Marketing is essential to your business, not failing. But marketing tactics don’t always work. 

You can let those PPC ad dollars add up and spend on great content — but what about organic efforts through LinkedIn? 

I want to share five ways you can leverage LinkedIn to make your marketing efforts more effective. And, in turn, help you succeed at being your own boss.

1. Figure Out Who Your Audience Is

Before a marketing campaign, you always define your target audience, right? 

That’s what you need to do as the first step of your LinkedIn marketing strategy. You might want to generate more leads or raise awareness of your brand, or maybe both. 

That’s something you need to define. What you want to accomplish will help determine who your audience is — and use advanced filters effectively. 

Once you know exactly who you’re after, you can start customizing your profile to welcome those types of people.

2. Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile

Yes, this should be part of your marketing strategy. Making your profile as filled-out as possible is the first step before doing any proactive marketing. 

Marketing is becoming more focused on personalization. Everyone has something to sell, but not everyone wants to work with everyone else. Your profile is where you can show your expertise and your personality. 

Are you more approachable than the next guy? And does your profile show that?

Try to get as close as you can to a 100% completed profile. Then make sure you add skills, certifications, and achievements as time goes on.

3. Create And Optimize Your Company Page

After you’ve made a professional profile, create a LinkedIn company page. This is the first impression for anyone who may be interested in your business. 

First, optimize your company page so people can easily find it online. People search directly on LinkedIn, and they use Google so that you can implement search engine optimization (SEO) practices. Best practices here are to use relevant keywords, link to your page from elsewhere, and share useful content.

Either way, treat your LinkedIn page as part of your funnel.

4. Get People To Follow Your Company Page

The more followers you have, the more people your message can reach. And that’s the whole point of marketing — reaching more people so you can connect with the right people. 

But how do you get followers?

Start with your employees — ask them to follow the company page and share the page with their followers. 

Next, invite your LinkedIn connections to follow your page, but only those connections that may benefit from what you offer. This may take some research, but it will be worth it (use the advanced search on LinkedIn to find connections based on interest and industry). 

Finally, add a “Follow” button on your company website, in blog posts, and in your email blasts. 

5. Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator Generate Leads

Speaking of emails, a more effective method than email blasts is cold emailing. Yes, cold emails work if you do them correctly.

This might be the most productive marketing tip on this list. 

But how do you extract email addresses from LinkedIn? You use LinkedIn Sales Navigator. 

Here’s a basic step-by-step process for using this tool:

1. Create a lead list in LinkedIn
2. Use the Advanced Search tool to find people by industry, professional experience, products you offer, and other keywords
3. Add the leads you find to your leads list
4. Extract the emails from the leads list

There are a handful of tools to choose from for Step 4. 

Next, you need to write an email template that you’ll use for every cold email, making sure you personalize each one.

When it comes to writing the email template, you can massively increase your open rates and number of responses by following these necessary steps:

➔   Keep it simple: you don’t want to overwhelm the recipient, so use just one font type and one color. And don’t use links as those can get flagged by spam filters. Also, you want them to see only one call-to-action: respond to your email.

➔   Write a catchy subject line: your subject line needs to sound like your emailing a colleague — relevant and useful. For example, one of the most effective email titles is “Quick question.”

➔   Personalize every email: by using the person’s name and/or company name, you are drastically increasing the chances that they’ll open and respond. It takes extra effort and research, but it’s worth it. 

Just like that, you’re on your way to using LinkedIn to build your business and succeed as your own boss! 

About the Author: Brooklin Nash is Head of Content at Wiza.co — a sales prospecting tool focused on LinkedIn Sales Navigator. On the weekends, Brooklin parties hard with his own content marketing business. Find him on LinkedIn and Twitter.