When you start a new business, be it online or offline, the most important aspect of it, without a doubt, is the marketing. Without marketing, you can have the most professional looking website in the world and the best businesses but still go nowhere.
Marketing, regardless of it being online or not, is often described as "activities a company undertakes to promote the buying or selling of a product or service." Marketing is not one dimensional, and includes advertising, selling, and the delivering of products to consumers or other businesses. Some marketing is done not by the companies themselves, but by affiliates on behalf of that company.
Marketing is what brings the customers to your door; it is what gets your name out there for everyone to see. Online marketing, if done right, is the best form of marketing as your audience can number in the millions, allowing your brand to gain lots of exposure. Whilst most people tend to turn to platforms such as Facebook or Instagram for online marketing, they tend to overlook the potential LinkedIn has as a social media marketing tool due to its primary role as a business connection platform.
LinkedIn comes under the heading of social media marketing but, unlike Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn is aimed firmly at the business market. It is free to join and is the number one business marketing platform in the world, allowing you to network, talk, and connect with other like-minded businessmen and women and give your business venture exposure to the business world.
With more than 675 million unique members worldwide, LinkedIn has a huge reach, crossing lines over virtually every industry in the world. Apart from just being used to market your business, LinkedIn can also be used as a recruitment tool, allowing you to hire new team members in an instant; this proves especially useful for those whose business requires an online presence.
In this book, not only are we going to talk about how to use LinkedIn to market your business, but to share some insights with you on how to get the right traffic flowing through your door, and to generate new leads that you can convert into loyal, paying customers. If you have thought about using LinkedIn but didn't know how to use it or even considered it as a marketing tool, this is the book for you, both new and old businesses alike.