LinkedIn is a social media platform that offers a plethora of options for businesses. As the largest community of business professionals in the world, LinkedIn users consume a wide range of content that assists in building professional relationships, raising awareness and generating quality business leads.

Know your audience

LinkedIn’s audience shows that businesses can benefit from spending time to build their presence on the platform. With 40 million decision-makers interacting through this medium, 94% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn to distribute content and engage with their audience. Content consumed includes industry news, professional advice, insights and recommendations. Closer to home, of the 18 million South Africans on social media, 6.1 million use LinkedIn.

Source: LinkedIn Marketing Solutions

How to use LinkedIn to reach your goals

For B2B companies, this platform can be used to target and grow your client-base through organic expansion as well as paid promotion. A number of recruitment options from the platform can help your company identify the right people to grow your workforce.

Businesses must ensure that there is a clear message and objective. Social media requires effort and alignment with your business’s objectives for optimum return on investment (ROI). From here a content calendar should be created that has a variety of content which still speaks to the overall strategy to drive presence on the platform.

The benefits of the platform

LinkedIn provides the additional benefit of extending a company’s reach through their paid promotion options. These include sponsored posts, text ads and lead generation forms – to name a few.

Although paid promotion on LinkedIn is relatively more expensive than other social media platforms, the value of targeting outweighs the cost disparity. Some of the target audience elements include job title, job function, industries, location and company size.

The platform also allows for flexibility, giving businesses the opportunity to experiment and refine until a tailor made recipe is found that works.

Getting the most for your budget

Whether it be creating awareness, growing traffic to your website or generating leads for new business, success lies in the ability to translate technology value into tangible business value and then harvest these outputs for optimum results.

Consistent, quality, targeted and valuable exposure drives greater visibility and ensures that clients are top of mind with their prospective customers.

Reporting and analysis through embedded tracking links in every piece of content and Google Analytics allows the business to find out who is coming to the website, for how long, what content is being looked at and ultimately tailoring messages for greater success for future campaigns.