Why it is vital to spend time building your brand
A strong brand can ensure you are found by the right people on LinkedIn, something which can be extremely important in helping your company to succeed. This is just one reason why it is vital to spend time on building your brand.
Creating Your Company Profile
Your brand building efforts should start with a great Company Page and the use of effective ways to tell your story. To ensure that you can achieve this, you must understand your target audience. This will ensure that your profile speaks the right language, whether you’re trying to attract job candidates, new business partners or potential customers.
Use your Company Page to demonstrate your expertise and showcase your work. Endorsements and recommendations can also go a long way in boosting your credibility.
Make your page a great source of information for new and old contacts and ensure that it is as easy as possible to find. Do not forget to link your LinkedIn page with other online elements, such as your website and presence on other social networking sites.
Networking Tips to Boost Your Brand
Typically, every connection you make on the LinkedIn network will be connected to another 110 professionals. This highlights how important growing your network is to increasing awareness of your brand.
Start building your network with clients, family, friends and colleagues. These should be brand advocates who can help promote your brand to their connections, while current customers can also be extremely valuable in this regard.
Past classmates can be useful connections and LinkedIn Groups can be a great source of new contacts. Groups are also the perfect place to increase your knowledge and build your reputation as a thought leader.
Try to make connecting on LinkedIn part of your everyday routine. When you meet new people, cement your relationship with a LinkedIn connection. You should also include your LinkedIn information in company correspondence and consider having a Follow link on your website, giving easy access to your Company Page.
You can also make use of LinkedIn Search to find contacts based on location and industry. There are premium filters such as seniority levels, years of experience and function. Once you have found potential connections, reach out by requesting an introduction from a mutual connection or by using the InMail messaging platform.
Brand-building Relationships
One of the best ways to build your brand and to cultivate business-building relationships is to become a leader of thoughts by regularly sharing news, articles, videos and comments. You should also aim to stay in touch with contacts using the Connected app and set yourself reminders to nurture relationships regularly.
Ensure that your efforts are proving effective by monitoring activity, such as who is viewing your profile. You can then use the information to fine-tune your content strategy.
Other LinkedIn Features
Sponsored Updates and LinkedIn Ads can be useful tools in allowing you to reach beyond your own network. You can use targeting criteria such as industry and geography to target the right contacts to help build your brand.
It is also important to make use of the Analytics features available on LinkedIn to understand the growth of your community and the way in which you can tailor your posts and page to achieve the greatest rewards.