There are so many different ways to improve your marketing efforts with LinkedIn.

In fact, LinkedIn happens to be one of the single best platforms to utilize to maximize your B2B marketing efforts.

Businesses often under-utilize LinkedIn’s platform and potential.

1. Leverage Sponsored Updates.

One of the biggest tips that can make a big difference in your marketing efforts is to make use of LinkedIn sponsored updates. These sponsored updates are a great way to provide a much better way to put your content right in front of the primary influencers that are on the platform. This not only assists you in your efforts to gain authority in the niche but can also help to maximize your exposure to those that might not even be in your network. The best part about sponsored updates is the ability to directly target your specific audience for the update. Thus, you will be able to maximize your efforts by targeting your specific demographic of your highest converting customers. Along with this, you will be able to effectively determine how effective these paid updates are by utilizing the various analytics that LinkedIn provides its users. You’ll be able to find everything to optimize your campaigns from clicks, impressions, click through rate, cost per click, social actions, and even audience demographics.

2. Consistently Offer Value.

When it comes to marketing your business on LinkedIn, it is important to understand how crucial it is to offer value to others. As with any form of content marketing, you must consistently provide value to a prospective client or customer through your content. The same rules apply to marketing via a social networking platform like LinkedIn. A lot of marketers or business owners wrongfully utilize this tactic by simply spamming links or their business to groups on the platform. Rather than simply spamming links or your business’ message, you will want to try to find relevant groups and provide high-quality actionable content that prospective customers will find useful. Believe it or not, but LinkedIn groups are one of the ‘gold mines’ for marketers and businesses alike. You can find extremely high converting prospective clients within these groups looking for answers to specific questions. You are much more likely to generate leads through these groups when you demonstrate your authority within the industry and/or niche by consistently providing high-quality content and value to the members of the group.

3. Focus On Influencer Networking.

When it comes to LinkedIn, it is all about building the right connections. You want to focus on building real relationships with other users on the platform. Most marketers utilize LinkedIn in much of the same way that they utilize other social media platforms. The truth is, LinkedIn has its own identity and it must be utilized in a much more personal and professional manner. By focusing on influence networking, you can make yourself and your business stand out on the platform. Not only will your connections be much more receptive to what you are marketing, but you will be able to consistently maintain a good relationship with your entire network. This will be much more likely to have an end result of a lead, client, or customer.

This kind of influence networking is all about bringing a personal approach to your marketing efforts rather than simply treating everyone the same. It is finding ways to personalize your marketing efforts on the platform in order to maximize engagement with your network and to connect with them on a much deeper level than you could without this level of personalization.

The key is knowing and understand what people in your network are the most important. You want to really focus on trying to pinpoint an actual target customer profile to see who they are, what their needs are, what kind of goals they have, and how they respond to things. By understanding the most valuable people within the network, you will be better able to come up with ways to help them and connect with them.

You can do this in a variety of ways. For one, you will want to utilize the mentions and/or introduction feature which will allow you to speak and communicate directly with them. You will be able to not only speak directly with them, but you will also be able to promote your ideas to them as well.

4. Be Consistent.

One of the biggest mistakes that a lot of marketers make is the inability or unwillingness to be consistent. The fact is, in order to achieve success in marketing on LinkedIn, you must maintain a certain level of consistency. Not only do you need to be consistently visible, but you need to provide consistently high-quality content as well. You will never be able to position yourself or your business as an authority in your industry or niche without having effective and consistent high-quality content, updates, interactions, and more.

Along with this, you will want to ensure that your profile is consistently updated and that you post informative, valuable, and high-quality status updates to your profile each day. While you might assume that this can be very time to consume, in order to do this, you can actually get it done in very little time.

Some of the best ways to stay on your connection’s minds are by posting various sorts of updates and engaging in various activities. Not only do you want to utilize media rich status updates with relevant, engaging, and thought to provoke questions and content, but you will also want to be sure that you share relevant and high-quality content as well.

5. Get Your Employees Involved.

Another major thing that you will want to do which can pay off in a big way is to get your employees involved. By giving your business faces to go by, you should be able to exponentially increase your efforts on the platform in its entirety. You can do this by getting all of your employees on the platform and completing their own profiles.

6. Create Your Own Group.

While you should be posting to relevant groups and providing actionable and high-quality content to them, you will also benefit from creating your own group. By creating your own group, you will be able to facilitate a community of hot and ready to buy prospects. Along with this, you will be able to demonstrate and provide value to the members of said group and even create and tailor products and services to the members at the same time. This will allow you to do all of this without having to look like you are selling anything because it is your group. Along with this, it provides your business with an effective built in the list that you can really target your products and services towards. In addition, you will have a core set of your target market that you can use to utilize as a focus group for future products and services. This is one of the best ways to effectively build out your brand, maximize exposure, and generate a significant amount of leads to boost your bottom line.

7. Avoid Hard Selling At All Costs.

LinkedIn is a platform where you want to soft sell. It is best to avoid hard selling at all costs. People are not looking to participate in discussions and get involved with LinkedIn to be interrupted and sold. Thus, you should treat LinkedIn as a platform to expose your business, products, and services rather than to actively ‘sell’ them.

8. Look For Ways To Go Viral.

Going viral is a guaranteed way to attract more visitors and exposure for your business. Thus, you should look to stay on top of latest news and trends going on within your respective niche in order to be able to effectively capitalize on topics that people are actively talking about or looking to talk about. The best way to do this is by posting directly on LinkedIn and focusing on the topics that are most relevant to networks that service your target customers.

9. Have Patience.

A lot of people begin to utilize a social media platform like LinkedIn and get the urge to jump start everything to grow as fast as possible. Do not think about using any sort of shortcut you might have learned. Instead, practice patience and let your audience and network grow organically. While you will want to seek out groups and other connections that might prove to be valuable, it is important to understand that growing your presence on the platform is not going to happen overnight and you will need to have a good amount of patience.

10. Develop Relationships.

As noted previously, instead of looking to consistently add connections, you will want to think of it as a relationship. It is important to understand that LinkedIn is a social network for professionals interested into networking with other like-minded professionals. As a result, as a business owner, you should be engaged in connecting with and fostering relationships with other business owners, potential partners, referral partners, or any other professional that would be mutually beneficial to know and be connected with. However, instead of treating these people as simple connections, they should be treated and maintained as relationships. In order to do so, the relationship should be constantly nurtured which will allow it to grow and the potential for it to help your business, in the long run, to grow along with it.

Overall, LinkedIn is one of the most underutilized social networking platforms on the Internet when it comes to business and marketing. A lot of marketers simply do not understand nor do they take the time to learn how to effectively market a business on it. LinkedIn itself provides a lot of tools needed to succeed when it comes to marketing a business on its platform. It is up to the marketer or business owner to leverage these tools and the platform as a whole.