinkedIn for business owners as a free pool of talent you can dip into at any time. The better employees you have on board, the better your company’s productivity.

5. Staying Updated about the Competition

Did you know that 94 Percent of B2B marketers have been using LinkedIn to distribute their content? You can keep a tab on what your competitors are up to by following their LinkedIn profiles and checking their content. 

This will help you stay on top of any changes in your industry or marketplace. You can even take on what works for a competitor and make it your own by making tweaks. This sometimes can help you evade the large R&D budgets and bag a strategy that can work in your favor too.

6. Improving Your Search Engine Rankings

Search engines like Google, Bing, and others rank Business’s LinkedIn pages and display the content-rich profiles as top results. Therefore, to use LinkedIn for business owners, you can add frequent updates about your business, optimize your posts and content for SEO and improve your search engine rankings and sales.

B2B Focused vs. B2C Focused Tactics

B2B or Business-to-Business refers to a business model where you sell on selling products and services to other businesses directly. To put it in other words, you deal with the buying companies’ decision-makers and convince them to buy products from them.

On the other hand, B2C refers to the Business-to-Consumer model refers to the practice where you sell directly to the consumers. This is easier than B2B business strategy; all you need to know is where to find your target audience and what their needs are.

However, LinkedIn can help you master the B2B focused digital marketing strategies. You can build healthy and reputable connections with businesses without sounding too salesy.

That said, here are some of the best practices to help you with best practices to use LinkedIn for business owners.

1. Building Your Brand

To build reputable relationships on LinkedIn, first, you will have to create a professional brand image. 71 percent of the consumers prefer doing business with companies they like, know or trust. This is vital, especially if you are a small business trying to establish yourself.

LinkedIn offers you a free platform to showcase your business and mingle with the digital community within your niche.

To build a complete business profile, you must provide as much information as possible to be discoverable by others on LinkedIn.

Moreover, you must do your best to make your company come across as a legitimate business to prospective business partners, vendors, employees, and followers.

2. Establishing Your Authority

One of the best practices on LinkedIn for business owners is to foster an image and send of trust, likeness, and being knowledgeable amongst the target audience on the platform. Demonstration of your expertise in the field and sharing your knowledge and experience will help you win trust.

To do so, you must share valuable resources and content with your ideal clients.

Curate unique professional content that can help solve a challenge or problem faced by the industry or consumer. In case you have skills and resources you can share for free, then doing so will help you appear as a consumer-centric business that believes in giving back.

3. Asking For New Introductions

You can request your LinkedIn connections to introduce your business to their extended network. However, you have to be careful and do it without hurting your existing relationships. So, when you ask a company for new introductions, be respectful and appreciative regardless of what the outcome might be.

Therefore, asking for new approvals and referrals on LinkedIn, follow these steps.

• First, you must build a rapport
• Explain why you are requesting them for a new introduction with other businesses in their network
• Leave it with them and decide for yourself, and be thankful even when they say no.

4. Approaching New Contact Directly

You can send a personalized connection request to prospect clients, business partners, vendors, and consumers. You can even answer their concerns and queries without sounding too salesy. Plus, you can engage in a variety of ways to start a conversation and introduce yourself.

• Finding common topics, interests and strike a conversation
• Commenting on their profile or ongoing discussion on the content or post they shared.
• Complimenting their products, services, and efforts.

Then it is time to send a connection request and start building rapport by creating dialogue.

5. Stay Updated About Your Industry

It can be challenging for business owners to keep pace with the latest happening in their industry.

This is where LinkedIn for business owners can work as a tool to keep tabs on recent trends, new developments, latest innovations, and more.

You can stay updated or keep your connections updated about your business by reading their posts or posting. These posts are always available for a quick glance in your latest news feed.

You can follow other industry influencers and thought leaders to learn from their valuable expert opinion and insights.

6. Following or Starting Hashtags

You can search and follow hashtags related to your industry. You can even use the most trending hashtags to appear amongst the top search results on LinkedIn as well as other search engine results.

In case you are starting a conversation on LinkedIn, you can create your own hashtags and share them with your connections to spread the word and make it go viral for global recognition.

7. Make LinkedIn an Integral Part of Your Marketing Strategy

Running a business is not an easy affair regardless of its type, size and location.

You will need an actionable plan with the right strategies and tools to achieve your objective and more. LinkedIn can prove to be helpful if you wish your business to perform well in the online marketplaces.

Therefore, you must ensure to incorporate LinkedIn for business owners as a part of your digital marketing strategy.

Conclusion

If you are a business owner looking into using LinkedIn to boost your business but do not know where to begin, you can always seek digital marketers’ professional assistance. MediaBoom is the industry leader in using LinkedIn for business owners to reap the exponential benefits of this fantastic business networking platform. Our team guarantees to offer cutting-edge solutions to boost your business recognition and sales conversion rate.