Think LinkedIn can’t help your local marketing? Think again!
While primarily used as a professional networking platform, LinkedIn has many uses for small businesses. Start by creating a personal profile. As a local business owner, your target market may be searching for your name over your business. A common occurrence in the local, small business world is sharing through acquaintance or word of mouth. You don’t want to miss out on a referral because they are searching for you and not your business name.
With a complete profile, you can adequately integrate your business. By listing your business in your profile, people can quickly find your company by association. The next step would be to create a business profile to market your local audience effectively. How do you do this? You need to determine what “local” means for your business. Is “local” your small town and a 15-mile radius? Or is “local” the city you live in and expanding to the entire state? Defining those geographical limits will help you narrow down your content and search categories for your page.
How Do I Reach My Local Audience on LinkedIn?
“Regardless of what local means to you, rich targeting capabilities make it easy for small businesses to find the right people on LinkedIn. Choose from any combination of the following filters:
The location-based filter is popular among small businesses that serve geographical areas. For example, you could combine the location filter with industry and company size filters to reach small manufacturing firms in Pittsburgh. Or you could combine location- and experience-based filters to reach COOs and other similar titles in Pittsburgh. If you’re trying to reach a community, you might filter using Groups, skills, job title, or fields of study. Just remember not to be overly narrow with your scope, because you want a reasonably sized audience.”
Utilize your connections to share company news and updates, leading traffic back to your business page. By continuing to update both your personal and business profiles and building your local connections, you increase your reach potential. Narrowing down your business type, company info, expertise, interests and identity and creating posts to support those topics, you stand out in local searches.
