linkedin groups Archives - Barbara Genest

LinkedIn Groups provides businesses a place to connect with other members who are in the same niche or industry and share information, make connections, share content, post job vacancies and network.

As a member of LinkedIn, you can join up to 50 groups at a time. However, even though you can join up to 50 groups, this can spread you thin. It is much better to be active in just a few groups than to deplete your resources by trying to participate in too many.

LinkedIn Groups offers you the opportunity to connect and interact with other members, join discussions, share your knowledge and build influence, authority, and credibility in your industry, become a top influencer, expand your reach and find followers, and source information and increase your knowledge base.

However, it is important to remember that you shouldn’t use LinkedIn Groups to blatantly promote your products or services.

Joining a Group

One of the major advantages of joining a group on LinkedIn is that members appear in the search results of that particular group.

So, if you go to a group and click the number stating how many members the group has, you can see whether any of your connections are already members.

To find groups that you are interested in, you can click on the “Interests” tab on the top menu of your profile and then click on “Groups” in the drop down menu.

This will allow you to search groups based on keywords that you enter and start filtering and viewing the results. You can view “Open Groups” without joining but you can only view content of member only groups once you’ve joined.

There are over a million groups currently on LinkedIn so you can afford to be selective when choosing the groups you want to join.

Before joining, however, you need to make sure that you’ve worked out what your goals are. Are you looking to build connections and relationships or do you want to gain knowledge from key influencers, or establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry?

If your main goal is to drive traffic to your website or blog, then you need to look for groups that will allow you to post links.

When searching for groups you can view the descriptions of the group along with the group statistics. The group statistics will show you the number of members the group has, and the number of discussions and comments that have been made.

Joining smaller, lively groups with a lot of interaction may be more advantageous for you as opposed to joining larger ones with little activity. This is where quality can significantly outweigh quantity.

The demographics of the group are also important. It might be a huge waste of time joining a group where most of its members are international if you are running a local business. Taking a look at the group’s activity feed can help you see whether the group is relevant to you and whether you think you might be able to contribute in some way.

After you’ve made your selection and joined a group or two, you can introduce yourself and start commenting and joining in on the discussions. If you are looking to build influence then you need to stay active and engage with the other members and contribute to the discussions taking place.

LinkedIn keeps track of the interactions that take place in groups and appoints ‘The Top Influencers of the Week.’ You can view this list at the top right of the group page to see who have contributed and participated in discussions and liked and commented the most.

This is a tremendous opportunity for your business to gain exposure and for your brand if you are appointed to the list.

LinkedIn Discussions

Discussions on LinkedIn are a great way to communicate with others in your niche and build connections with like-minded individuals. To start a discussion in your group, hit the ‘Discussions’ link at the top of the group page and add a title and description for your discussion.

You can add an article or ask a question. You also have the ability to post relevant content with a link to your company page, website or blog. You should also check to see if your group has a special section for adding promotions and jobs.

You can participate in discussions by liking and commenting on the discussion and you can also follow a particular discussion and receive updates anytime someone comments on the post.

The Benefits of Starting Your Own Group

If you are unable to find a group that meets your needs, you might want to consider starting your own LinkedIn Group. Creating your own group has a multitude of benefits, especially if you are a company focused on B2B sales.

Raises Your Profile

When you create a group on LinkedIn, your name, as the creator, will be clearly featured as the owner of the group. Being able to successfully run a group will help you to be seen as a thought leader in your industry.

The more you contribute to the group personally, by interacting with its members and offering valuable content, the more you will build your credibility and be considered an expert in your niche.

Lets You Send Weekly Emails

As a creator of a LinkedIn group, you are afforded the ability to send emails to your members every week. This provides a great opportunity to gain attention by sending your members the links to your top quality content relating to the group subject matter.

Drives Traffic to Your Website

There are a few ways that you can use your LinkedIn group to drive traffic to your website or blog.

• Add your URL to the group profile to gain more exposure.
• Include your URL in the welcome message that you send to the group.
• Include your URL when you send valuable content to your
members in your weekly email.
• Create discussions within the group and including your URL.

Creates Community

People love to be part of a community and join with like mined people and engage in discussions. If you are the creator of a thriving group on LinkedIn, you can bring people together and help them make connections. This will create trust with your members and good will toward you and your brand.

Expand Your Personal Network

Creating a group on LinkedIn is a great way to build connections with others. If your group is active then members are going to want to connect with you because you are the authority and you are likely to receive numerous invitations to connect with other LinkedIn members.

Generate Leads and Sales

When you send out your initial welcome email and thank people for joining your group, you can include details and benefits of joining the group and provide a brief background and description of you and your business.

You can also invite them to join your newsletter or invite them to connect with you on your other social networks.

LinkedIn groups is a great way to become active on the social networking platform and can help you get connected with potential customers and other thought leaders in your industry.

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You need to clearly understand what content marketing is if you want to effectively use it on LinkedIn.

Content marketing is marketing that doesn’t focus on a “pitch,” but rather focuses on informing your target audience about solutions to their problems. With content marketing, you want to focus more on making the buyer intelligent rather than just saying that they need to purchase your products and services.

Content marketing allows the buyer to better understand what they are getting, why they need it, and how it will help them. To accomplish this, it requires a regular placement of necessary information, either via private email, articles, or blog posts.

Publishing content on LinkedIn is becoming more and more popular for companies to market their items because it helps them to build the trust with their customers, creating brand and company loyalty.

This, in turn, leads to a longer relationship between the company and customer, which leads to repeat customers and customers who are referred by others, which helps to offer a more sustained relationship.

