LinkedIn Benefits and Possibilities | McDougall Interactive

2 new users are joining every second on LinkedIn (source). It’s no longer something your business can ignore for marketing purposes, and how much it can benefit your networking.

Some of the Benefits & Possibilities of marketing through LinkedIn

Awareness of your products and services, especially for B2B
Sales research to know your prospects’ interests
Find funding
Recruiters can find talent
Drive traffic to your site and content
Get noticed by journalists
Promote events
Get and give free advice
Make global contacts
Meet influencers through referrals
Build trust with recommendations

7 Golden Rules of LinkedIn Marketing

As with any social media effort, be sure to follow the golden rules:

Know your audience.
Know their hopes, dreams, and what keeps them up at night.
Listen first and then engage by starting conversations.
Be honest and authentic.
Give content and advice freely. Deepen relationships by answering and asking questions.
Only offer your product or service once they know, like, and trust you, and you are in their sphere of influence.
Build fans first and then customers! Don’t expect pushing your ad in front of people’s faces to work here.

LinkedIn works best when you have tons of contacts. Make sure you have a strategy to generate a couple thousand contacts or more if you can, if you really want to take full advantage of the system.