Starting an eCommerce brand may seem like a good (or even easy) idea. However, you’ll quickly realize that it can get complicated – especially in terms of getting customers through your virtual door. Finding your audience is an ongoing process and, unfortunately, at the beginning it can be painfully slow. Thankfully, there are ways to boost your brand’s visibility – and not all of them cost a ton of money. In the case of LinkedIn, promoting your brand doesn’t have to cost any money.
A dedicated LinkedIn company page can help boost your brand and increase visibility. Here are a few reasons why your business should be on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is a proven way to attract more customers to your business and, as a result, boost your eCommerce store’s sales. With well over 100 million business professionals on the platform, LinkedIn is a great place to meet other small business owners and entrepreneurs, which can lead to successful partnerships as well as straightforward sales.
Although it’s a social media platform, LinkedIn is geared towards professionals. Over the years, it has developed a reputation for being a place to find employment and employees. But, in reality, it’s a lot more than that if you know how to use it correctly as an eCommerce brand. If you haven’t considered creating a separate LinkedIn profile for your eCommerce business, here are five reasons why you should.
5 Reasons Your eCommerce Brand Should Be on LinkedIn
1. Increase online exposure.
The more visible your eCommerce brand becomes, the more opportunities it has to succeed. LinkedIn provides yet another avenue for online exposure, and not just through people finding your business profile. Because individuals can link to a business page, your employees (including yourself) create more opportunities for your brand to be seen.
2. Share your business story.
A business profile on LinkedIn gives you a great opportunity to showcase your business, including its story, mission, and what sets it apart from the competition. The more compelling your brand’s story is, the more attention it will get, and the more people will want to share.
3. Interact with other business owners.
LinkedIn is loaded with tons of business professionals and entrepreneurs, which means it’s an awesome place for eCommerce store owners to start networking.
While some of the connections you make will turn into sales, the even more powerful opportunity comes from creating relationships with other business owners who can use their audience to potentially bring more visibility to your own. These business-to-business connections can result in things like spots on podcasts, guest posts on blogs, email blasts, affiliate partnerships, and collaborating on contests and giveaways.
The more active you are on LinkedIn, the more benefits you’ll see.
4. Become an expert.
LinkedIn allows you to publish posts and articles as a business, which means you can position yourself to become an expert in your niche. This starts to build trust and buzz. Not to mention, the content itself can be shared, which once again leads to more online visibility and better branding.
5. Improve SEO.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a critical component of most eCommerce stores’ marketing strategies. One of the reasons so many brands develop an active profile on LinkedIn is that it boosts SEO, which means it’s more likely that customers will find you.
Of course, LinkedIn is rarely the only answer to developing a successful eCommerce business. In almost every case, LinkedIn is just part of an intelligent marketing strategy – a way to yield results without having to spend any money. If you’re hoping to put all of your eggs in LinkedIn’s basket and just hope for success to come your way, then you probably won’t find it. Here are a few things to remember about the limitations LinkedIn has so that you can better gauge if it’s the right path for your brand:
- LinkedIn yields the most results for business-to-business sales, rather than businesses that sell directly to consumers. While it’s still a good idea to have a LinkedIn presence for your eCommerce brand, know that if you sell products directly to consumers, you might not see a huge spike in sales from the work you do on the platform.
- Advertising is limited on LinkedIn, which means it’s not always the best place to spend your marketing budget.
- LinkedIn is big, which means it can be overwhelming to navigate or to try to find “your people”. If you find yourself becoming more frustrated each time you use LinkedIn, then putting your effort into a social platform you enjoy more is probably a better bet.
With that said, there’s a lot of opportunity waiting for eCommerce brands on LinkedIn. But, in order to maximize your efforts, you need to make sure that your business profile is doing things the right way.
