Essential tips to grow your business with LinkedIn

Nowadays, it’s not surprising to see a corporate account on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or Facebook — those are all well-known targets for social media marketers. However, there’s one major social media platform that often gets left out of the SMM strategy for being “too complex.” Even today, for a lot of businesses, LinkedIn remains an untamed beast. 

There are a lot of misconceptions associated with using LinkedIn for Social Media Marketing, including that the platform is inept for visual-oriented publications and, therefore, limits the creative expression of brands, and that, overall, it’s ineffective. Because of this, there are currently only 55 million company accounts registered on LinkedIn. 

Which means… if you play your cards right and master the art of LinkedIn Marketing sooner rather than later, you still have the opportunity to get the first-mover advantage. 

While LinkedIn is a bit different than other social platforms, it’s not as complex as some think. If you’re ready to take advantage of growth on LinkedIn. We’ve got your back. 

So, what is LinkedIn Marketing?

Long story short, LinkedIn Marketing is a form of Social Media Marketing that utilizes LinkedIn — a social media network for business professionals — to promote their business online and raise brand awareness, communicate the benefits of the business’s products to its target audience, and increase sales. 

Some of the key processes that make up LinkedIn Marketing include establishing a connection with the target audience via social listening, raising brand awareness via LinkedIn Content Marketing, driving traffic to a website via LinkedIn paid advertising, and generating leads via cold and warm LinkedIn outreach. 

LinkedIn Marketing also offers a set of strategies aimed at establishing thought leadership, brand authority, and raising brand credibility. 

It’s possible to differentiate between two types of LinkedIn Marketing:

• Organic LinkedIn Marketing — when you grow your brand on LinkedIn without investing money into paid advertising, through SEO optimization of your LinkedIn page, Content Marketing, and social listening
• Paid LinkedIn Marketing — when you rely on heavy financial investment to promote your business with advertising via LinkedIn. 

For a more in-depth LinkedIn Marketing definition and more information on the intricacies of the platform, check out our ultimate guide to LinkedIn Marketing. 

Fundamentals of LinkedIn for business

Traditionally, the big four of Social Media Marketing are Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and now TikTok. LinkedIn, unfortunately, is an outsider in this group, as it often gets overlooked and underutilized by the majority of marketers. 

This, however, is a huge omission as LinkedIn Marketing can bring your business to a new level and open up numerous sales opportunities. Here’s why:

• LinkedIn is a fast-growing social media platform with over 850 million registered users and over 675 million monthly active users. Up to 40% of them use LinkedIn on a daily basis. 
• LinkedIn is perfect for targeting decision-makers: 61 million of the LinkedIn user base are senior-level influencers, and 40 million are in decision-making positions. In fact, 4 out of 5 people on LinkedIn “drive business decisions.” 
• LinkedIn is the most popular social media platform amongst Fortune 500 companies.
• LinkedIn allows its users to share image-based, video-based, and text-based content, providing them with an opportunity to create posts in over 15 different formats. 
• LinkedIn produces the best organic results, according to 77% of content marketers. 

Besides, LinkedIn is reportedly the best marketing channel for B2B companies:

• 92% of B2B marketers include LinkedIn in their digital marketing mix, and over 40% of them indicate LinkedIn as the most effective channel for driving high-quality leads.
• LinkedIn makes up more than 50% of all social traffic to B2B websites and blogs. 
• LinkedIn is the #1 channel for B2B marketers to distribute content — 94% use it as an effective content distribution channel.

🔥 VistaCreate Pro Tip: LinkedIn is the best platform for B2B companies looking to build their brand awareness and generate high-quality leads. 

So, do you think LinkedIn might be the right fit for your business goals? After you’ve covered the meat and potatoes of LinkedIn Marketing, the following tips will help you level up your success on the platform.

Tips to grow your business on LinkedIn

Now that you know what LinkedIn is all about, you can make an informed decision on whether or not you should bother building a LinkedIn Marketing strategy. We aren’t going to lie, just like any other Social Media Marketing strategy, it requires a lot of work both during the preliminary preparation stage and the maintenance stage. 

The good news is that with our tips, tricks, and best practices growing your business on LinkedIn will be as seamless and painless as possible. We’ve broken down the whole process into these key action points:

1. Optimize your business profile
2. Build up your audience
3. Create and publish stellar content
4. Leverage tools to work smart

Let’s look at each of these steps in more detail. 

1. Optimize your LinkedIn business profile

Like most social media, LinkedIn is not a set-it-and-forget-it project — you need to carry out preliminary preparations, continuously expand your network, and work hard on keeping your LinkedIn Marketing strategy high-quality and content-oriented.

