How to Accelerate Your Startup’s Growth with LinkedIn?

With more than 900 million active LinkedIn members in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide, LinkedIn is the best professional networking platform available today. It is a great platform to tell your startup’s story, increase your visibility and credibility and set your business goals in motion. However, like any other marketing channel, using LinkedIn for your startup’s growth has a learning curve to it. Here are some tips to accelerate your startup’s growth on LinkedIn!

Identify your goals for LinkedIn marketing

As a startup with limited resources, you need to be very intentional about the marketing channel you choose. So be very clear about your goals for LinkedIn. Do you want to increase your brand awareness and authority? Or generate and nurture leads? Or drive relevant traffic to your website/content? Or promote an event? Your content and overall marketing plan should be based on these goals.

Make sure your company page is entirely completed

Your LinkedIn page mainly represents two things – legitimacy and professionalism. These are critical aspects for establishing your brand image. Naturally, your very first step should be to add every relevant information to your company page that allows any visitor to get to know your company better. Also, company pages with complete information receive 30% more visitors than those with incomplete information. Therefore, if you haven’t already done it, get working on the following sections immediately!

Create an aesthetic, high-resolution logo and banner image that captures the essence of your business.

Your “About” section should have a well-written, captivating, and honest company description. Also, it’s always smart to insert keywords in your company profile for better SEO results.
Organizational info like your website URL, company’s location, industry type, and company size should be accurately filled out.
Add a relevant call to action.

Reach and engage with your target audience

LinkedIn is incredible at prospecting. Its extensive search filters can really help you narrow down your focus to an audience that is more likely to be a good fit for your products or services. Here are a few ways you could reach your prospective customers through LinkedIn.

By growing your organic presence

Your organic presence on LinkedIn will translate into genuine connections and help you amplify your brand. Here are a few tips for you to grow your organic presence on LinkedIn:

Draw traffic from outside LinkedIn by adding links, to content pieces you’ve published, to email signatures, websites, blogs, and/or other social media channels.
Make sure your content posting frequency is consistent. According to LinkedIn reports, companies that post weekly see a 2x lift in engagement as compared to companies that do not post as frequently.
Use different kinds of content such as images (result in a 2x increase in comments) and videos (gets 5x more engagement than static content)
Publish relevant thought leadership content like blogs, articles, research reports, and white papers from within your organization. You can also post your company updates, news, and job opportunities. This will help build a community of people who are interested in your business.
Be responsive and engaging when it comes to replying to comments and reacting to page mentions. Also utilize LinkedIn’s engagement-driving features such as LinkedIn Live, LinkedIn Stories, Polls, and Reactions.
Measure, learn, and adjust your content based on your page analytics. Particularly, pay attention to your page’s visitor analytics (who clicked on your page, number of page views, unique visitors over time, ratio of visitors from desktop and mobile, demographic information), update analytics (total number of likes, comments, clicks and shares you’ve had over a specified time period, the ratio of engagement between organic and sponsored content, real-time data on a post-by-post basis) and follower analytics (total number of followers you’ve got, new followers you gained in the last 30 days, demographic data).

Boost your employee involvement on your LinkedIn page. A great way to do that is to create, feature, and tag your employees in behind-the-scenes stories that highlight your company’s values and culture.
Engage and coordinate with customers, brand advocates, thought leaders, and influencers.
Use hashtags to increase your post reach.
You could also launch a Follower campaign under which you could encourage executives and prominent leaders of your industry to @mention your page.
Experiment with posting at different times of the day or week. If you find that a particular type of post gets more engagement than others – do more of it!

By leveraging LinkedIn’s free insight tools to validate your target audience

One of the most powerful aspects of LinkedIn is its Insight Tools which provides industry-specific data. LinkedIn Insights can tell you what our audience wants to know more about and what they avoid by using content engagement data. It also improves retargeting and allows us to stay in touch with new trends. Here are a few different types of insights LinkedIn provides:

People:

Provides data about your audience’s location, skills, occupation, and other individuals and companies they like and follow on social media.

Industry:

Provides data on certain industries, current information, and trending news within these industries that’ll help you understand the needs of your industry-specific customers.

Advertising:

Helps you understand every aspect of how advertising works on LinkedIn and allows you to create successful campaigns to ultimately generate a better ROI.

Talent:

Helps you make better hiring decisions.

By amplifying your reach with LinkedIn’s targeted advertising

You can use LinkedIn advertising to amplify your reach to a target audience outside of your network. You can choose to target options based on locations, audience attributes such as company, job experience, education, demographics, interests, and traits.

Identify and convert your high-value customers

With a database of over 900M professionals, your LinkedIn followers could include potential investors, customers, partners, employees, and advocates for your growing brand. According to reports, LinkedIn users have twice the buying power compared to the average web audience. So, tapping into this database can drive leads with high conversion potential. Here are three ways in which you could convert high-value customers for your business:

Use your ICP to get high-potential leads
Develop action-oriented offers to engage and convert your audience
Use LinkedIn’s lead generation forms to generate leads. Lead generation forms have a 5 times higher conversion rate as compared to landing pages.