― Bobby Darnell

In today’s time, being on LinkedIn is simply awesome. Whether you are a business owner, a professional, a freelancer, or a student, this platform has something for everyone. That’s probably why the social media platform has recorded an impressive 690 million active users in 2020 itself.

But when it comes to marketing on LinkedIn, professionals, and businesses are still in the nascent stages.

While some consider it to be just another platform for networking, there are others who believe it’s only meant for hiring purposes. And then there’s also a group of people who are trying to leverage the platform for marketing but haven’t cracked the code yet.

If you’re someone who’s just starting out with LinkedIn marketing or wants to know what may have gone wrong with their strategy, this post is for you. 

Dos’ of LinkedIn marketing 

1. Let your profile show who you are 

When someone visits your profile, they see three things:

• Your profile picture – Make sure it looks professional. Adding party pictures, pictures from your wedding or your last trip is not a good idea.
• Your cover photo – Make your cover photo like your business card. Define what you do in a couple of words. (Bonus Tip – You can pick a template from Canva to design your LinkedIn cover).
• Your headline – Your headline should define your USPs as a professional. So instead of stuffing it with your skills, offer solutions to the problems of your target audience.

For example, Instead of simply writing that you’re a startup coach, maybe talk about how you help them grow.
source.

2. Craft your about us section strategically

Copying templates to add some random content in your ‘about section’ might not help you in the long run. Nor will trying to find a few good paragraphs from a similar profile. This section needs to be about you, what you do, what you can offer, and hence strategically crafted.

Here’s a simple format to follow to ensure you don’t undersell or oversell to anyone visiting your profile – especially your prospects.

• Write about your present – What are you doing presently,  professionally of course.
• Write about your past – What have you achieved so far?
• Write about your future – Where do you see yourself in the next 5-10 years?

But more importantly, write what you strive to achieve and how you can add value to those who connect with you on LinkedIn. Treat this as your cover letter and you’ll see how many conversations you’re able to strike naturally as you expand your network.

3. Build your recommendations and request endorsements

70% of people trust reviews and recommendations from strangers and that is the power of social proof. The same holds true on LinkedIn. Highlight your skills by getting recommendations from ex-coworkers, friends, bosses, and others in your network.

This social proof also helps you sell better. With more people standing up and speaking positively about what you have to offer, you’ll have to do lesser convincing.

4. Give your profile visitors a sneak peek into your background

Add relevant information under every experience that you may have. Also, make your profile more interesting by adding some information under your educational background. This will help your connections get to know you better and maybe even find something to relate with you on!

For example, add information like ‘Sports captain in school’, ‘National champion – Cricket’ etc. to enhance your story in the eyes of the visitors. If nothing else, it might just become a conversation starter.

A little pep talk before you dive into a sales call, for instance, is a great warm-up session.

5. Share your knowledge and insights 

There are endless things one learns while on the job. Some relevant to the job and some that are experiences that somehow help you become a better self for the job.

But how do you get someone new in your connections or your prospects to know how much you’ve learned? Or how much value you can add to them? You can’t just have them trust you blindly and hop onto a sales call. You need to warm them up and make them feel like they can trust you.

This is where sharing your knowledge and insights as LinkedIn posts come into play.

From top-notch marketers to solopreneurs and others, the ones who are becoming “known” in the industry are typically those who haven’t been afraid to share tips. Unfiltered. With only one goal – educate.

6. Proactively engage with your connections

LinkedIn marketing is not just about sending out invites and growing your network. The important thing here is to stay on top of your connection’s minds at all times and for that, you need to engage with them proactively.

Send your connections personalized messages, endorse them for their skills, interact with the content they post, reply to the comments you get on yours, and find other avenues to start a conversation on LinkedIn.

Now, this can be time-consuming. But you can leverage automation tools such as Scrab.in to automate these tasks for you. From visiting profiles to sending out personalized messages, it takes care of it all and gives you back the time you can invest in growing your business.

Now that you know some of the most effective dos’ of LinkedIn marketing, let’s move on to the don’ts.

Don’ts of LinkedIn marketing

1. Do not send requests to “everyone” on LinkedIn

It is often said that you should only connect with four types of people over LinkedIn:

• People who can teach you something.
• People who can learn from you (this is the kind that will engage with your content).
• People who are your prospects or can give you some ROI.
• People who you can actually add value to.

So if you’ve been sending out invites to connections of those you want to connect and everyone else that shows up on LinkedIn, it’s time to take stock. Stop, right now.

