Waste is bad in any business setting. For small businesses, running on lean margins against ambitious growth goals, waste is anathema.
Generally speaking, small and midsize businesses (SMBs) can ill afford to invest their time and resources chasing the wrong customers or funneling budgets into ineffective channels. At LinkedIn, we aim to make it easier for SMBs to network and grow by fostering an environment where people are ready to do business.
That doesn’t mean buyers and decision-influencers are always ready to make a purchase, but they — like all members — come to LinkedIn with a professional mindset, eager to engage with people and content pertinent to their jobs and careers.
For small businesses striving to increase brand awareness and build a loyal customer base, LinkedIn is a tremendously valuable place to focus. More than 99% of companies on LinkedIn are classified as SMBs, with upwards of 10 million small-business owners and entrepreneurs comprising our bustling community.
In celebration of Small Business Week, we thought we’d highlight some of the newer features and tools on the LinkedIn platform that can help smaller businesses do bigger things.
How LinkedIn Is Helping SMBs Gain an Edge
For small-business owners and marketers, these powerful capabilities can be especially impactful.
Let People Know You’re “Open For Business”
With word-of-mouth playing such a key role in the early success of any small business, we’ve channeled this dynamic onto LinkedIn with the “open for business” feature. It helps you quickly indicate to other members that you are actively offering solutions or services, turning your profile into a friendly digital billboard of sorts.
By tapping into this feature, you’ll also be more discoverable on LinkedIn by people who are seeking out the specific skills and services you provide. From there, the buzz will only build ...
Zero In On Your Specific Objectives and Goals
Small businesses face their own unique challenges, but they also have some relative advantages compared to big, complex, multifaceted organizations. Among them: clarity and focus. SMBs tend to have a clear idea of what they need to accomplish, and can pursue these goals and key milestones in lockstep.
LinkedIn’s objective-based advertising experience is built to help you achieve specific objectives based on what your company needs in order to grow. The streamlined campaign creation experience and reporting tools are simple and intuitive enough that you don’t need an extensive team to manage them. Whether you’re hoping to increase brand awareness, generate leads, or convert customers, you’ll have no trouble identifying the right formats and metrics to match.
Build Community with Live-streams and Events
Communities of customers, influencers, and advocates can elevate young brands and are instrumental to sustained long-term success. Virtual events and live-streamed broadcasts help nurture fledgling brand communities by bringing people together in an interactive, shared experience. And while marketers turned to these tactics mostly out of necessity in 2020, there’s no doubt that planning and hosting experiences virtually is more scalable and accessible for a small business (not to mention its customers) than organizing physical events.
LinkedIn Live and LinkedIn Events offer excellent ways to bring your professional community together.
LinkedIn Page Growth Made Easier
Growing your LinkedIn Page following is extremely valuable, helping to cultivate that all-important brand community while increasing the number of members you can reach with organic marketing activities on the platform. Over the past few years, we’ve continually added new ways for organizations to attract more Page followers. For example:
- Add a LinkedIn Page follow button to your website
- Associate Community Hashtags with your Page
- Invite first-degree connections to follow your Page
- Gain visibility and show what your brand is about with video and LinkedIn Stories
Find more tips to build and engage your audience with LinkedIn Pages Best Practices.
Bring Your Story to Life
For founders and entrepreneurs, there’s considerable overlap between growing the personal and professional brands. We’re excited about giving LinkedIn members more ways to bring their stories to life with functionalities like video Cover Stories and creator mode.
Supercharge Small Business Growth on LinkedIn
If you’ve been waiting to take advantage of all LinkedIn has to offer for small and mid-sized businesses, we encourage you to make a move on some of these great tools. There’s no time to waste!
Learn more about how to maximize the impact of LinkedIn for Small Business. And create an ad to start reaching the right people in a professional mindset.
