While LinkedIn is not as massive as Facebook or YouTube, this social networking platform has slowly grown into a staple for businesses and professionals. Launched in 2003, LinkedIn was designed primarily for professional networking. Job seekers, employers, businesses, and organizations use it to build valuable professional relationships in their own industries. 

However, LinkedIn is more than just social networking nowadays. With more than 900 million active users, the platform has also become an effective marketing and advertising channel for entrepreneurs and organizations. 

To give you a better idea about LinkedIn advertising, here is an overview of the pros and cons of LinkedIn marketing and how to navigate the platform’s SEO.

 

Why Use LinkedIn for Marketing

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There are much bigger social media platforms than LinkedIn. But why do digital marketers continue to use this platform for their marketing campaigns? Here are some of the reasons why entrepreneurs include LinkedIn in their social media marketing campaigns.

 

Different Market and User Demographics

One of the reasons why marketers use LinkedIn for marketing is because it provides access to a completely different demographic. Unlike mainstream social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Twitter, where most of its users belong to the younger generation, LinkedIn comprises mostly professional adults.

LinkedIn is known primarily as a professional social networking site. The majority of LinkedIn users are aged between 30 years old and above, and only 17% of its users are 29 years old and below. This is in complete contrast to other social media platforms where Millennials and Gen Zs are the dominant demographics.

Considering this, marketing on LinkedIn immediately provides digital marketers with a more specific demographic composed of young professionals, business owners, and the like.

 

Boost Online Visibility

Although LinkedIn is not as massive as Facebook, LinkedIn still has a significantly large user base. Marketing on LinkedIn is an easy way to gain access and boost exposure to roughly 900 million users. Creating a LinkedIn Business Profile allows people to find your brand. But aside from that, other users can also link your page in their posts, providing valuable exposure to their social network. 

 

Create valuable social networks

Business-to-business (B2B) relationships are also important in entrepreneurship. Given the nature of LinkedIn as a social networking platform, advertising on LinkedIn can make it easy for brands to connect and network with other businesses in their industry or niche. Also, business owners can find and build supplier and vendor relationships that can help in growing and scaling their businesses. 

 

LinkedIn Ads And SEO

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When it comes to LinkedIn marketing, there are two things that come to mind – LinkedIn Ads and the platform’s search engine optimization (SEO). 

LinkedIn Ads is the site’s paid marketing tool. It is used by brands and businesses to boost their marketing paraphernalia’s visibility and exposure to a specific group, audience, or market. On the other hand, LinkedIn SEO is a strategy used to boost a brand’s organic reach.

 

Types of LinkedIn Ads

LinkedIn Sponsored Content

This type of LinkedIn advertisement is used to promote existing content from a business’s page. LinkedIn Sponsored Content appears on top of the users’ home page or news feed. It can effectively introduce your brand to a specific market or share relevant and valuable information.

 

Sponsored InMail

Sponsored InMail ads are marketing delivered directly to a user’s personal message inbox. This type of advertising is considered more targeted as they are sent to users who showed interest in what you have to offer. It also appears to be more personal and can effectively engage and interact with prospective customers.

 

Text Ads

This type of advertisement is placed along the side rail or inline of a user’s home page. It includes several elements, such as a headline, an image thumbnail, and a short description that can be creatively used to make the content more appealing and engaging. This type of LinkedIn ad runs on a pay-per-click model where advertisers will pay for every click their ad gets.

 

Dynamic Ads

Dynamic LinkedIn ads introduce a more personalized marketing approach using analytics based on user preferences and activity. This type of LinkedIn ad is able to determine valuable leads and allows digital marketers to retarget potential customers at the right time effectively. 

 

Helpful Tips To Boost LinkedIn SEO

Much like any digital marketing campaign, search engine optimization (SEO) has become essential to increase online visibility on any digital channel or platform. LinkedIn SEO allows brands to build a well-optimized page that will boost their search engine ranking and results performance. To help you with this, here are some of LinkedIn’s best SEO practices.

 


Determine the right keywords for your industry or niche

Keyword research is critical for every search engine optimization strategy. To ensure that you are targeting the right audience, it is important that you identify the right keywords or key phrases for your business. 

Your keyword research should be able to come up with relevant words that help describe your business, niche, industry, as well as your products and services. 

Make sure to add these keywords to your business profile’s headlines to make them visible to the users and the search engine as well. You can also personalize your LinkedIn URL and add a relevant keyword to improve your SEO. 

 

Fill out your business’s about section

LinkedIn is still primarily a social networking site. Considering this, an essential part of networking is letting people know who you are and what you have to offer. In order to ensure that anyone visiting your page will be able to understand your brand and business, include as much valuable information as you can. 

However, it is crucial to be still succinct, engaging, and compelling. Learn how to write copy that people will actually read instead of simply skimming through.

 

Learn how hashtags work

Using hashtags is something particularly common on social media platforms. While they are only recently added to LinkedIn, understanding how hashtags work can and incorporating them in your profile and marketing strategies can significantly boost your campaign.

Hashtags are labels used to categorize content. You can select a hashtag and find various posts related to it regardless of niche or industry. Adding hashtags to your content makes it more visible to people who share the same interests. 

 

Drawbacks of Using LinkedIn for Marketing

While LinkedIn can be a powerful marketing tool, there are also some drawbacks when it comes to advertising using this particular social media platform.

One of the drawbacks of LinkedIn marketing is that the platform itself is catered toward business-to-business (B2B) transactions. This means that it can be difficult for brands to find individual customers or leads in their LinkedIn marketing campaigns.

Aside from that, LinkedIn also has relatively poor audience targeting capabilities when compared to other social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube. Because of this, it can be challenging for digital marketers to aim their marketing efforts at a specific LinkedIn audience.

In addition, LinkedIn groups, while created to build communities among people in the same industries, tend to include spam content. Properly managed LinkedIn groups can be great channels for advertising as they filter out spam. However, those who aren’t are often littered with them.

 

Bottomline

LinkedIn marketing is something that most digital marketers overlook. While it may not offer a similar reach as Facebook, using LinkedIn can still be an effective way to advertise and promote your products or services. It can also be a marketing tool to boost brand awareness and increase organic traffic through SEO. 

But more than online marketing, LinkedIn is a type of social media platform that businesses can utilize to create valuable relationships between customers, colleagues, and other brands that can serve as suppliers or vendors. 

 

Want to know more about various social media marketing strategies? Sidekicks is an on-demand virtual company, and we’re eager to help visionaries and entrepreneurs like you. Get a free ebook and learn more about how we can help you by signing up for our newsletter. We also offer a free 30-minute consultation if you prefer something more personal.

 

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