It all starts with optimizing your business page. At the end of the day, visually appealing pages with complete information get 30% more weekly views. Here are the must-have components of a great LinkedIn business page.

Business page tips for LinkedIn

Just like you wouldn’t show up to a stakeholder meeting in crumpled, dirty clothes, with messy hair, and stinky morning breath, you shouldn’t leave your LinkedIn business page unoptimized and incomplete before embarking on your LinkedIn Marketing activities.

It takes less than 50 milliseconds (that’s about 0.05 seconds) for people to form an opinion about your page online. Your business page on LinkedIn is the face of your business online, and it should be as flawless as possible. 

Here’s how to put your best foot forward.

Use a professional-looking, branded profile picture

Your profile picture isn’t the first thing your profile visitors will see, but it is the only picture other LinkedIn users will see when they come across your post in their feeds. So, create a profile picture that represents your brand well. 

Here’s what makes a professional-looking, impactful LinkedIn business profile picture:

• You should have one. Let’s start with the obvious — a missing profile picture won’t get you anywhere and will lower your chances of raising your brand awareness via LinkedIn Marketing.
• High quality is key. A blurry, pixelated profile picture is a tell-tale sign of a lazy, unprofessional business that doesn’t take their LinkedIn profile seriously. 
• Use your current logo. Our best piece of advice is to keep your LinkedIn profile branded, and there’s nothing better for that than using your logo as your profile picture. 

Prioritize a profile header that reflects your business, its mission, offers, and benefits 

Even though LinkedIn isn’t known for being the most visual of social media platforms, there are still plenty of spaces on LinkedIn where you can add a branded image to power up your profile — like the LinkedIn header. 

Your profile header (also known as a cover photo) gives you an opportunity to summarize your profile in a nutshell and straightaway tell your audience everything they need to know about you. Some of the things you should consider including are:

• The industry you work in
• A positive review of your business
• Your business or product’s critically acclaimed rating
• An image of your star product or a list of benefits it can bring
• A lucrative offer
• The recent accomplishments that you’re most proud of
• Your current marketing campaign

On top of that, you should also use your LinkedIn profile cover to enhance your brand by adding some of your key branding elements:

• Your brand colors
• Your signature shapes
• Your business tagline
• A reflection of your brand values

Of course, for your cover picture to make an impact, it needs to be well-designed and visually appealing, too. Stick to tried and true design principles such as visual hierarchy, up-to-date styling, and the latest design trends. 

Check out VistaCreate’s library of professional-looking, visually appealing, and fully customizable LinkedIn cover templates.

Make sure you have an optimized-for-search overview

Previously, we stated that LinkedIn is the best platform for harvesting organic marketing results. This, however, is only possible when your LinkedIn business page is easy to find, a.k.a. all the elements are optimized for search. 

Ideally, you should hone every bit of your LinkedIn page with text but especially your overview. 

There, talk about who you are, what you do, what you offer, and how your potential customers can benefit from purchasing your products. Ideally, you should use industry- or niche-specific language to both show off your expertise and make your profile identifiable. 

To amplify your optimization efforts, pick up to 5 primary keywords that describe your business best and add them to the overview — LinkedIn members can search by keywords. 

Pro tip: Ensure that your overview doesn’t use cliched, overused phrases. Otherwise, it’ll have little to no impact on your audience. 

Stay away from LinkedIn’s favorite buzzwords that have been used and abused so many times they’ve lost their meaning:

• specialized 
• leadership 
• focused 
• strategic
• experienced
• passionate
• expert
• creative 
• innovative 
• certified

Fill out all your organizational information

LinkedIn doesn’t like lazy businesses that don’t fill out all the fields and won’t promote them as actively as those that do. So, you need to make sure you put in all your organizational information, including:

• Your business industry
• Your business size
• Your business location
• Your business website address

2. Build up your LinkedIn audience

Once your business page is in top-notch shape, you can crack on with your LinkedIn Marketing activities. The more followers you have — the broader your network is — the more exposure they will get. So, the next step on the way to boosting your brand on LinkedIn is to acquire more followers. 

Tips for LinkedIn follower growth

We’ve put together a list of proven tips that will help you quickly grow your follower base and get your LinkedIn business page up and running. Here’s how to get noticed on LinkedIn:

• Find and use the right hashtags on your page — Organic reach on LinkedIn is really potent, so using the right hashtags for your business can help you to get in front of the right audience.
• Engage your employees — Get your team to like the content on your business page, tag it in their posts, etc. 
• Collaborate for exposure — Work creatively with your employees to develop their personal brands on LinkedIn. 
• Add a Follow button on your website and your blog. 
• Make it easy to share your blog and website content via LinkedIn (with a tag or an active link, of course).
• Leverage LinkedIn Groups – Become an active member and natively promote your business page.
• Add a page link to your email signature and your personal LinkedIn page. 
• Publish new content regularly.  

