Finding LinkedIn marketing partnerships isn’t as difficult as it sounds. LinkedIn differs from all other social media platforms in a couple of ways. For one thing, it is designed for purely professional purposes. For another, it helps you connect with people and businesses who don’t yet know you, rather than just allowing you to stay up to date with current connections.
These characteristics make LinkedIn an ideal platform for finding marketing partnerships and contractors. To be successful, there are three main things you need to do: market your brand, publish content, and advertise.
Step 1: Optimize Your Page for Search
The only way to ensure that potential partners and contractors will find you is to create a company page. This allows people who are interested in your business to learn more about what you do. Users can also follow your page to see your content in their newsfeeds.
Beyond setting up a page, you’ll need to optimize it. You’ll also need to complete all the fields (specifying industry, company type, company size, and more); you should add the following:
- Company description. Describe your business in no more than 2000 characters. The most important details should appear in the first 150 or so characters, as this will appear as the meta description in Google searches.
- Specialties. As you can only add 20 specialties, think carefully about what keywords partners are likely to use to find you. Turn to data from social listening if you are unsure of what to use or check out what your competitors have listed.
- Images. A page without images is incomplete. It is essential that you use the right sizes of images to appear professional.
Another way to optimize your company page is to connect your personal profile and the profiles of everyone at your business with the page. Users who find your company page will want to know what kinds of people work at the business and what sets them apart from those at competitor companies.
Make sure that all employees’ personal profiles are fully populated with information like experience, skills, and accomplishments. You can check how complete yours is by looking at the profile strength report. This will bring you one step closer to finding LinkedIn marketing partnerships.
Step 2. Publish Engaging Content
LinkedIn has its own publishing platform for content. Unfortunately, company pages are unable to release their own posts. However, you can use this feature through your employees. Ask people in leadership and other high positions to publish content on their profiles. Your company page can then share the articles.
In addition to creating your own content, share articles that you posted on your blog as well as content from external sources. Posting at least once a week will keep your page active.
Step 3. Optimize Your Content
By understanding how the LinkedIn algorithm works, you can ensure that all your content is optimized.
The first thing to focus on is quality. A bot checks all content to determine if it is high quality. If the bot decides that a post is spam or low quality, the content may never reach users.
Once your content is published, LinkedIn monitors it for engagement. Releasing content that resonates with followers and is likely to receive shares and likes is key to finding LinkedIn marketing partnerships. If a user hides your post or marks it as spam, you are going to lose visibility.
Finally, the LinkedIn algorithm will assess your account as a whole. If your account often publishes spam or has a low engagement rate, content will appear to fewer users.
Step 4. Use Rich Media
Post a variety of content types, not just text-based articles. At a minimum, all your articles should have an accompanying image. However, you can mix things up even more by posting media from other social channels. Options include YouTube videos (these will start playing automatically in newsfeeds) and SlideShare presentations (to increase your amount of visual content).
Finding LinkedIn marketing partnerships often relies on how engaging your posts are. Rich media keeps your output fresh, thus increasing the value of engagements.
Step 5. Attract Followers
A large following will show that your page has authority. Plus, more followers may mean more shares of your content. Publishing interesting content will go a long way to attracting followers, but you should also take a more direct approach.
For starters, ask all your employees to become followers. Next, tell other people connected to your business about your page. You can let them know in your next email newsletter, for example. Finally, add a LinkedIn button to your website to attract users who are interested in your offerings.
Step 6. Use LinkedIn Ads
LinkedIn ads allow you to target the users who are most interested in partnering with you. As well as running ads, you can turn your best-performing posts into sponsored content — to reach a greater audience — and send Sponsored InMail to targeted users.
Continuously improve your ads by using LinkedIn Analytics. The data will help you determine who to target, when to post, and how to change your ads for better engagement.
Learn how to set up LinkedIn ads, then plan and run your campaigns.
Step 7: Network With Other Professionals
LinkedIn makes it easy to connect with potential partners. The trick is finding such users.
One way is to add interests to personal profiles — such as to the profile of the social media manager of your page or the business owner. Then, more content related to these interests will appear in the feeds of these users. When content that appears is created by high-level members of companies, reach out to these users to start building relationships.
All the above will help you develop visibility and authority, which is key to finding LinkedIn partnerships and contractors. However, such a strategy will only be effective if you maintain an active presence on LinkedIn, reach out to people yourself and respond quickly whenever users contact you.
