Thursday, February 23, 2012

5 Ways to Market Your Brand on LinkedIn

LinkedIn provides plenty of marketing opportunities, but lets take a look at some of the lesser-known tools. Although not all are free, try making room in your budget for a few simple and effective marketing strategies.
Whether you’re looking to raise marketing awareness or drive sales, look for guidance from the LinkedIn team. Where else can you specify your target audience based on job title, industry, functional area and much more?
Try these five LinkedIn tools for better marketing.

1. LinkedIn Ads


Start off with self-serve LinkedIn ads. You can target your ad by geography, job function, industry, company size, seniority, age and gender, as well as company name, LinkedIn group and job title. There’e plenty of scope to define your audience.
Your ad will display either along the top, bottom or right-hand side of a member’s home or profile page, and can contain both text and an image. Link your ad to either your own website, your LinkedIn company page, your group or anywhere else you might want to send your visitor for further information. Or consider sending your visitor to your company Facebook page where you can possibly convert her into a Like.
In terms of cost, LinkedIn ads run very much the same as other text ad systems, on an auction or bid basis. You can pay either for CPC (cost per click) or CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions).
As with any advertising platform, consider LinkedIn’s advertising best practices.

2. LinkedIn Display Ads


Purchase display ads through the LinkedIn field sales team. They are IAB standard unit sizes.
The ad space to the right of everyone’s home and profile page is a prime piece of real estate for ad property. The space can be used in several ways, and is not just reserved static images. You can add video, a blog feed or even a Twitter feed.
Word-of-mouth advertising is incredibly powerful, so consider creating a recommendation ad: If anyone within your network has recommended your product or service, his recommendation would display as an ad on other people’s profiles within that person’s network. LinkedIn members can recommend the product directly from the ad.
Try these further ideas for display ads.
  • Display your company ad on your LinkedIn company page to help with brand awareness and online consistency.
  • Show your ad on every one of your employees’ profile pages. Turn each team member into a brand ambassador.
  • Advertise your LinkedIn group to a targeted audience via a display ad.
The cost of these ads is dependent on the audience you plan to target. LinkedIn will bill you on a CPM basis. Talk to a LinkedIn sales representative for further information.

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