10 Tips for LinkedIn Business Growth

Many companies sign up for a LinkedIn presence but then do nothing to optimize or utilize it. Yet, LinkedIn can go a long way toward bringing in new leads and sales, and ultimately toward boosting the company’s sphere of influence, depending on the business and how willing it is to invest in LinkedIn as a viable resource for strategic growth. 

Simply setting up a LinkedIn page gets you nowhere. You have to strategize, and you have to be diligent to tap in to the immense potential for business development.

Here are 10 tips that can help you invest your time and efforts for growth.

1.     START OFF COMPLETE

Before you begin to promote your LinkedIn page, you need to make sure you have something that’s actually worth promoting. That means taking the time to complete the profile, ensuring that you provide thorough and detailed information about your company. Ensure that there is a professional-quality photograph or image, as well, because good visual branding increases consumer trust.

2.     DOUBLE UP PROFILES

Create both a personal page and a company one. Whether you’re the CEO of the company or simply a consultant, you need to have your own page through which you can project individual authority—but of course, a company page is also vital. Make sure that your company page includes all pertinent data about the business, including the number of employees you have.

3.     PROMOTE THE COMPANY PAGE

If you’re going to be really investing in using this page as a tool for online branding and business development—which you should—then it helps to take the time to let people know it’s there. Include a link to it on your company website and on your Facebook page, and also in e-mail signatures and on business cards.

4.     BUILD YOUR NETWORK

LinkedIn will automatically recommend people for you to add to your network, simply based on the content you already have in your profile. The more connections you build, the more your customers and potential customers will see that you’re reputable and authoritative. Regularly search for contacts, import contacts from your e-mail address book, and use the recommendations that LinkedIn offers.

The contacts should not all be from the same industry. Let’s say that you own an advertising firm, you want to have connections from within the world of advertising, but you also want to have connections with realtors, and lawyers, and small business owners who might need advertising services. You’re not doing your company any favors by remaining within a small bubble.

5.     JOIN GROUPS

Join groups with high numbers of participants, and ensure that you’re in groups that are both directly and tangentially related to what your own profession is, for maximum impact.

6.     GET RECOMMENDATIONS

A recommendation is one of the best things you can get for engendering trust and goodwill from potential customers and clients. As such, it is very much worthwhile for companies and professionals to actively solicit recommendations from customers who are satisfied with the work done or the product provided.

7.     SEEK OUT AND CONNECT

Use the platform’s search feature to seek out people to connect with. Looking for a new employee? Don’t wait for him or her to find you. Search for someone who fits your job description and send a personalized request to connect. LinkedIn’s search tool is extremely effective, so use it!

8.     INCREASE PRODCUTIVITY WITH THE MOBILE APP

Business professionals can increase their productivity by using the mobile app. Access LinkedIn while you’re riding the subway, waiting for an appointment, or taking your lunch break. Approve new connections and take care of other housecleaning items during your down time.

9.     MAKE REGULAR UPDATES

Regular status updates can make any LinkedIn page more effective, and a good way to increase those status updates, fairly easily, is to tie in the company Twitter account. Integrating these two social platforms is a great way to really get more bang for your buck, in terms of those updates you’re writing.

10.   INCORPORATE THE COMPANY BLOG

As of fairly recently, LinkedIn has produced a way to automatically feature blog updates (you can manually enter them, as well). Make sure your company blog is linked from your profile page, perhaps with an attention-getting and descriptive title to keep your latest messaging and updates in front of your key business contacts.

How to Use Buzzworthy Guerrilla Marketing: Take it from a Rock Band.

It was a couple years ago that I read of Canadian indie rock band Arcade Fire’s approach to launching their album and stumbling across the article again, I feel it’s worth another look at what businesses can learn and benefit from a more guerrilla tact to marketing and advertising. Indie rock bands are not often thought to be the fodder of Bloomberg Business Week articles, but such is the case with the Canadian natives in Arcade Fire. The band, in the process of preparing to release its latest record -- a double-disc project titled Reflektor – was hailed “experts of guerilla marketing craft.”

