6-Step Corporate LinkedIn Strategy

By Tracy DiMarino | Posted July 29, 2010 | 13 Comment(s) | Filed in: Internet Marketing, Social Media

Through active LinkedIn participation, there are tremendous opportunities to improve your company’s reach and influence. In addition, LinkedIn can be an excellent outlet for lead generation.

Following is a six-step corporate LinkedIn Strategy that contains techniques and recommendations on how your business can effectively leverage LinkedIn to:

Build brand awareness.
Establish company representatives as industry experts.
Connect with prospects, customers, vendor partners and peers.
Drive leads and sales.

The Strategy assumes that your business already has a presence on LinkedIn — including a business profile that is linked to individual employee profiles — and that you are seeking ways to enhance your visibility on the site through ongoing monitoring and increased participation.

Step 1: Identify Buyer Personas and Conversations

In order to achieve the above objectives, it is important to identify the buyer personas with whom your company is looking to connect, and then determine if, and where, they are active on LinkedIn. Do some preliminary LinkedIn Answers and Group searches to see if your target audiences are active on LinkedIn prior to diving in. At this time, flag any relevant conversations or groups to share with your team. Note: It may be helpful to create an Excel document that lists potential groups with descriptions, links and notes to reference later.

Step 2: Benchmark Current Site Activity

By benchmarking your LinkedIn presence, you’ll be able to evaluate the success of your campaign on an ongoing basis. Consider tracking data such as referring traffic, employee connections and recommendations, and participation levels (i.e. how often employees are engaging in relevant conversations).

Step 3: Select Employees to Lead Participation

Designate a few employees to be internal LinkedIn champions. To be most effective, these individuals should be social-network savvy; knowledgeable about your products, services and brand messaging; and have a desire to engage with target audiences.

Participants should also have the time availability each week to respond to LinkedIn discussions and questions relating to their areas of expertise. Note: See Step 5 for tips on how to alleviate some of the time commitment required from individuals.

Step 4: Have Employees Optimize Their Profiles

Encourage your employees to optimize their profiles. Be sure that all individual profiles are completely filled out — including the Summary, Specialties and Job Position sections — with keyword-rich descriptions. Also, include links to Twitter profiles, as well as optimized links to your company website and blog, if applicable. See our blog post “Six Tips for Maximizing Your LinkedIn Profile” for some best practices.

Step 5: Set Up a Monitoring System

LinkedIn Answers and Groups provide the most opportunities to connect with prospects, customers, vendor partners and peers. For this reason, it’s important to monitor these sections on a regular basis, and contribute meaningfully to discussions.

When commenting, it is perfectly acceptable to share relevant blog posts and content pieces your company created. However, aim to be helpful and not overly self-promotional, and abide by group rules. To simplify the monitoring process, and alleviate the time commitment needed for each person, consider:

Designating one person to monitor and distribute opportunities to other team members. This saves time since only one person is monitoring instead of multiple. The monitor can then email relevant commenting opportunities to team members based on each individual’s core competencies/expertise.
Incorporating LinkedIn Answer searches into your RSS feed readers.
Using a social-media monitoring tool, such as HubSpot, Radian6 or ScoutLabs.
Having each person choose 3-5 groups that they will receive email updates for, and contribute to, on a regular basis.

Step 6: Participate & Engage in Conversations

On an ongoing basis, encourage employees to actively participate in priority groups and respond to relevant LinkedIn Answers queries. In addition, employees should update their LinkedIn statuses often. This increases their visibility on the site by ensuring that they appear more often on their connections’ home page feeds. Note: By integrating your Twitter account with LinkedIn, Tweets that contain #in will automatically be posted to your LinkedIn account.

Employees should also be encouraged to proactively request connections with business contacts, and to continuously work to nurture those relationships. Some tips include: passing along relevant content via status updates and individual messages, and connecting like-minded individuals when appropriate.

Your Thoughts?

In what ways have you leveraged LinkedIn to increase your visibility in the industry, connect with target audiences and generate leads?

Tracy DiMarino is an associate consultant at PR 20/20, a Cleveland-based inbound marketing agency and PR firm. Follow Tracy on Twitter @TracyDiMarino.

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Photo Credit: Nan Palmero

Comments

Allan Schoenberg

July 30, 2010 at 4:39am | Permalink

We have had tremendous success using LinkedIn at the exchange to act as focus groups to talk with our customers 24/7. Making these groups private gives our customers the confidence that their information/comments won't be picked up in a public stream, and for us LinkedIn provides a tremendous amount of transparency so we invite quality people (I can see your photo, name and work history). Given the professional nature of the platfrom we've also found that LinkedIn is much more accepted as a social media business platform that people are familiar with and like.
Allan Schoenberg

@allanschoenberg
@CMEGroup
Tracy DiMarino

July 30, 2010 at 8:03am | Permalink

Allan,

Thanks for the added insight and for sharing your experiences. I agree that using the private group functionality for focus groups is yet another way LinkedIn can be used to connect with, and grow deeper relationships with, key target audiences.
Lauren Fernandez

August 2, 2010 at 10:48am | Permalink

This is a great breakdown on a tool that many brands have no idea how to utilize. It creates a foundation that ties all the steps together in a nice package - which brands can definitely learn from.

