[LinkedIn Success Guide] UNIT 3: LINKEDIN BUSINESS SOLUTIONS

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[LinkedIn Success Guide] UNIT 3: LINKEDIN BUSINESS SOLUTIONS

Note: You can read the full guide and resources in the carousel above ☝️

1. Talent Solutions

LinkedIn is, as you might have seen by now, a platform that takes great pride in the way that it allows companies and businesses of all sizes to get in touch with the type of talent that represents the greatest fit for proper organization development. 

So one of the greatest reasons why your business will greatly benefit from having a presence on the largest professional networking platform is because it can provide you with the best variety of recruiting tools that will allow you to meet your next hire.

LinkedIn talent solutions offer talent seekers three types of solutions. You can start with job postings that target the right type of candidate for any job and then to find qualified applicants that can accelerate your hiring efforts.

You can post jobs by simply signing up to use LinkedIn as an employer, and you can hire up to two hires a year with a free account, but if you plan to hire more than three hires a year you can contact LinkedIn to request the feature that will allow you to swap more than three job slots at a time!

LinkedIn also allows you to source active and passive talent from the platform through sourcing tools that will enable you to quickly hire quality candidates, which is possible when you use the “recruiter lite” and the “recruiter” tools.

The “recruiter lite” tool is a lightweight solution for companies looking for a few hires a year, and you can get started for free, but if your goal is to tap into the largest pool of talent and access LinkedIn’s massive network of professionals for hire your obvious choice would be to use the full “recruiter” suite.

Another way to find talent to work for your organization is not by posting jobs or by navigating the database of professional profiles available on LinkedIn but by promoting your brand as an organization where top talent would likely want to collaborate with, and LinkedIn offers you the right type of tools to help you further build your brand and showcase your unique organizational culture.

Having a strong brand that stands out in this competitive job market is essential when it comes to attracting the right people through your doors, and LinkedIn has two solutions that will help you out on capitalizing the branding factor for your business.

First you have the “career pages” that can help you to showcase jobs that are tailored towards specific talent as well as to showcase your excellent work culture. Not to be confused with company pages, these career pages are designed to make your job postings to better stand out to potential candidates through awesomely targeted job opportunities.

And unlike company pages, where only information and content about your company is promoted, career pages are all about sharing your unique company story, attracting the best talent and also about measuring the impact of your employer brand on your recruiting goals.

Another highly-targeted solution is the “work with us ads” solution, which are ads designed to capitalize on the high traffic ad space on your potential employee’s profiles. These job ads on average get 50 times more engagement than typical recruitment ads and they drive interest to your job posts, to your career pages on all your other LinkedIn placements so you can stay ahead of your competition.

Talent solutions are available to enterprise companies to help them hire lots of people more efficiently, to small and medium sized businesses so they can easily add more candidates to their pipeline in order to grow their business, to search and staffing agencies so they can get more leads.

Nonprofits can also benefit from using LinkedIn talent solutions and get steep discounts to get more people working on their fundraising efforts. So now you know, next time you are looking for the perfect employee look no further!

2. Marketing Solutions 

LinkedIn is a great platform when it comes to nurturing a very important marketing factor known as outreach. Outreach, is the marketing practice of looking for individuals and organizations that can be interested in what a marketer or business has to offer, be it a product, a service or a business idea.

Doing marketing outreach on social media has become commonplace because social networking platforms make it easier for people and companies to reach people where they are most likely to hang out the most, and social media offers marketers the benefit of narrowing lead qualifying criteria thanks to targeted placements such as groups and company pages.

And because you are using LinkedIn for outreach, it might be a little easier to find the right prospects and clients simply because you already know what people are looking for. Yet this organic approach to outreach has its own inherent limitations, and LinkedIn offers you the right type of marketing solutions that will help you to avoid being hindered by limitations.

And what we mean by this is that LinkedIn gives you access to the right tools that will help you to easily direct your marketing to who matters the most so you can reach your ideal customers right on the largest professional network in the world. 

These marketing solutions will allow you to build your brand, to raise awareness about it and to generate leads the right way on LinkedIn, with several marketing options available at your disposal that include paid advertising and company pages that can help you to take your marketing efforts to a whole new level.

Sponsored content for example can help you to boost your content and show the very best version of it to the world's largest professional audience on any device. Sponsored content solutions will allow you to use comprehensive targeting options to reach the exact type of audience that your business needs through native advertising, which will in turn help you to build meaningful relationships with your prospects.

Another direct marketing solution offered by LinkedIn includes "InMail" advertising, which is all about reaching the people that are most likely to support your business with valuable content, right in their LinkedIn email inboxes. Using InMail solutions will help you to easily send personalized messages to your prospects. This type of correspondence has helped many businesses to drive conversions by reaching others right where they are the most engaged.

Other solutions include dynamic social ads that will allow you to drive relevant responses with ads that correspond to the activity and profiles of the members of your target audience, sending highly personalized copy and dynamically generated advert imagery to LinkedIn members.

Advertising offered by LinkedIn marketing solutions also includes display ads that will help you to reach your target audience through accurate professional targeting technology. These display ads are highly visible and are specifically placed on high traffic areas on the LinkedIn platform only, and they operate on a fraud-monitored environment to ensure maximum brand safety.

Lastly, text ads are also supported by the LinkedIn marketing solutions platform, which gives members eager to try out advertising options, a way to stay within a tight budget and at the same time attract new customers to their business using LinkedIn's fail-safe pay-per-click advertising platform.