2. Do not spam people with vague messages 

When we said to reach out to your connections with personalized messages, we did not mean bombarding them.

Always send meaningful messages to your connections to strike conversations. In fact, even when you’re sending across a note with an invite, put in the effort to make it relevant to who you want to connect with.

The best way to do this is to learn about the problems of your target audience and then offer them a solution. Without expecting anything in return, of course.

3. Keep your profile more up-to-date 

One of the most common mistakes that people make is creating a profile and then simply using it for expanding their networks, or so to say, LinkedIn marketing. But as months roll by, their network changes, their professional roles change, but their profiles remain the same. That’s where they start to lose out on conversations because the new visitors and connections don’t know who you are “now”.

So irrespective of what your LinkedIn marketing goals are, make sure your profile remains up-to-date at all times.

No goal can be achieved when the foundation is too weak or too old.

4. Do not stuff your content with hashtags

You are posting consistently? Awesome work! 

But if you are stuffing your content with unlimited hashtags then nothing is going to happen. We know you want your content to reach as many LinkedIn users as possible. But at the same time, you want it to be readable. You want it to make you look like an authority instead of someone who just posts copy-paste content.

Whether it’s a link you’re resharing or a piece of content from what you have learned so far, make sure you only add the relevant hashtags to it. This will also make sure that you attract the right audience to your content and your profile, making your LinkedIn marketing strategy more effective.

5. Stop scrolling, start doing

LinkedIn is great and has some amazing content but mindlessly scrolling through the platform won’t take you anywhere. It’s like going down the rabbit hole of watching one YouTube video after the other.

So join the platform with a goal. Your goal can be personal branding, lead generation, etc. but having one is an absolute must.

Once you have a goal, grow your network, follow hashtags, follow industry leaders, join groups and engage with people as per that goal. Do as much as you can to reach as many people as you can and see your LinkedIn marketing strategy become more effective by the day.

Should you focus so much on the dos and don’ts?

 YES.

LinkedIn is one platform that is yet to explode. With amazing organic growth and new features coming every now and then, it is one of the best platforms to invest your time and resources in. 

However, you should never forget that there are humans sitting on the other side of the screens as well and you cannot simply sell something to them instantly. Your goal needs to be “networking”.

Learn from what you do. Learn from your connections. Take value and add value, and continually test different strategies of LinkedIn marketing to grow your business! 

So give some time to this platform. Add a tint of content and lots of engagement to bake the perfect cake of ROI and if you do it right, trust us, your brand value will grow over time.

Suggested:

Complete guide to using LinkedIn Live.

A Quick and Easy Guide to LinkedIn Automation Tools.

The post The Dos and Don’ts of LinkedIn marketing appeared first on Tricky Enough.

As a former social media marketer turned freelance writer, I know just how time-consuming it can be to manage a social media presence. Even if you work on tasks in bulk by creating content calendars and scheduling posts in advance, it still takes longer than most people realize to come up with content ideas and manage a social media presence.

The good news is that there are tools out there that can help you, and automation in particular has a lot to offer us. So let’s go ahead and take a look at everything you need to know about LinkedIn automation tools.

A Quick and Easy Guide to LinkedIn Automation Tools

1. LinkedIn Sales Navigator

This tool belongs at the start of this list because it’s directly offered by LinkedIn, which makes it a good place to get started if you’ve never used LinkedIn automation before. For a free tool, it’s pretty good, allowing you to get started with the process of identifying and reaching out to your target audience on the network.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator also has the advantage of being bundled in as part of LinkedIn Premium, which itself comes with a whole heap of perks, including LinkedIn’s InMail. That alone makes Premium worth thinking about because it allows you to more easily reach out to people.

2. SalesAI formally known for Kennected

This tool is designed to automatically follow groups and hashtags as a way of growing your reach and your network. It’s geared towards identifying what’s relevant and what’s got people talking so that your brand can go ahead and jump into the conversation.

On the downside, it doesn’t come with a free trial (although you can book a demo), and it’s hard to tell what steps they take to remain within LinkedIn’s terms of service. Still, as a LinkedIn lead generation tool, it’ll get the job done.

3. Dux-Soup

Dux-Soup is designed to help you generate further data about your LinkedIn browsing habits, including better tracking for profile visits. The downside is that it takes the form of a Google Chrome extension, which won’t be any good for you if you’re using a different browser.

