LinkedIn Marketing

From Facebook marketing to Twitter marketing to YouTube marketing, there are a wide variety of social networking sites that can be utilised to communicate with your customers and prospects, and to drive traffic to your brand. The difference of LinkedIn marketing is that whilst other social media sites like YouTube and Facebook were built for enterainment and personal usage, LinkedIn was designed for use by business professionals as a business platform.

Looking at some of the statistics on LinkedIn itself, you will see:

• LinkedIn has in excess of 60 million members
• A new member joins LinkedIn on average every single second
• Executives and board members from all of the Fortune 500 (USA) and the FTSE 100 (UK) companies are LinkedIn members

Our LinkedIn marketing strategy

We begin the process by ensuring you are registered on the site, build your profile in full then start to build your network with existing clients, customers and contacts. We will liaise with you to ensure we are doing this in the most positive way for your business. These contacts will be the people who have dealt with your business for the longest amount of time, who are absolutely “sold” on yoru service, your products and your reputation. We will also try to get as many of your employees involved, if necessary showing them how to create their own professional profile on the platform – remember that their profiles reflect directly onto your business. Once we have this network established we will then reach out to this core of contacts and request recommendations to display on your business profile. LinkedIn works in a simliar way to review sites on this front, in that a recommendation from a contact is a huge “vote of confidence” in yoru services and WILL have a positive effect on your future lead generation.

Once your personal account and profile are created, including your core network of contacts, customers and staff, we then create a group for your brand. This allows us to reach beyond the people you already have contact with and establish a base within LinkedIn for others to discover your busienss. In many ways similar to FaceBook fan pages (but for an entirely different audience), we can initiate discussions, publish news, advertise jobs and even create subgroups that will serve as a whole community platform in which your potential customers can learn all about your company and interact with your brand.

We then take the time to maximise the search engine optimisation and secondary impact of your LinkedIn profile, including relevant URLs within your profile, and using links with relevant anchor text. We also ensure the proper use of keywords within your descriptions, text and content. This will include your summary, your specialities, your experience as well as any other description categories.
With LinkedIn being a visual platform, it is important that we also include imagery in your profile – please do send us a mug shot so we can uplaod this for you. Remember that this image is going to convey your business profile, so it might not be the best idea to send a picture of you on a stag night at half past midnight….. however, LinkedIn, is, despite the business footing, a social networking channel. So we add as many personal elements as possible to encourage personal connection and put your face to your brand.

Once we are sure that your LinkedIn profile and brand is established and fully optimised, we then go and integrate third party applications (of which there are a huge amount) to fully leverage the platform, generating contacts within it and also capitalising on the SEO benefits and potential it brings. To name but a few of these applications:

• Box.net: This allows us to add links to files like pdf documents, product specifications, video marketing and other advertising media.
• Slideshare: This allows us to create and share business presentations with your network, demonstrating your product and business acumen and reinforcing your personal image
• Company Buzz: This allows us to monitor and display messages posted to Twitter about your brand, company, industry or other subjects

We will select the best applications to showcase your particular business and then fully leverage these to get the best all round benefit for your company.

In many ways, once established, LinkedIn shoudl be treated in a similar manner to Twitter marketing or Facebook marketing strategies in that the more engagement with your audience and interaction, the more benficial the results will be. In order to consistently interact with your network:

1. We can synchronise your blog with your profile where possible, allowing your network full interaction with your latest news – if at all possible we will also do a back-sync, allowing your LinkedIn audience to partcipate in discussion at the same time as your blog audience
2. We regularly update your profile (see packages below for options) with the LinkedIn status feature, which behaves in a similar way to Facebook status updates
3. We participate in the LinkedIn Q and A feature – answering industry specific questions to build credibility and reputation as well as posting your own on related topics

To expand and grow your network, we cross pollinate your LinkedIn marketing efforts to other channels. Including a link to your LinkedIn profile in your website footer and/or blog, posting links in individual blog posts, incorporating the link to your email signatures as well as on business cards will all help to raise your profile. We post links to your LinkedIn page on any other social media platform you are engaged in and on your LinkedIn page will also display return links to those platforms. We also adjust your privacy settings to allow enough of your profile to be publically viewable so that the search engines can rank that content accordingly and pass the benefit on to your website.

LinkedIn Marketing Pricing

1. Setup of LinkedIn profile and company/brand group page including profile, location, opening hours, contact information, logo upload, layout, imagery and video content (if available) – £450
2. Management of page and profile including twice per week updates (please keep us up to date with events in your organisation so we can use this to generate updates that will be of interest to your contacts) – £150 per calendar month
3. Management of page including regular workday updates (Monday to Friday excluding bank holidays) – £500 per calendar month
4. Network growth – advanced techniques to acquire more LinkedIn contacts and generate a growing user base to ensure your LinkedIn profile is reaching its intended audience – £200 per calendar month
5. Fully social – our all inclusive package covering FaceBook marketing, Twitter marketing, LinkedIn marketing and YouTube marketing with network growth and workday updates on all channels – £1200 per calendar month
6. Fully social contracted – if you agree to a 12 month contract of our Fully Social package and we will include your profile creation on all of the channels for free.

Please take the opportunity to get in touch with us to discuss how we can make your socila media work for you and get your LinkedIn profile firing on all cylinders.