Rather than creating a demand for your product or service, content marketing anticipates the needs of your customers and delivers to them information on products and services that already exist.

Since content marketing is primarily done online, it’s easier for companies to target their audience and deliver the information that their customers need to feel informed enough to make a decision on which product they should buy.

The goal of content marketing is that the company that consistently delivers the most valuable information in the best way possible is rewarded with the business.

Using LinkedIn for Content Marketing

Since LinkedIn is the largest professional network in the world, it makes sense for businesses to use LinkedIn as a part of their online marketing efforts.

LinkedIn recognized this idea and created tools to help businesses run effective marketing campaigns from start to finish. It even allows users to track and gather data on their ideal target so they can deliver content in a variety of formats.

It also provides tips to help with marketing campaigns, including how to measure the effectiveness of the campaign. Content marketing on LinkedIn is a vast ocean of potential customers.

When you first start to use LinkedIn for your content marketing, it is important that you know what your goals for the campaign are, and your company mission statement. When you know these, then you will be able to start an ad campaign on LinkedIn.

When you know your goals, you can start to create content to meet those goals. Your mission statement will outline the reason why your company exists. Your company’s mission statement needs to feed into three marketing components.

• Core target audience
• Type of content
• The desired outcome of the advertisement

When you go about creating the ad campaign for your company, you want to clearly document the strategy that you will take to reach your goals.

You can document your strategy in any way that works best for you, just as long as you do it.

When you write down your documented strategy, you are more likely to succeed and be effective, feel more capable with your content marketing, and you’ll be able to visualize each step in the process, which will help to draw connections for you for a more comprehensive plan.

When you document your strategy, you will be able to further elaborate on the objective you are seeking more easily. You’ll be able to see where you need to place your content mapping and personal development when you are planning your campaign.

These two steps will help you to recognize buyers, as more than just numbers but as individuals with problems, as well as helping create content that addresses the questions at each stage of your campaign development.

Take the time to organize your plan, decide what you are doing and who is assigned to do what part.

Finding Your Target Audience

Next, you will need to identify who your target audience is before you can create your ad campaign.

LinkedIn has over 500 million members and counting, with 61 million of these members senior influencers and 40 million are decision-makers.

These are the people that you hope will be purchasing from you. When you are creating your content you need to consider the questions and problems that they have, as well as your solution to those problems.

Content marketing is supposed to anticipate the needs of your audience and supply information for meeting those needs while the impression that you are the ideal company to help solve their problems.

For you to do that, you need to research your target audience. Take some time to look at what your target audience is posting on their news feeds, consider the industries they work in, and look at what other products and services are available to them.

Your target needs to be narrower than simply, everyone.
Your ideal target audience should be the people you want to sell your items to, otherwise, you will be wasting your time and marketing resources on people that you won’t be able to convert to paying customers.

Not everyone is someone who will need or want your product or service.
Use your current connections to see what your target audience will want because these are usually your direct buyers or associates of your target audience.

Generally, your target market is already aware of the type of product or service you are offering.

LinkedIn has a marketing tool called Web Demographics, that will allow you to track the kinds of people who are visiting your site by cataloging their profile information. This will allow you to see company names, seniority level, job title and other necessary information that will help you to tailor your content.

Creating Content

Once you’ve determined your target audience, you can start to create your content. You will need to decide what you want to say, how you want to say it, and when you want to say it.

Carefully consider what you want your readers to do with the information that you are releasing. Start by defining your topic and deciding.

• What is the outcome that you want?
• Who you are writing for?
• What are the obstacles of your intended audience?

Once you have answered these questions you can set aside some time to brainstorm and take the time to shape your thoughts into meaningful ideas.

You are trying, ultimately, to decide what stories you want to tell of your company, and what information is going to get you to your objective and then creating the outline to tell the stories or determining what is missing from your company story.

Next, you will need to narrow down your topic to fit the timing of your article. The content that you are creating needs to be relevant to the market landscape at the time of your marketing campaign.

If you skip this step, you may end up with out-of-date content or content that is based off information that hasn’t been released yet.

Your content should be original and should initiate engagement and discussion.

Make sure to add graphics to your articles and blogs, and choose an eye-catching and effective cover image for articles, and remember to always cite your source. Publishing the right information for the right customers will help to boost your thought leadership in your industry.

Releasing Your Content

When you’ve created your content, you will need to plan when you want to release what pieces on different areas within LinkedIn.

You need to have a variety of content that includes everything from long-form blogs, articles, videos, sponsored content, InMail, status updates, and infographics. It is also important that you find a way to measure performance.

You will also need to decide on how frequently you will publish content. Do you want to publish daily, weekly, or monthly.

You have to strike a delicate balance because while you want to stay at the forefront of your potential leads’ minds, you don’t want to become overwhelming.

You should post status updates no more than one or two times per day, and news articles and blog posts should be posted one to two times a week.

Once you’ve published content, keep an eye on the comments so you can interact with those who are commenting on the article or sharing it with their network.

The measurement tools in LinkedIn can help to increase your followers, click-throughs on your information and inquiries form viewers.

Utilizing Video Ads on LinkedIn

Video ads can be utilized for all aspects of your marketing funnel. Video ads make it easy to share your brand and customer success stories with your audience.

When you create your video ad, you want to make sure you put the most important information within the first two to three seconds so that you can grab the viewer’s attention before they lose interest.

With video ads, you can give previews to webinars, offer demos of your products, and explain upcoming events.

LinkedIn Groups provides businesses a place to connect with other members who are in the same niche or industry and share information, make connections, share content, post job vacancies and network.

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Power of Linkedin Groups