What will make your brand stand out on LinkedIn in 2020?

Brands and marketers keep looking out for platforms that can help their business grow. When platforms like Facebook and Instagram show signs of saturation in terms of organic reach, LinkedIn saves the day.

With over 310 million monthly active users, LinkedIn is everything that someone would need to grow professionally. It has become what Facebook was a few years back in terms of providing opportunities to brands and connecting them to their potential customers.

However, in a crowd of 30 million company pages, to stand out and grow your brand is undoubtedly a tedious task. And in order to unlock the true potential of LinkedIn, you need to stand out. So how to do that?

We’ve listed the best strategies that can make your brand stand out on LinkedIn in 2020.

The top three prerequisites of a great LinkedIn profile

But before proceeding, there are a few prerequisites.

Have an optimized company profile

Before starting with anything, you need a few gears with you and an optimized company page is that gear here. Your page is the first thing that anyone would check before interacting with your brand. Make sure that when someone opens your page, you have sufficient information on it.

Lucky for you there are services out there that helps with optimizing your Linkedin profile and Social Selling Coach is one that can be recommended. To stay ahead of the game you need to produce engaging content frequently, create stunning background image, and company’s description. Once you do this, it will be a lot easier to get new leads from Linkedin.”

Source: M.O.M. LinkedIn Company Page

Here are a few things to consider

1. Make sure your company page has a profile picture.
2. Add a background picture.
3. Fill out all the form fields: Name, LinkedIn Public URL, Website, Company Size, Company Type, Logo, and Tagline.
4. Add a detailed description of what your company does.
5. Add up to three hashtags for connecting with your target audience.

Define your goals

Just like any other platform, LinkedIn too needs a strategic approach. And the first step to developing any strategy is by defining a goal or goals. Your goals can be anything like the ones shared below:

• Creating awareness regarding your brand.
• Generating website traffic.
• Boosting your personal brand.
• Getting leads.
• Making sales.

Define your target audience

Based on your goal, define your target audience. The people who you wish to attract and connect with for achieving your goals. This will help you to create content that will help you execute your marketing strategies and achieve your goals.

Now that you’re done with the prerequisites, it’s time to dive into the strategies.

Six strategies to help you stand out on LinkedIn in 2020

Congratulations, you’re now up to speed with the prerequisites! You’re just six strategies away from having a successful LinkedIn presence.

1. Create posts that are related to your niche

How do you think influencers become influencers? Because they create and share content regularly. And LinkedIn’s algorithm also promotes text-based content more than any other form of content.

So the best way to stand out from the crowd is by sharing text posts as much as you can. However, remember it’s always quality over quantity. Start with three to four posts per week. You can share your work experiences or struggle stories or basic tips and tricks related to your profession.

LinkedIn, the employment-oriented online service that primarily serves as one of the world’s largest social media platforms for working professionals is a great example. Their content strategy is variety-packed, but here’s a quick look at the content types they actively publish.

A simple two-liner post that is data-backed and relevant to their audience as well as the current climate.

The post share below is purely an engagement based one but it successfully struck the chords with 5K+ professionals in just a week.

In addition to these, LinkedIn also shows its audience that it has strong values and has a voice by sharing valuable posts. However, how you choose to create content would solely depend on how your brand stands and how you’d want to connect with your audience.

Source: LinkedIn Company Page

2. Stay consistent

The biggest thing that will set you apart from your competitors is the level of your consistency. Treat your LinkedIn company page as an extension to your website. Update it from time to time. Create and share insightful posts and make sure that you engage with your audience as much as possible.

Set a posting schedule and strictly adhere to it but remember it’s always quality over quantity. So create a schedule based on your availability of resources.

3. Create videos

Videos are the latest feature on LinkedIn and so the scope of growing video content creators is more right now.

Source: Microsoft LinkedIn Company Page

You can create videos on anything that is related to your niche. People love videos because they don’t need to put any effort to watch a video and get the takeaways. There are several video creators on LinkedIn but the number is still a way lesser than text-based content creators.

Also, LinkedIn recently added a new feature of live streaming which is still available to only a few people. Now if you manage to get this feature, it would really help you to boost your LinkedIn profile.

4. Get a good hold of LinkedIn’s three engagement methods

Just like any other platform, even LinkedIn boosts the profiles and pages that have good engagement rates.

LinkedIn has basically three engagement methods that are: like, comment and share. However, there’s one more thing that LinkedIn focuses on while promoting a post which is how many people clicked on “see more” in a post. The more people click on “see more” to read your entire post the more LinkedIn thinks of it as a good post.

So if you want to make people open the entire post, you need to use the first two lines to write a captivating hook.

Also, to boost the engagement rate of your post, make sure your reply to each and every comment. This doesn’t only make the post look good to the algorithm but also boosts your relationship with your audience. You can also tag a few relevant people in your post to seek their opinion.

5. Let your employees be your biggest brand ambassadors

LinkedIn works as a digitized resume for individuals and thus provides them with the option of mentioning the past and present employers. Ask all your employees to clearly mention that they currently work for you. Getting mentioned on the profiles of your employees will help you to establish your brand name as a trusted company.

Source: Microsoft LinkedIn Company Page

Also, you can ask your employees to keep talking about their work experience in your company and provide testimonials that you can showcase on your company page. The more they talk about your brand the more people come to know about your offerings.

6. Use lead magnets

All the above-mentioned strategies are already being used by the top brains on LinkedIn but what is that secret sauce that can help get on the top?

That’s your skill!

Create an irresistible lead magnet for your target audience. This can be anything like an eBook, access to a video series, or a private group. This lead magnet will help you grow your personal brand and make your target audience reach out to you.

A single lead magnet can help you grow your audience base exponentially and generate leads for you.

To wrap up

So these were the six strategies that can be used to grow your brand on LinkedIn. However, no matter what platform you choose it’s necessary to understand the importance of consistency. Now based on your goals and audience type, choose your strategies wisely and start unlocking the true potential of LinkedIn for your business.

Harikrishna Kundariya Co-founder and Director of eSparkBiz Technologies, a mobile app development company. His 8+ experience enables him to provide digital solutions to new start-ups based on IoT and chatbot. You can connect with him on LinkedIn.