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Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

What is LinkedIn?

Representing the digitalization of professional networking, LinkedIn is a business-to-business focused platform that allows professionals to connect in a professional context and build and develop their connections, including the mission and vision of their company. LinkedIn member profiles represent an individual's professional identity and who they are in the corporate world.

LinkedIn enables users to establish their professional profile, build and maintain their professional network, as well as find and reconnect with colleagues and classmates. Furthermore, LinkedIn allows you to connect and engage with other professionals and communicate with people in your industry. It also provides information and news about companies and industry insights. You can tap into the knowledge of your network and uncover new opportunities as well.

Mission

LinkedIn's mission is to connect the world's professionals to make them more productive and successful. LinkedIn's members can get access to people, jobs, news, updates, and insights that help you to be great at what you do. The most important word in the mission is professional. It is the key differentiator between it and other social media platforms. LinkedIn portrays individuals as who they are as professionals.

Why do marketers use LinkedIn?

There are many reasons why marketers use LinkedIn.

  • LinkedIn enables marketers to market to decision-makers when they are making business decisions.
  • Unlike other social media platforms, LinkedIn represents a professional context, and when LinkedIn's users are online, they are invested. They are investing time into their professional brand and enter an aspirational mindset.
  • LinkedIn can be utilized as part of an overall social media marketing strategy, and it can help you achieve your overall marketing goals.

Value proposition

Firstly, LinkedIn is one of the world's largest professional platforms, with over 400 million members globally, and it's growing every day. With 200,000 members joining LinkedIn daily, it's clear that LinkedIn has a large base of members that marketers can access and communicate to. Compared to other social networks where users spend time, LinkedIn members invest time when they are on a professional network and enter an aspirational mindset. For marketers, they can communicate to users when they are making business decisions or decisions related to who they are as a professional.

For businesses offering products or services to other businesses, LinkedIn is a great platform for advertising. It allows marketers to target on a very granular level to reach their precise audience. The user data on LinkedIn is relevant and up to date, and with the ability to understand who the decision makers are in a company, it can be a very powerful asset for marketers.

Being able to target exactly the right person in a company is a strong asset for marketers using LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a hub for business news, updates, and insights. Users are engaging on the platform, reading about their industry, and network with businesses, even incorporating their perspective and opinion as well. LinkedIn is a prime location for businesses to position themselves as thought leaders in their industry through the distribution of content, insights, and news.

In short, marketers can market to a very large pool of professionals, focus their efforts on exactly the right audience, and capture them when they are making business decisions. A benefit for LinkedIn is that it enables you to practice social selling. Social selling introduces a new era of selling and it incorporates social networking.

Social selling

Social selling is the process of building and maintaining relationships through social networks and utilizing these relationships in the entire sales process, from finding new prospects to reaching sales goals. LinkedIn enables users to social sell, gather insights, and get an understanding of their prospects.

Furthermore, LinkedIn can help users understand more about their companies, the decision makers within the companies, and insights. This can help with knowing when it's the right time to approach a prospect.

There are many benefits to social selling.

  • Build leads: Social selling enables users to build and develop relationships with leads via social insights.
  • Gather insights: Social selling enables users to gather insights and an understanding of your prospects, and can help with shaping your approach and conversation. Furthermore, with these insights, you can intelligently approach prospects in a timely manner when there is a potential opportunity.
  • Leverage your networks: Social selling involves leveraging your existing network of contacts by establishing mutual connections between you and your prospects. The idea is that your mutual connection will provide you with an introduction, the mutual connection is a trusted source to the prospect, and therefore, the lead is more open to conversation. Social selling can help yield better results compared to cold calling and other sales methods, where there are no mutual connections or insights.
  • Inspire trust: By leveraging connections and insights from social selling, you can create a sense of trust with prospects by showing a genuine interest and understanding of the company.

Marketing model

LinkedIn's marketing model is based on full-funnel marketing. Full-funnel marketing is an online marketing technique that truly focuses a business's marketing efforts, spending your budget in a smart, focused, and calculated way.

There are three areas to consider when you look at a funnel marketing strategy.

Reach

This involves finding the right audience that will be interested in your products or services. While many will market to you as many people as possible, this strategy focuses on a core audience interested in your services.

Nurture

Once the target audience is defined, you can boost the visibility of your company presence to your likely audience with ads and content. This is known as nurturing your audience.

Once those likely customers are located, they are nurtured through the funnel. Companies will present ads and content that will encourage engagement with the target audience. The ads will continue to keep popping up in likely places until some form of action has been taken. This makes it so your business is always at the forefront of your audience's mind.

Acquire

Once the action has been taken by your target audience, they are an acquired lead for marketing. Lead nurturing is the process of developing relationships with buyers at every stage of the sales funnel and buyer's journey by listening to a prospect's needs and providing answers and information that they require.

This means that there can be touchpoints with the buyers where there is no mention of product or selling.

The role of content marketing

Content plays an integral role in lead nurturing. Consumers can download several pieces of content before they make a decision to purchase. Content can help with moving leads further down the buyer journey by getting their attention and interest.

Consumers can consume up to 10 pieces of content before they make a decision about a purchase. Furthermore, customers will have gone through 90% of the customer journey before they directly reach out to a company. Therefore, content plays an integral role in nurturing leads.

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Lauren Murphy

As Head of Social Media for the creative agency Goosebump, Lauren’s current role is to create and implement social media strategies and content strategies for a portfolio of clients spanning a wide range of industries. Her team of creatives and strategists specializes in delivering innovative and integrated social media campaigns that drive conversions. Her work has been recognised with a wide range of awards, including the Irish Social Media Awards and Digital Media Awards. 

Data protection regulations affect almost all aspects of digital marketing. Therefore, DMI has produced a short course on GDPR for all of our students. If you wish to learn more about GDPR, you can do so here:

DMI Short Course: GDPR

The following pieces of content from the Digital Marketing Institute's Membership Library have been chosen to offer additional material that you might find interesting or insightful.

You can find more information and content like this on the Digital Marketing Institute's Membership Library

You will not be assessed on this content in your final exam.

ABOUT THIS DIGITAL MARKETING MODULE

LinkedIn
Lauren Murphy
Skills Expert

This module focuses on LinkedIn and shows how you can use the platform to build and develop professional connections with your target audience. You learn how to use LinkedIn-specific features, such as Company pages and Showcase pages, to build your company presence on the platform. The module goes on to cover the different ad formats available on LinkedIn, such as Text ads, Sponsored ads, Sponsored InMails, Display ads, and Dynamic ads, and outlines best practices for advertising on the platform. Finally, it teaches you how to use analytics with LinkedIn to measure the success of your campaigns.