Use Your LinkedIn Profile for Digital Selling

Digital marketing has become one of the most popular forms of selling your products and services. In the last few years, this has become a major source of earning for well-known social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Even the new Indian social media channels apps like connected app and Vero app that recently joined the bandwagon have realised the importance of promoting digital marketing on their sites. LinkedIn is another very popular social channel with over 400 million users across 200 countries and territories. It has got a phenomenal reach like Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

Unfortunately, inspite of its wide popularity and a large user base, it’s not the preferred channel for the digital marketing for most businesses. It’s about time you should incorporate LinkedIn into your digital selling strategy.

Since its inception, LinkedIn has positioned itself as a distinctly professional channel. It’s primarily used by prospective employers and business houses as well as job seekers as a tool for recruitment, brand promotion, and business networking. But of late, it’s increasingly used as a powerful platform for digital selling.

You must be wondering how to make the most of your LinkedIn account, and harness that social presence to generate leads, drive sales and achieve digital selling success. You can easily do that by following a few simple tricks and easy-to-adopt approaches I’ve listed below.

Optimize Your Profile 

You can establish trust and build a powerful brand by optimizing your social profiles, and this applies to LinkedIn as well. It’s such a versatile platform on which you can identify and develop a deeper understanding of prospects; they can just as easily use LinkedIn to conduct research and get more information about you!

You can use certain LinkedIn profile tips that serve as a starting point. For example something as routine as personalizing your vanity URL, using a professional headshot, filling in your job experience and educational qualifications will go a long way in creating a powerful profile. You should use your LinkedIn profile to showcase yourself in the most credible and personable way possible.

Customize your headline: 

Your headline is usually your current job title and company, which is mentioned in the “Experience” section of your profile. Instead of duplicating content, customize your headline using some keywords and key specialist functions. This not only helps you to become more visible and the probablity of your profile displaying in a LinkedIn search, it also efficiently showcases your varied skillset.

Enhance your contact details and add summary: 

Adding your summary in the LinkedIn profile enhances your chances to get discovered. Try to include some interesting lines about what you do and why you’re passionate about it. There is an additional contact details section which is only visible to existing LinkedIn connections. Therefore, mention your contact details within your summary for potential customers, along with an appropriate Call-To-Action. You can add a maximum of three links to either your Twitter profile, company website, blog or RSS feed. This will further boost your social authority and search optimize your profile.

Add assets: 

There is a provision on LinkedIn to add media assets to your profile, including photos, links, documents, videos and presentations. By adding such relevant content to your profile, you can show your leadership and creativity to potential customers, and also use that content to persuade and convert them. For example, it could include – a video testimonial, an industry related blog or a slideshare presentation.

Request for Recommendations: 

To begin with, you should try to obtain at least one recommendation for every job title listed on your profile. Recommendations particularly play an important role in digital selling, since this could mean the difference between successfully engaging with and acquiring a new customer.

Use keywords: 

It’s important to use relevant keywords throughout your profile to improve your profile’s chances of getting displayed in LinkedIn search results. Just imagine yourself in the shoes of someone who would be searching for you; what words or phrases would they use? Try to include these keywords in the content of your profile as organically as possible, because if you’re forcing them, it could disrupt the fluency of the professional, accessible tone you are trying to achieve.