Leveraging LinkedIn for Branding and Lead Generation

LinkedIn is the most popular social media platform for establishing a strong professional network globally. LinkedIn not only helps you build connection across your industry, but it has become one of the major tools for promoting your brand. The professional networking platform that was started as a job listing platform for companies is growing hugely and has come up with several features. While employees and jobseekers use job search and LinkedIn learning features, Entrepreneurs can use LinkedIn for business. It can generate leads and helps promote your brand.

Here are opinions shared by some of the startup founders and entrepreneurs on how LinkedIn can be used for lead generation and branding.

Vidisha Debsarkar - Head, Growth Marketing, TradeSmart
Aditya Singh - Co-Founder, Eggoz Nutrition
Neeraj Sharma - Vice Chairman, The Lexicon Group | Director - Pune Times Mirror
Gauri Bhatia - Founder, The Unveiled Sagas
Amulya Nagaraj - Executive Director, PEPPER INTERACTIVE COMMUNICATIONS
Ashmita Dhingra - Managing Director, Digifish3
Abhishek Singh - Senior Vice President of Marketing, Hirect India

Vidisha Debsarkar - Head, Growth Marketing, TradeSmart

"LinkedIn being the largest professional networking platform provides a huge potential to build brand awareness worldwide. Marketers should definitely consider LinkedIn in their brand outreach programs and social media marketing strategies. A significant platform for making public company announcements, displaying work culture, and leading conversations on changing trends can in turn lead to building goodwill for a brand.

People wanting to know more about a brand - prospective customers, partners and talent can eye a brand's LinkedIn space. Hence, maximizing the offerings and analytics of the platform to create valuable and high-end content centering the niche audience of one's sector can garner an overwhelming response.

The LinkedIn blog feature is an effective tool for thought leadership providing unique insights on a specific product, customer behavior, and the evolving industry trends. It is also a great place to showcase human interest stories related to a brand. Intelligent use of LinkedIn ads can further help in successful lead generation from appropriate target audience. When all of these are used holistically, the platform ensures awareness and growth of a brand."

Aditya Singh - Co-Founder, Eggoz Nutrition

Despite having enough potential, LinkedIn remains under-utilized; as marketers continue using common social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, etc., for business promotion. LinkedIn can be a treasure trove for businesses in branding and lead generation. This is primarily because LinkedIn is widely used by Fortune 500 companies. Being a professional networking platform, LinkedIn brings in marketers, working professionals, and the general audience at the same platform, providing businesses with the opportunity to build the brand while generating sales qualified leads.

LinkedIn also provides marketers with industry updates and gives access to a company’s profile and latest performance updates. With the scope to do extensive business research, marketers get the opportunity to contact other relevant businesses and enhance their outreach.

One way to leverage LinkedIn for branding and lead generation is by making a list of target companies and providing them with the company’s relevant information such as services, performance details, and upcoming projects. This increases the visibility of the company in the domestic as well as global market, thereby being an effective way of branding; it also opens the door for lead generation through interaction with other businesses. LinkedIn has a sales navigator to help businesses effectively manage their sales pipeline. The LinkedIn sales navigator also saves the searches and leads and provides sales updates in real-time, connects to the sales tools, and automates the process of lead generation.

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Neeraj Sharma - Vice Chairman, The Lexicon Group | Director - Pune Times Mirror

With the advancement in technology and increased consumption of social media across a myriad of geographies, marketers have successfully mastered the art of leveraging social media for branding and lead generation. Thus, creating the booming field of Digital Marketing. Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are widely used by marketing teams around the world, and LinkedIn is joining the club at an accelerated pace.

LinkedIn offers extensive prospects to marketers with opportunities to connect with Business Leaders and decision-makers of virtually all industries in one place, also serving as a platform for debate, research, and networking. A recent study by hubspot.com on the impact of social media on lead generation conducted for more than 5000 businesses showed that LinkedIn generated the highest visitor-to-lead conversion rate at 2.74%. This was 277% higher than the conversion rates of both Facebook and Twitter.

Though grabbing attention or coming into the spotlight has to be subtle, the advantages of marketing via LinkedIn and the resulting conversion outweigh the efforts by a large margin. The platform is professional and offers a massive amount of data relevant to the criteria utilized in targeting. The audience can be targeted based on their professional information and business fields. Important promotional announcements in the format of new posts have the potential to reach the correct audience interested in goods and services similar to or even the ones you offer.

An added advantage of the platform that can assist marketers is features like the LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Showcase Pages, and even the availability of selective groups of individuals who share interests, offering or providing services. Features like saving your searches and leads, automating lead generation, CRM integrations, and pages to promote products can be highly beneficial for lead generation and branding when utilized with an appropriate marketing strategy.

Gauri Bhatia - Founder, The Unveiled Sagas

LinkedIn is one of the goldmines when it comes to lead generation. It is an organic directory that indexes on Google- you can control your reputation by editing your profile yourself.

If nothing else, just enlisting your services and your expertise in your profile will get you consultations. I remember when I worked in a corporate, LinkedIn had come to my office to celebrate our 5 million followers- we didn’t even have an active ad campaign going on. Just regular, targeted content was getting us the traction that we needed. Well-written copy and easy to comprehend graphics are all that you need to feature on LinkedIn.

Of course, I would still recommend people stay true to the platform- it is a professional platform, expanding to the virtue of maybe containing the career trajectory. Diluting the content by posting personal information has turned it into another Facebook- which I am not in favor of.

For brand building, my company and I stick to only publishing information, opinions, or industry reports basis our studies of our clients.