They are designed to drive traffic and generate quality leads, and you can pay for them on either a click or impression basis. Start leveraging the power of LinkedIn's marketing solutions today!

3. Sales Solutions

LinkedIn is a place where anything that is business related comes and goes, and sales are no different. Because, in the end, what really matters is to use LinkedIn as a platform to close: to close connections, to close deals, to close a hiring interview, or to close sales.

That is why LinkedIn has made a great, significant effort into creating a sales solution for its more business-oriented users, one which will allow them to get started in the world of social selling through a series of powerful ways to engage with potential buyers on the platform.

But before looking at the product offered as LinkedIn’s sales solution, the following questions are worth answering: what is social selling and why is it important to integrate into your marketing plan?

Social selling is the act of using social media to drive sales by interacting directly with prospects on their preferred communication channel, which in our case is LinkedIn. And social marketing is important because it allows salespeople to drive 45% more business opportunities, it makes them 51% more likely to reach their sales quota and it also makes them 78% more successful than sellers that do not use social media.

So what is LinkedIn’s sales solution then? Allow us to introduce you to LinkedIn’s “sales navigator”, a tool that will enable you to connect with LinkedIn based buyers and sellers in a whole new way.

Finding the right people whom to offer your products or services to can be a hit or miss situation in most cases, but the LinkedIn sales navigator will allow you to target the right buyers and companies thanks to a sophisticated algorithm that will give you lead recommendations that are tailor-made for your needs.

The sales navigator tool will also give you the ability to understand what your buyers value the most thorough sales insights that aim to leverage more effective selling strategies. In this respect, the sales navigator has the best tools to help you stay informed about your contacts and accounts, as that is the only way to transform cold calling into a warm, relevant conversation.

Because LinkedIn understands that creating successful sales campaigns is all about building great relationships with your clients, the sales navigator will also allow you to engage existing and potential customers with a personalized outreach approach.

This is easy to achieve because the sales navigator enables you to establish trust even before starting your initial conversation. In short, it is designed to understand your buyers’ intent and follow up on it effectively.

The sales navigator comes in three flavors, and finding the one that is right for you depends on the size of your business operation and the number of features that you would need to run them properly.

These three Sales Navigator plans are the “Professional”, “Team” and “Enterprise” suites. Features included on each plan include from 20 to 50 promoted emails per month, extended LinkedIn network access, advanced sales-specific search tools, automated lead and account recommendations, access to a sales focused learning center and a dedicated mobile app.

Features that are only available to “Professional” and “Enterprise” Sales Navigator users include customer relationship management widgets and synchronization, out of network unlocks, usage reporting, volume based and multi-year discounts, invoicing and a dedicated client relationship manager.

You can start using the “Professional” Sales Navigator suite with a free trial so you can get a test drive of what you will be able to achieve with it, and you will need to request a demo once you are ready to advance in your social selling efforts. So get ready to take your sales force to the next level!

4. Learning Solutions

Becoming a professional takes years of education, but a university title alone won’t be enough once you enter the workforce because what makes a dedicated professional is real world expertise acquired from ongoing, continuous learning.

That is why LinkedIn has devised a series of Learning Solutions that can be accessed through its platform and through third party efforts that have transformed the world of online education over the past decades.

The benefits obtained by businesses using LinkedIn’s on-demand learning solutions include soft and people management skills training that will allow them to develop managers and leaders among their talent, the merging of soft and technical skills on a practical level and a boost of employee productivity of up to 50%!

These learning solutions are available for businesses that want to develop improved leadership positions on their teams, including the development of managers and leaders at all levels, to adapt to the job market of the future by up-skilling their entire workforce through education, to keep their employees more productive by teaching them to be comfortable around digital tools and to accelerate career development among their employees.

Higher education facilities such as colleges and universities can also benefit from allowing their faculties, staff and students to access LinkedIn learning solutions that will allow them to discover more inspiring content, to assign video tutorials and tools training for homework and to leave classroom time for concept mastery, to keep the staff skillset up to date and to further prepare students to join the workforce once they are out there!

LinkedIn also offers Learning Solutions to government agencies so they can better manage workforce development by maximizing their budgets through on demand e-learning. LinkedIn Learning solutions will allow government agencies to do more with less, to attract and retain employees, to close job related skill gaps and to promote self-paced learning.

This is possible because LinkedIn Learning solutions can help government agencies to maximize their training budgets thanks to its cost effective approach at covering thousands of relevant educational topics, to prioritize learning opportunities as another employee benefit offered by the organization while also helping these employees to acquire soft and hard skills that they will need to be more productive in their roles.

Lastly, LinkedIn Learning Solutions are also available to libraries, and they can provide skill-building job training opportunities and resources to library staff and patrons. Learning solutions offered by LinkedIn to libraries will allow them to provide their staff with the business and technical training that it needs in order to succeed.

These learning solutions also benefit the community that the libraries are located in because they can jump start advanced job search and digital literacy initiatives supported by the public.

The expert-led learning provided with these solutions include studio quality videos and resources curated by industry experts and by working professionals, which can greatly help library staff to acquire the type of skills that they need to be more productive in their specific careers.

Providing all these institutions with amazing educational opportunities through LinkedIn is made possible by the Lynda.com sponsored learning solution, which combines 20 years of experience that back Lynda.com’s expertise in developing high-quality content with the LinkedIn platform, making it easier to identify and personalize the learning experience offered to each person involved in the learning process. 

Read more: You can read the full guide and resources in the carousel above ☝️