The last point is, perhaps, the most important for your LinkedIn Marketing success. If you regularly produce and share the content of interest to your target audience, LinkedIn will show more of your content to its users. 

3. How to create effective content for LinkedIn

Content Marketing makes up a huge part of your LinkedIn Marketing strategy. Let’s look at all the different content approaches and formats LinkedIn allows and cherishes.

Tips for LinkedIn content 

The formula of a successful LinkedIn publication is pretty straightforward. You need to know who you’re writing for, know what you’re writing about, and make sure your content is share-worthy. 

Unfortunately, this is often easier said than done. 

Fortunately, our LinkedIn content tips should simplify the process and guide you through the process of creating content with strong chance of virality.

Make sure you know your target audience well 

You need to be on par with your target audience’s content preferences, including the format they like best, and the information they expect to consume. To figure out that, you need to have a solid understanding of who your target audience is.

Here are some expert tips for honing your target audience. 

Keep up with the latest trends

Make sure you not only post evergreen content, but also promptly react to any events taking place in your market and your industry. 

Keep in mind that modern trends have a very short lifespan, to capitalize on current events, you need to be able to catch and respond quickly. Try following industry-leading blogs or setting up Google Alerts for topics relevant to your business.

Let your followers see the backstage of your business

Give your LinkedIn audience insight into what’s going on behind the scenes of your company. Showcase your business processes, your day-to-day tasks and responsibilities, and your true expertise. 

For example, you could talk about some relatable hardships your business is successfully dealing with and share the ways you’re overcoming difficult situations. 

Humans are curious by nature, so content like this is often noticed. But what’s even more important, by lifting the curtain and honestly talking about the backstage of your business, you humanize your brand and show that there are real people, capable of real human connections, behind it. 

Make your posts interactive 

Don’t let your publications be a monologue. Engage with your audience and prompt them to respond to you in the comments section, in their posts, or elsewhere.

Not only will this deepen your bond with your target audience, but it will also make your brand reach more feeds.

Don’t shy away from using emojis

Emojis can serve several purposes:

• They make your brand more approachable — You don’t want to come across as snobbish because you wouldn’t tap into current Internet culture. 
• They make your posts more readable — Emojis break up a wall of text and give the reader’s brain a second of rest before they can focus on the remaining part of the post.
• They help you tell stories more effectively and in fewer words. — Emojis are an international language, so using them can help you reach an audience that doesn’t speak your language and still understand the message you want to convey. 

The only thing you need to remember, though, is to make sure the emojis you go for are appropriate to use for your specific business. Overly foolish, lighthearted emojis might not be a good fit for some industries or brands. 

🔥 VistaCreate Pro Tip: Make sure you know the meaning behind the emoji you use, including all its implications and how those change when emojis are used in a combination. You don’t want to end up in an unfavorable situation simply because you aren’t aware of the alternative uses of certain emojis (yes, we’re looking at you, 🍆!)

Promote your posts on LinkedIn

If you want to get more eyes on your LinkedIn content, you can try to step away from Organic Marketing and invest in paid promotion. LinkedIn offers a handful of different ad formats for you to benefit from. For example, you can run a self-service ad campaign on LinkedIn using Sponsored Content, Message Ads, Dynamic Ads, and Text Ads.

Via LinkedIn’s built-in Campaign Manager, you can set a budget, select goals (clicks vs. impressions), and have complete control over your campaign’s timeline. 

Learn more about paid LinkedIn posts in this guide by LinkedIn. 

How often to publish on LinkedIn

While it’s important to post regularly, you shouldn’t spam your followers with posts. The optimal frequency of publications by post type is below.

• Status updates — 2-3 times a day
• Long-form publishing (articles, newsletters, document posts, etc.) — 1-2 times a week

Content types that work best for LinkedIn

One of the most exciting things about LinkedIn is the number of different types of content this social media platform supports. Here are all the different formats you can include in your LinkedIn Content Marketing strategy: 

• LinkedIn articles
• LinkedIn Stories 
• LinkedIn Status updates
• Native videos
• Carousel posts
• Polls
• Single-image and multi-image posts
• Links to external sources 
• Document posts
• Celebrations
• Newsletters 

Make sure you don’t limit yourself to only one format — it will soon become boring for your followers to keep up with your content updates. Instead, mix and match different content formats in your editorial calendar. 