For lead generation, although it is better to run traffic ads on LinkedIn, we use the platform for what it's worth- hyper niche targeting. We run ads for a very small target market- let's say, entrepreneurs with 15+ years of experience, staying in California with a company of over 200 employees. Those guys have the money and the knowledge required to invest in our services. Of course, I love Google for mass targeting and low CPC, and of course, this kind of campaign is going to burn a hole in my pocket- but the leads I get are so specific and so precise, that I don’t even have to try to sell. They’re filtered, verified, and knowledgeable.

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Amulya Nagaraj - Executive Director, PEPPER INTERACTIVE COMMUNICATIONS

LinkedIn has over 800 million registered users across the world, and this includes senior leadership members who access and pay attention to the platform. In a chaotic social media world, LinkedIn has streamlined its content to purely business and work. Good content shines on any platform, but with LinkedIn, the organic reach for a good piece of content is so much higher than any other social media platform.

Secondly, building a network for lead generation is simpler on LinkedIn. The 6 degrees of separation are clearly showcased in LinkedIn. Your network is a powerful tool to showcase your brand, your vision and encourage others to reach out to you.

This means the network and reach out can happens with a good blog, an insightful post or even a good video. Being active and interacting with people can also happen with just comments and minor engagements. The data of demographics available on LinkedIn help you create micro audiences for better ROI via ads.

Additionally, each employee of a company becomes a brand ambassador on social media. The amplification of content of any form is more effective when your team engages with the content on your company page. The insights available on pages also provide a wealth of information on your current audiences and allow you to modify the strategy if required. The audience segmentation is available under job function, industry, seniority, location and more.

Ashmita Dhingra - Managing Director, Digifish3

LinkedIn is indeed a powerful social media tool for connecting with professionals or for brands catering services to a B2B clientele’. This social media platform is indeed transforming into a very powerful tool for branding as well as lead generation for many brands.

LinkedIn as a platform is helping users to network with businesses and marketers worldwide. It has evolved tremendously as it has more than 750 million users on its platform.

Interesting, isn’t it?

Brands today are not only trying to position itself on the platform as a communication platform but also enjoying the benefits of getting leads with LinkedIn Marketing.

Armed with the right strategy, you can grab audience attention and grow your business while generating leads. You can also use LinkedIn to increase website traffic and reinforce brand credibility.

Impressive, right?

Once you start working on creating valuable content, optimizing, and engaging with people, you will begin seeing traction from LinkedIn. Make sure to have a  strategy and evolve the same with user response.

If you focus on generating quality leads, make your funnel strong enough to get your prospects to paying customers. Using LinkedIn for qualifying leads is efficient, and you get better quality results for sure.

To conclude, Building a company page on LinkedIn is like having a booth at the world’s largest networking event. Why not seize the opportunity to promote your business and build new contacts?

With so many B2B businesses using LinkedIn for lead generation, understanding how to make the most out of the channel will save you time chasing leads that don’t matter. Whether you’re meeting new prospects, promoting lead magnets, or sharing customer reviews and testimonials, LinkedIn is a great way to amplify those efforts.

So, what’s the wait for?

Start leveraging LinkedIn TODAY as when you water your audience regularly, leads will begin to sprout automatically!

Abhishek Singh - Senior Vice President of Marketing, Hirect India

LinkedIn is a networking site primarily used for professional networking and growing career opportunities. The platform is one of the largest professional networks that allow individuals and brands to build their online presence and connect with other professionals.   With LinkedIn’s user base proliferating, there are many ways in which one can leverage this platform for branding and lead generation purposes. In this article, we will discuss some techniques that Hirect uses to attract more leads that other brands can use to make their business stand out from the rest of the crowd.

Many marketers and individuals prioritize LinkedIn as one of the critical platforms for finding the right customer and building brand awareness. The platform helps to network with people working across different industries.

A brand can utilize the existing features like joining relevant business groups and participating in industry-specific dialogues, which will help generate leads and enhance brand visibility. LinkedIn provides a plethora of groups for numerous categories and businesses, filled with like-minded professionals.

One of the best ways to use LinkedIn for business is by using it as a content marketing platform. This can be done by publishing blogs on relevant topics on the platform, which will help you rank higher in search engines and add your voice authority. A brand can also create presentations uploaded on the profile so that others can access them easily. Another way to leverage LinkedIn for branding is by hosting webinars on the platform, which will allow you to reach out to more people and help you build authority through different narratives.

For example, Hirect uses LinkedIn to generate leads by reaching out to recruiters and assisting them with onboarding by analysing and solving their talent acquisition concerns. Hirect's Outbound and Inbound marketing strategies have generated significant brand awareness.  With initiatives like 'Bring It On', 'Counter Offer Comics', and events like 'Through Founders Lens' and 'Humans of Hiring', Hirect has constantly evolved its content game to reach the relevant audience and successfully hit the correct string to find the prospects with its strategic marketing approach. With events like Humans of Hiring, Hirect is building a community of HRs where we talk about various aspects of hiring every week in the form of webinars. Hirect executes the campaign in the form of audiovisuals along with influencer marketing which helps to reach out to a large user base.

Hirect also leverages LinkedIn to create informative and engaging content for job seekers and recruiters. It thrives on posting appealing videos and organic content, which leads to a higher reach and engagement rate. Hirect engages with target users by posting thought-provoking content and participating in industry-specific discussions.

Conclusion: As a brand, it is essential to understand the target market and use LinkedIn strategically. In general, LinkedIn can be a helpful tool for raising conversion rates, establishing identity, engaging with quality leads, and helping increase sales over time.