Marketing Tips: Build Your Brand With LinkedIn
Potential customers increasingly rate your brand not on your corporate site.
When most entrepreneurs think about building their own brand, they assume that the best way to do this is to have a professional looking website.
However, with the advent of social networks, the value of websites is increasingly declining, especially for small firms.
Firstly, corporate websites are becoming less important every day, because anyone can buy a trendy website and fill it with any content. And everyone knows that such sites can be ordered quite cheap.
Secondly, in the case when customers make purchases from small firms, the people behind the offer are more often more important than the offer itself. On the arm of large companies usually plays a well-established reputation, which also forms the brand and image of the company; small firms can only oppose people like you and people who work for you.
In other words, your “brand” is more based on how you present yourself (and the people you work with) in public forums on the Internet. That’s all the importance and coolness of LinkedIn.
Why LinkedIn is so important.
You may have described your biography on the site, but your clients will get (or be able to) better ideas from whom they buy when they view your LinkedIn profile.
Customers will pay attention not only to your experience, but also to your relationship: who supports you, who has already worked with you, what people have expressed about you and your work, and the type of people who are on your network.
It is unlikely that all this information will be posted on your site, and even if it does, it will look somewhat unnatural. The simple truth is that as long as you maintain your LinkedIn profile, it will be perceived somewhat more objectively compared to the same corporate site.
Smart entrepreneurs realize that LinkedIn and other social networks may be more important than their websites and, thus, deserve no less, and sometimes even more attention from them.
Step by step
Here is the step-by-step process of turning your LinkedIn profile into a great tool for building your own brand:
Focus on customer-focused messages.
Many entrepreneurs tend to pay attention to internal issues: Here is our product, it has its own characteristics. Instead, consider the situation from the other side: Our customers buy from us in order to achieve some goals.
Redefine your experience so that it more closely matches the metasubscription.
Instead of treating your account as if you were in the autobiography of your work, take it as a way to show how your experience makes you a reliable supplier of what you sell.
Repeat steps 1 and 2 with key members of your team.
It is not enough just to have a CEO profile and a company profile in accordance with the main meta-message. Every single serious player in a team should define their experience in such a way as to further strengthen the position of the brand.
Remove any dubious and irrelevant contacts.
The list of the company is like the chorus of the song, it should be in harmony with everything else. Instead of trying to fill the list with as many people as possible, consider reducing it to a certain circle of people whose presence will reinforce the idea that you are trying to convey to customers. And also make sure that there are no contacts in your contact list that could compromise you in any way.
Use LinkedIn as the centerpiece of your brand concept.
Make sure that every significant (in terms of branding, event) (big deal, new employees, new products, etc.) is reflected in your updates on LinkedIn. Reduce the content of the biographical page on your corporate website and post a prominent link to your LinkedIn profile.
In fact, do your best to attract customers and potential buyers to your LinkedIn page – because it reminds them of who you really are and why they should do business with you. And this, of course, is a good reason to have your own brand.