According to LinkedIn itself, certain formats perform better for achieving certain goals:

What about visuals in LinkedIn publications?

There’s a common belief that LinkedIn isn’t a visual-friendly place. This, however, is nothing more than a blatant lie. In recent years, marketers have seen a drastic rise in the number of well-designed LinkedIn posts and noticed the positive impact pictures have on the engagement rate of publications. 

According to studies, just a few custom images can double the number of comments your post receives, skyrocketing your engagement rate and your overall reach. Similarly, the video format is capable of driving up your engagement rate 5X. Live videos help you gain a 25X engagement rate.

But remember, if building brand awareness is one of your LinkedIn Marketing objectives, you need to ensure that all the visuals you share on the social media platform are branded. This means, you should try to use the same design style, stick to using similar templates, include your logo, your brand fonts, and brand colors.

How to create professional LinkedIn content

You don’t need a huge team of copywriters, designers, and brand managers to advance your LinkedIn page with content. All you need to get started is a good idea and a reliable, easy-to-use tool to DIY your LinkedIn content.

First, the idea… Here are all the things you can share on your LinkedIn page as a business:

• Educational content — Cover evergreen topics relevant to your industry
• Case studies — Describe stories of your clients and highlight the problems your product helped them solve
• The latest industry news
• Results of your surveys, research, and other exclusive content 
• Lifehacks and tips on how to get more out of your product
• Promotional content on LinkedIn 
• Links to your website and blog content

While it’s advised to come up with unique content exclusive to your LinkedIn page, the topics you cover don’t have to be unique. In fact, you can make use of the content you’ve already created for other mediums (your blog, your YouTube channel, and other social media) and repurpose it. 

Learn how to repurpose content effectively in our article. 

Regardless of what you decide to share with your audience, you need to make sure you deliver high-quality content that is error-free, visually appealing, and easy to digest. Double-check all the copy you use in your content, both in-text and on the image. 

Speaking of images… We’ve already mentioned that LinkedIn publications that feature images tend to perform better because they stand out from the crowd and capture the viewer’s attention. A well-designed visual can make your LinkedIn content appear more professional and valuable.

The easiest way to create stunning visuals for your LinkedIn posts is VistaCreate. You can choose from thousands of professionally designed templates for all kinds of purposes and customize them to look unique and intrinsic to your brand.

For example, you can use these templates to talk about your offerings:

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Or hype your followers up for an around-the-corner sale with one of these templates:

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Or utilize one of these templates to announce your upcoming webinar:

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In this section, we’ve only tested the Content Marketing waters — if you want to approach your content strategy more holistically, make sure you give our article on content marketing strategy for small businesses a read!

Examples of effective LinkedIn content

For you to have a better idea of what to aim for when creating content for your LinkedIn business page, let’s look at some examples of effective LinkedIn content. 

➡️ See the full post here!

Why is it good? This LinkedIn publication hits all the right spots. It makes good use of hashtags and industry-appropriate emojis. The copy is clean and straight to the point, and it offers a carousel of branded, well-designed images that you can’t help but swipe through (a big loud CTA “Swipe” along with an arrow on the first slide helps).

Here’s another example of an effective LinkedIn publication from Fast Jobs:

➡️ See the full post here!

Why is it good? Just like in the previous example, the business is leveraging the benefits of the carousel format and making its content interactive (yes, swiping through slides is a kind of interaction, too!) Moreover, Fast Jobs also successfully engages the audience by sharing behind-the-scenes content, humanizing the brand, and putting a face to a name. The copy is great, too. All the hashtags are in their place, and there’s a strong CTA that directs the viewer toward the next steps. 

And finally, an example of a funky LinkedIn post that is bound to attract the audience’s attention from Chili Piper:

➡️ See the full post here!

Why is it good? Chili Piper taps both into Video Marketing by resharing a TikTok video (bonus points for content repurposing) and into current trends (“It’s corn” is the most viral sound/meme at the moment). While it’s likely to fade away in just a few weeks, right now, the trend is hot, and the brands that manage to hop on it by making the trend relevant to their niche get some extra, free exposure. 

Learn how to create videos in seconds with VistaCreate’s Video Editor in our article.

