How to build a successful LinkedIn strategy for your business

Setting up a plan for your LinkedIn activity is something I always recommend to my clients. It helps to boost your efficiency by linking your activity to clearly defined objectives; it ensures direction and accountability; and it will also provide you with plenty of inspiration for your content.

Another important reason for having a LinkedIn marketing strategy in place is the fact that pushing a sales pitch or aggressively advertising is widely frowned upon. This social media platform requires a slightly different approach to get the results you want.

Giving your approach some thinking is definitely worth the effort, as LinkedIn users come to the platform 'to do business'. LinkedIn is known for its ability to generate 277% more leads on average than Facebook.

What do you want your business to achieve on LinkedIn?

Some common goals include:

• increasing brand awareness

• expanding your business network to boost referrals

• positioning yourself as a thought leader in your niche

• sourcing talent

• connecting with potential donors or sponsors

Who do you want to connect with and why?

Think who is an ideal connection for your business; in other words, who you want to do business with. Having a clear idea in your mind will help you to find these people through LinkedIn's search feature.

Important point here: The person you want to connect with may already be connected to one of your first-degree contacts, so don't forget to tactfully request introductions where possible.

Having a clear strategy for your LinkedIn activity will also have an impact on who you're 'following' – and following the right people will make your LinkedIn experience so much more rewarding.

Your newsfeed will display updates from people and sources you actually want to hear from – both for the purposes of learning and staying up to date with industry news, as well as building interactions with interesting prospects and industry influencers.

Liking and commenting on their updates may be a softer way of opening up a conversation and building a rapport. In other words, a good way of 'warming up the lead' before sending a connection request.

Being mindful of who you follow works the other way too. If you find your newsfeed cluttered with dull content, use the three dots in the top right-hand corner of the post to 'Unfollow'. This is a subtle way of removing content from specific contacts from your newsfeed, while remaining connected to them.

What type of content will best reflect your expertise?

How you present yourself through the content your share on LinkedIn will directly affect your business and your personal brand.

Keeping your content relevant to your industry proves to your followers and potential customers that you're up to date with news and trends. It will also help you to establish yourself as a quality source of industry updates.

And remember, you don't need to be a 'business guru' to share helpful articles and insights. Your personal experience can also be of value, as long as it remains relevant and beneficial to your target audience.

Ideas for LinkedIn updates

• What's happening behind the scenes of your business

• Useful articles

• Industry updates with your commentary

• What you've read recently and what were the main lessons

• Practical tips and lessons from your personal experience that would benefit your audience

• You can include some promotional posts, but as a general rule of thumb these should not make up for more than a third of your overall posts

It's also worth pointing out, especially if your objective is to position yourself or your business as a thought leader, that you should consider creating your own long-form content on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn has changed substantially over the last few years and has now emerged as one of the leading content platforms, with articles gaining a lot of popularity.

Benefits of publishing articles on LinkedIn

• They can help to establish your voice within a specific area and build trust as an expert

• They provide more value to your network and help to form a first impression to anyone who visits your profile

• They can be indexed by Google and show up in organic search, providing you with a wider opportunity for exposure and engagement

• Your connections will be notified each time you publish a LinkedIn article, providing you and your business with much wider exposure than a regular update

To recap, everything you do on the platform should be purposeful and bring you closer to achieving your objectives.

I hope that these tips will help you to clarify your direction and strategy on LinkedIn. Should you need more advice on how to use LinkedIn to support your marketing efforts, please connect with me and send me a message.

How are you going to stand out?

Change your LinkedIn profile URL

LinkedIn is, essentially, a massive search engine. It works much the same way for its users as Google does for websites. When a LinkedIn user – that’s your potential customer – is looking for a solution to their problems, they’ll turn to the LinkedIn search bar.

By default, your profile URL will be the name you used when you joined LinkedIn. In my case, that looks like this:

www.linkedin.com/joanna-michaels

That’s all well and good, but if anyone’s searching for you using your name either:

• they already know who you are

  OR

• you might want to consider a restraining order…

Instead, you should think about what your clients might be looking for.

Anyone looking for someone who does what I do, to use an example that’s close to home, might search for “LinkedIn trainer” or “Marketing consultant”.

Now, there’s one slight problem here, in that LinkedIn doesn’t allow you to use its own brand name in your URL. So I’d have to use “social selling trainer”, “social media trainer” or something similar instead. Some lateral thinking can be required!

So let’s take the less complicated “marketing consultant” as our example.

How to change your LinkedIn profile URL

First, you have to find WHERE to change your LinkedIn URL… Like so much on LinkedIn, that’s not as easy as it might sound!

1. Open up your LinkedIn homepage and head over to the top right-hand corner.

2. Click on ‘Me’ underneath your profile picture.

3. Click the ‘View Profile’ button.

4. Click on the ‘Edit Public Profile & URL’ link in the top right.

Note: At the time of writing, this link gets partially hidden by a ‘helpful’ additional navigation bar that LinkedIn pops up as soon as you start to scroll back up the page. Persevere, the benefits outweigh the pain!

Choose your new URL carefully

It’s important to note that your LinkedIn profile URL is NOT dynamic. You can change it as often as you like, but that won’t change any existing links to your profile that are out in the wild.

So, if one week you choose to use “mary-smith-lion-tamer” then the following week you decide “mary-smith-hamster-training” is a safer business bet… any links you’ve already sent out to your profile will stop working.

Obviously, you want people to have an easy way to find you on LinkedIn, so you should be putting links to your profile out there. Whether that’s on emails, your website, printed on business cards… when you change your URL, all those links will instantly be out of date.

For that reason, you really only want to change your profile URL once. So ensure you choose something that’s meaningful, relevant and makes it clear what you do.

The perfect LinkedIn profile URL

Perfect is a strong word but it’s what you should strive for in choosing your new URL. Here are my top tips for getting close to perfect:

• Use a combination of your name and what you most want to be found for.

• Keep it personal and searchable to increase your chances of appearing above your competitors.

• Take some time to write out different variations before making the change.

One final thought on changing your LinkedIn URL – it shows good attention to detail. If you’ve put thought into your URL, you’re showing potential clients that you plan ahead, think about how you present yourself and understand the importance of paying attention to the small things.

Relevant resources

• How to attract customers and clients on LinkedIn

• Lunch and Learn: The secrets to LinkedIn success

• Growing your LinkedIn network is more than just a numbers game