Dedicated, standalone LinkedIn automation tools tend to be the best for creating powerful campaigns, and if that’s what you’re looking for then you’re going to want to continue the search until you find something a little more powerful. Still, it’s not bad for beginners, and it has some decent features like the ability to automatically like and follow or endorse skills.

4. Zopto

Zopto is one of the easiest tools on this list to get started with, so it’s one to consider if ease of use is a priority. You can create an account in just a couple of minutes, and from there you can start to build your automated LinkedIn campaigns and begin bringing in inbound leads.

One of the best things about Zopto is that you can specify the approximate level of engagement that you want to receive. With full control over your targeting and your outreach campaigns, Zopto is ideal for companies who want to take their fate into their own hands.

5. LinkedHelper

LinkedHelper is designed to be a LinkedIn-first alternative to running a customer relationship management (CRM) system. The goal is to make it easier for LinkedIn users to grow their network in a more targeted way, allowing them to gather data on individual prospects and to easily view all historic interactions.

They aim to make it easier for you to turn your LinkedIn marketing into a simple process that you can measure from end to end. If you know who your audience is and you want to set up automated outreach and/or follow-ups, LinkedHelper can make it easier for you to do that.

6. SalesLoft Prospector

This tool is just the ticket if you’re looking for something that will help you to prospect for leads and gain a greater understanding of the micro-communities on LinkedIn that are most suited to your business. It can be a useful precursor to running outreach and advertising campaigns, and it also has several other features that can help you take your LinkedIn marketing to the next level.

7. Crystal

This tool can be super useful for rookie sales teams or those where a little extra support can make the difference between closing and losing a sale. What’s particularly interesting about Crystal is that it’s specifically designed to provide personalized insights to help your sales team to profile potential customers.

Based on the ‘DISC’ personality model, Crystal uses the power of AI to generate buyer profiles for potential customers using a range of different data points and behavioural insights. It gives you a computer-generated report on key prospects, and it comes with ten free trial reports so you can make sure that you’re happy with it before you commit to taking out a license.

8. Overloop Formally Known for Prospect.io

This tool is arguably best used if you’re looking to export data from LinkedIn for you to use elsewhere, whether that’s in another tool or a CRM system. With just a couple of clicks, you can export all of the available data on contacts or contacts of your choice, including contact details, job titles, and more.

The best feature of Prospect.io is probably the proprietary algorithm it uses to allow you to find people’s email addresses with just a couple of clicks. It also has full integration with Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack, and other tools, which can help you make it a part of your workflow.

9. LeadFuze

LeadFuze is another prospecting tool, essentially acting as a search engine for LinkedIn that helps you to find potential customers and their contact details. On the downside, it’s a little bit on the pricy side, but it makes for a useful little tool with some interesting targeting options, such as the ability to target people who are using a specific content management system (CMS) for their website.

10. Meet Alfred

Meet Alfred is essentially a bot that you can customize to take actions on your behalf and to emulate the LinkedIn usage patterns of real people. It’s a decent little time-saver in that respect, but it’s relatively light on features compared to some of the other tools on this list so if you do use Meet Alfred, you might need to also use another tool alongside it.

11. Expand

This cloud-based tool is designed to be as safe as possible, working within LinkedIn’s guidelines and safety practices to help you grow your professional network without getting banned. For example, they use random delays between different actions to try to make your LinkedIn usage seem more natural. They also offer an auto warm-up feature that slowly eases into a campaign instead of going in all guns blazing.

On the downside, there are no free trials on offer and their pricing starts at around $100 per month, so if you’re working on a budget then you might want to give this one a miss.

12. Bant.io

Bant.io isn’t an automation tool as such, although they do use them on their clients’ behalves. They’re essentially an outsourced marketing team that will run automated LinkedIn campaigns on your behalf, delivering fresh leads directly into your inbox.

They’re pretty different from the other tools that we’ve talked about, but they’re worth mentioning, especially if you’re looking to run integrated campaigns across LinkedIn, email marketing, remarketing, and more. Plus they do all of the hard work for you, leaving you free to focus on other marketing pursuits.

Conclusion

Now that you know just a few of your options when it comes to LinkedIn automation tools, it’s over to you to start putting them to use at your company. Used well, they can save you huge amounts of time and energy, streamlining your approach to the world’s largest business-first social network.

So now that you’ve heard from me, I want to hear from you. Be sure to leave a comment to let me know which LinkedIn automation tools you use, especially if you think I’ve missed one. Let’s keep the conversation going!

The post A Quick and Easy Guide to LinkedIn Automation Tools appeared first on Tricky Enough.