4. Leverage top LinkedIn Marketing tools 

LinkedIn Marketing can be time-consuming if you handle it manually. But thanks to technological advancement, you don’t have to — there are plenty of LinkedIn Marketing solutions that will increase your productivity and generate higher ROI: 

• Hootsuite — Hootsuite is a social media management tool that can help you manage your brand presence on LinkedIn in a smarter way. This tool allows you to keep track of your LinkedIn content plan, publish posts, target specific audiences, analyze the performance of your publications, and engage with your followers. 
• VistaCreate — VistaCreate is a graphic editing tool that allows you to create professional-looking designs in minutes. With this tool, you can easily up your LinkedIn Marketing game by spicing up your publications with trendy, custom on-brand visuals, short videos, and more. As a bonus, you can plan and schedule your content calendar directly from the editor.
• LinkedIn Sales Navigator — LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a native LinkedIn sales and marketing tool that allows you to look for leads to reach out to based on a set of different search criteria. With this tool, you can build a better-shaped network for your business. 
• Lempod — Lempod is a tool that allows you to increase your LinkedIn posts’ reach and visibility by getting everyone in the ‘pod’ a.k.a. your teammates automatically like every post you publish on your business page. 

Common mistakes on LinkedIn

Mistakes aren’t necessarily a bad thing. They can make you stronger when you learn from your mistakes. However, when it comes to LinkedIn Marketing, you often don’t have a second shot at promoting your business and need to get everything right early on. So, it’s best to learn from somebody else’s mistakes.

We’ve compiled a list of the most common reasons marketers mess up or typically underperform on LinkedIn, plus how to avoid these mistakes.

❌ Leaving sections of your LinkedIn business page incomplete

The more complete your LinkedIn page is, the higher your chances of getting noticed are. Remember to fill out all the fields you can, including the organizational information, the overview, and the tagline, all while keeping your information and visuals high-quality, up-to-date, and on-brand. Don’t forget to mention your specialties, too. 

❌ Underestimating the power of LinkedIn Groups

LinkedIn is all about the community. You can quickly and easily grow your following base by simply being active in different groups, and communicating with people from your target audience. 

❌ Limiting yourself to only one LinkedIn content type

LinkedIn is known for offering marketers a vast selection of different formats, so you need to get the most out of it. Mix things up and alternate between video-based, image-based, and text-based content in your publications. 

❌ Having an irregular content publishing schedule  

Don’t post too often or too rarely. Don’t post too much or too little. Instead, find out when your target audience is most likely to be online to see your LinkedIn content and stick to those times every 2 to 3 days. 

❌ Not making your content engaging

Make sure you spark conversations with your LinkedIn content. Not only does that help with creating a community around your brand, but it also lands your content on more LinkedIn feeds. Encourage your audience to discuss the content you share in the comments section or on their personal pages.  

❌ Not getting your employees involved in LinkedIn Marketing activities 

LinkedIn Marketing is a group project — the more people are working on it, the more recognition it gets in the end. Boost your employees’ personal brands and get them to actively promote your business’ LinkedIn page online. You know what they say: Like, Comment, and Share!

Pros and cons of LinkedIn for business

While the perks and drawbacks of LinkedIn Marketing will differ from company to company and from industry to industry, there are several universal pros and cons for you to consider:

Perks of LinkedIn Marketing for businesses

• LinkedIn supports numerous types of content, which means you can keep your LinkedIn strategy diverse and exciting.
• You can enjoy the benefits of various third-party apps and automate parts of your LinkedIn Marketing.
• LinkedIn boasts having a base of users with the highest business intent for purchasing decisions in their respective companies. 
• LinkedIn is effective for generating social traffic to B2B websites and blogs. 
• LinkedIn Marketing isn’t as popular as Social Media Marketing on other platforms, which makes it less competitive. 

Drawbacks of LinkedIn Marketing for businesses

• The price of LinkedIn Premium required for successful LinkedIn Marketing might be too high for some early-stage startups on a tight budget. 
• LinkedIn paid advertising is much more expensive than advertising on other social media platforms. 
• LinkedIn is great for B2B marketing but might not be equally as effective for B2C marketing. 
• Developing a coherent content strategy for LinkedIn takes up a lot of time as the average quality of content on LinkedIn is higher than on other social media platforms.

If you’re a B2B business looking to market its products and services to high-quality leads, LinkedIn is the right place to be. 

• It’s great for raising brand awareness.
• It can expose your brand to a broader audience.
• It can drive lots of social traffic to your blog or website.

However, this is only possible if you know your audience well, understand what they’re looking for on LinkedIn, and have a solid idea of how that content performs on LinkedIn. 

If you’re a B2C business looking to leverage the benefits of LinkedIn Marketing… you’ll have a bit more of a struggle getting to the top, but we believe that it’s worth it. Embrace LinkedIn Marketing before your competitors decide to do so and get the first-mover advantage. 

And while you’re mastering the art of LinkedIn Marketing strategy, VistaCreate will help you with creating professional-looking visual content to aid your LinkedIn business growth.