Its great to first identify your audience, understand if they exist on the platform, then execute from there. Benchmarking is imperative when it comes to your measurable objectives, which can trickle down into identifying which employees represent on LinkedIn and monitoring strategy.

Thanks for breaking it down!

Best,

Lauren Fernandez
Agency Community Manager, Radian6
@cubanalaf
Tracy DiMarino

August 2, 2010 at 12:04pm | Permalink

Lauren,

Glad you enjoyed. We strongly believe that when implementing any marketing activities, companies should ask themselves: "What am I trying to achieve, and how does this fit within our overall strategy?" prior to getting started.

The same philosophy holds true for LinkedIn, which is why we recommend companies research target audiences and establish benchmarks - as these items will ultimately affect your overall participation strategy.

Thanks for stopping by and commenting!
Frank Strong

August 2, 2010 at 10:36pm | Permalink

There is definitely strong evidence emerging to suggest that LinkedIn can drive sales -- that's a great point. I believe it builds trust an opens up the doors to more in depth discussions. Here's a link to a case study on one acquaintance of mine, who started his LinkedIn group as an experiment, but ended up producing solid leads. In his words, the most-high-quality leads: http://bit.ly/9FqotS
Tracy DiMarino

August 3, 2010 at 7:52am | Permalink

Thanks for sharing that case study, Frank! It definitely provides some very helpful tips for people interested in starting and managing a LinkedIn group to establish their expertise. It also makes one strong point:

"Schulze [group creator] doesnât âsellâ his companyâs products to the group, instead he has remained neutral and consultative and focused on engagement with the community. The result? The community grew and began to see Schulze, as a trusted source of information and by extension his company, as a preferred vendor of choice."

I think that Schulze's focus on being a helpful source of great information is one of the main reasons that his group took off so much in the first place, and is a great reminder to the rest of us how powerful this approach can be.
Mario Sundar

August 6, 2010 at 2:30pm | Permalink

Tracy,

Great post that reiterates something I've been increasingly sharing with companies (as LinkedIn's social media guy): your employees are already on LinkedIn. Have a strategy to educate and channel their enthusiasm for your product.

I've taken the liberty of sharing these useful tips on my blog as well - http://bit.ly/9Dj04K

/@mariosundar
p.s. Love the LinkedIn candy pic :) always a big hit at events!
Courtney Hunt

August 8, 2010 at 10:52am | Permalink

Great tips, Tracy. As the founder of a digital community (Social Media in Organizations (SMinOrgs) that began as a LinkedIn group, as well as an active user of virtually all of LinkedIn's features, I can attest to its power and value.

I also provide guidance to individuals and organizations about how to leverage LinkedIn to meet their strategic goals, and would add a couple of tips to your suggestions and the valuable additions provided by others. These tips reflect the importance of using LinkedIn as a means of LISTENING, not just talking - as aspect of engagement that is sometimes overlooked. For example:

1. Polls are a good way to gather people's perspectives on concrete issues. The polls can be widely distributed, and sharing the results creates an opportunity for an individual/organization to provide valuable insights.
2. The "follow" feature is probably one of the most powerful monitoring tools on LinkedIn. You can follow organizations that are key prospects as well as individuals. Getting updates on their activities creates opportunities to reach out in specific, relevant and timely ways.

I will share this post with the SMinOrgs Community. Thanks again.

Courtney
Tracy DiMarino

August 9, 2010 at 8:19am | Permalink

Courtney,

Thanks for the additional tips about listening on LinkedIn â very helpful â as well as for sharing the post with your SMinOrgs Community.
Social Media Marketer

August 24, 2010 at 6:17am | Permalink

Nice marketing tips for using linkedin as a platform. I had to start using linkedin for one of our client who is particularly into SaaS technology and your post is a great help to start.
Tracy DiMarino

August 24, 2010 at 8:06am | Permalink

Thanks for the comment. Best of luck getting started!
Caroline Hoenk

February 17, 2011 at 12:35pm | Permalink

Thanks for this intersting article and good perspective, Tracy. I work with a number of businesses and associations and am (happily) finding that they're becoming much more open to engaging with potential employees, customers and industry partners through forums such as LinkedIn. I think your point about ensuring that the content doesn't become overly self-promotional cannot be overemphasized. The most successful groups that I've seen or particpated in are the ones that focus more on giving their members access to interesting insights and conversations, rather than promoting their own products and news (although there's certainly a place for that, too).
Tracy DiMarino

February 21, 2011 at 7:58am | Permalink

Caroline,

I completely agree that the focus should be on providing the community with helpful, informative resources that are relevant and not self-serving. By doing so, you garner trust from the community and position yourself as a thought leader. Once people begin to view you (and your company) as the expert in a particular industry, they will then be more likely to turn to you when they are in need of the services you offer.

Thanks for stopping by!