How to Use LinkedIn to Market Your Business, Part Two

LinkedIn has made it easier than ever to reach your target market and key centers of influence (COI). No matter who you are looking for, you can bet there is a LinkedIn group for those people. Once you have found your target market on LinkedIn, how do you go about marketing to them? In Part One of this article series, I discussed how you can use LinkedIn groups to start conversations with potential clients and COIs. In addition to contacting specific individuals, the social networking website offers great opportunities for promoting yourself and your business and doesn’t require much more effort than what you are already doing.

Promote Your Blog, Article or Newsletter
Whether you write a daily blog, a weekly article for the local paper or a quarterly newsletter for your clients, I strongly recommend you post it on LinkedIn. You have already spent the time and effort writing the article, so why not spend another 30 minutes increasing traffic to your masterpiece. To do this, join as many LinkedIn groups as possible that contain your target market or COIs. If you prefer working with women in the San Diego area, join the Women in Business San Diego group. If you are interested in meeting estate planning attorneys, join the Estate Planner Legal Network. You can join as many groups as you wish, so don’t limit yourself. The more groups you join, the larger your audience becomes.

Once you have strategically chosen your groups, it is time to start promoting yourself. Each group page has six tabs: Overview, Discussions, News, Updates, Members and Settings. Click on the News tab and you will see the most read articles for today, this week and the last two weeks. I have found that most groups focus on Discussions and not on News which is great for you because your article will be more visible. Click the Submit a New Article button and follow the instructions. You will be asked to submit the article URL and a summary. Even if you have a print newsletter you would like to promote, get a .pdf version and post it to your website. LinkedIn isn’t looking to see if the article is coming from a legitimate news site, it is just looking for a URL address. Once you have submitted your article, you will see the link on the Overview and News pages. The article you just posted will also be included on the Group Updates section of a member’s home page and in the group Digest Email for those members who do not regularly visit the group page. If you repeat this process across all of the different groups you have joined, you will soon reach hundreds if not thousands of people. If you have a blog that you update on a regular basis, I highly recommend this strategy. When I started promoting my weekly blog through LinkedIn, traffic to my blog more than tripled in just one month. LinkedIn is now the top referrer to my blog and I only spend 15minutes per week submitting articles to the various groups.

Stretch Your PR Further
Another way to use the LinkedIn groups News page is to promote news stories about you or your firm. This works for articles, radio broadcasts, and television appearances. If it has a URL address, you can promote it. You’ll get more traction this way than just the one time the story was covered.  Three weeks ago, one of my clients was quoted in the San Diego Business Journal about how the economic crisis has affected their business. The article was a great recruiting piece so I posted it to several financial services groups. Not only did the article receive several comments, but it is still one of the most read articles on the group sites. Not too shabby for two minutes worth of work.

These days, everyone is looking for a low-cost way to market their business. Social networking sites are a great way to do this.  For financial advisors, I can’t think of another site that is more effective than LinkedIn. Try it for yourself and then post comments about how it worked for you. I guarantee you will be pleasantly surprised by the results.

Kristen Luke is the Principal of Wealth Management Marketing, a consulting firm specializing in marketing solutions for independent financial advisors. She is currently accepting new clients in all geographic locations.  Visit www.WealthManagementMarketing.net for more information.  Daily marketing tips and blog updates are now available via Twitter.