The world’s largest professional network, more commonly known as LinkedIn, is a go-to for human resource professionals when it comes to recruiting and hiring talent, and rightfully so: LinkedIn’s fastest growing demographic is students and recent graduates seeking employment. But if your company’s LinkedIn page is only used by your HR team as a recruitment tool, you’re probably missing a huge marketing opportunity to connect to your customers and not just potential job applicants.

While we highly recommend that your company’s HR team utilizes LinkedIn’s talent solutions to recruit, we believe that your marketing team should be just as if not MORE engaged on this platform on a daily basis. Why? Consider that there are 12 professional groups on LinkedIn dedicated solely to supermarket industry professionals, and nearly 90 groups that serve agriculture professionals. Some of those groups are specifically for buyers, so if using social media to reach your customers is a goal for 2017, LinkedIn is a great place to start.

So how can your marketing team start to take control of your LinkedIn page? Here are a few tips from our experience and successes on the platform:

Appoint a LinkedIn “Champion”

If your marketing team is going to take a lead role on LinkedIn, you will be most successful if someone takes ownership of this. We recommend identifying someone on your internal marketing team, or perhaps it’s your marketing agency partner, to take the lead of updating the page, creating and posting content and tracking performance and success. This is not to say that this person will also take ownership of talent solutions; LinkedIn recommends identifying an HR or recruiting team member to focus on these aspects of your account in tandem with the marketing team posting content.

Build Out Your Products & Services Page

According to LinkedIn, marketers who build out their products and services page have twice as many company followers. Make sure your company description, industry, and specialties are up-to-date, and then use the products & services section to direct your followers to more than just your website. You can include white papers, downloadable ebooks, case studies, etc.

Share Engaging Content with Your Followers

Just like on Facebook or Twitter, your company can post a status update that can include links and photos. This will appear in your followers’ LinkedIn timelines, so this is your shining opportunity to showcase thought leadership and company news that you want your buyers to see. For example, you can share your company’s latest news in The Packer or you can go beyond this to share your B2B blog posts and product tips and information that your buyer’s might find helpful that they wouldn’t see otherwise. Think regular crop updates or articles about category growth and trends that involve your products. Above all, remember to keep your status updates helpful and friendly and not sales-y.

Generate Sales Leads

According to Kissmetrics, of the 5 major social media platforms, LinkedIn is proven to be the best at generating B2B leads. But consider this: leads (on any social media site) don’t just fall into your lap. It takes a deliberate strategy and thoughtful planning to create content that will allow your company to use social sites to identify qualified prospects and customers that have the potential to generate more business for you. This ties back to the previous point about industry thought leadership. Think about what your company can create and share that would be helpful to your customers, and then ask them for some information in return before they can get it. That’s how lead generation starts!

Advertise to Gain Traffic and Followers

LinkedIn offers pay-per-click (PPC) ads with great targeting options allowing you to reach the exact companies that you’re prospecting. That’s right – you can actually tell LinkedIn that you want your ads to be shown to the employees of a specific company. You can target by company, industry, job title, company size, and even group memberships (which means you can target the members of a supermarket buyers group, for example). This makes reaching qualified contacts much more straightforward than using Twitter or Facebook ads for B2B purposes. You can set up ads to link back to your website, driving traffic to content that you want seen on a continual basis.

If this all sounds enticing to you, but you don’t have the time or resources to get started, let DMA Solutions help. Our team of social media experts is available to provide you with strategies and tips to set you up for success in 2017. Whether it’s just LinkedIn or your entire social media portfolio, we’re here for you!