Arcade Fire isn’t exactly the type of band that needs an aggressive and mysterious street marketing plan to be successful. After all, the band, who arrived on the scene with 2004’s critically-beloved Funeral and won a surprise Grammy for Album of the Year with 2010’s The Suburbs, is arguably the biggest and most buzzworthy band in the so-called “indie rock” scene.

Indeed, the members of Arcade Fire, which include husband-and-wife vocalists Win Butler and Régine Chassagne, as well as a seemingly ever-shifting group of versatile instrumentalists, could easily have rested on its laurels and depended on the success of their previous album and the marketing sweep of their record label—North Carolina’s Merge Records—to help the upcoming Reflektor toward a hopeful (and highly likely) number one berth atop the Billboard charts. Instead, Arcade Fire took to a marketing route for this album that was anything but run-of-the-mill, using an inspired set of guerilla marketing tactics other bands and record labels—or even major businesses outside of the entertainment industry—could learn a little something from.

Arcade Fire’s innovative marketing campaign began suddenly and unexpectedly in July 2013, when one of the band’s Twitter followers sent them a tweet with the simplistic words of “you’re my favorite.” The band responded to the compliment with a tweet of their own, thanking the fan for his support and then tossing off a seemingly nonchalant comment that would function as the band’s announcement of their return: “Our new album will be out on October 29th.”

From there, the marketing campaign for Reflektor was executed largely from the shadows and almost entirely at the street level. Sidewalk chalk and mysterious posters gave way to secret shows, with small pieces of information gradually making their way to the press. First, the title was unveiled through the cryptographic symbol that the band continuously emblazoned on their posters or in their chalking campaigns; later, pre-order bundles on the band’s website revealed that the new record would be a double-album release; and eventually, song titles and lengths—most of them long—were revealed on iTunes and other digital music vendors.

There was also a single—the dance-oriented title track, which “leaked” to YouTube and began collecting buzz before the band even mentioned that iconic glam rock superstar David Bowie had contributed back-up vocals—as well as advance listening parties and reviews from major music publications that only fed the flames further. A euphoric write-up of the new album was published on Rolling Stone’s website a month prior to the album’s release, with the writer, veteran music journalist David Fricke, calling Reflektor “the best album Arcade Fire have ever made.”

The band’s marketing campaign managed to generate a huge amount of attention and anticipation for their new album, even though they have never had much of a presence on mainstream pop music radio.

So what’s the big takeaway? 

The most ingenious part of the campaign for Reflektor is that Arcade Fire managed to maintain the mystery of guerilla marketing forms while still sticking to the same advertising calendar that most major music releases follow. The band released a radio single, but did so in an unorthodox way; they also sent out promotional advances to key music publications to stir up anticipation, but have thus far done so without the album leaking to the public ahead of its highly-publicized release date.

Arcade Fire appeared on Saturday Night Live, taking over NBC’s late-night programming slot for a half hour after the popular sketch TV show’s 39th season premiere to unveil a batch of news songs. However, even the SNL concert special was far from commonplace. The special, which was directed by filmmaker Roman Coppola and which featured cameos from the likes of Ben Stiller, James Franco, Bill Hader, Zach Galifianakis, and U2 front man Bono—as well as pseudo “host” work from Michael Cera, a fellow Canadian—balanced oddball comedy and a near-nightmarish visual aesthetic with the obviously-promotional premiere of several new songs from Arcade Fire’s new album.

The whole marketing campaign ultimately boils down to one thing: Arcade Fire was able to keep their album in the public eye without resorting to invasive advertising. Instead of irritating pop-up web browser ads or repetitive television commercials, the band has built up a perfect storm of anticipation for Reflektor by disguising their true motives—ostensibly, to sell their product—in layers of performance art, self-mockery, and shadowy guerilla marketing. The band managed to forge a calculated marketing path while simultaneously making the whole thing look like an accidental mess, and that same kind of guerilla marketing model could be a refreshing substitute for the more in-your-face advertising strategies that most businesses use today.