In this blog post we will discuss how to effectively reach a desired target demographic using LinkedIn and all the tools that LinkedIn provides for doing so.
In this case our aim is to reach a demographic of educated professionals working for small to medium size and large enterprises.
LinkedIn is the world biggest professional network with more than 610 million users in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide (Linkedin.com, 2019).
Bonsón & Bednárová (2013) describe it as a platform through which members and companies are able to create and share their professional identities online, and build and engage with their professional networks.

(blog.durump.io, 2017)

A LinkedIn page helps customers learn about your services and products. LinkedIn helps you with setting up a company page, if you have any questions you can always visit the LinkedIn assistance page  or simply ask google. Setting up a page is relatively easy the hard part is to actually engage with customers and reach the desired target demographic this can be done in a couple of ways.

Simplest way to reach a demographic is to advertise and LinkedIn has good tools for advertising on it’s platform, such as LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. It works like any other social media marketing tool you can choose the age, location, job function, gender and industry and target your ads according to these characteristics.

More importantly LinkedIn has a tool that can track what is being Said about your company  (Gregory, 2010), which also gives firms a tool to measure the impact and the perception of their enterprise.

BusinessNewsDaily.com (2014) staff recommend to grow your marketing list by asking them to be a part of the mailing list, they highly recommend it.
It is also worth mentioning that mailing lists are not as effective of a marketing tool as they are perceived to be for a number of reasons, firstly People that receive emails get so many of them that they lose relevance. Engagement cannot be tracked through emails, content cannot be personalized  and younger audience is less likely to respond to email marketing (TripBuilderMedia, 2019).

Each one of your employees can be a brand ambassador through LinkedIn since they can also post documents and multimedia to their profiles (Hutchins, 2016).
This is an opportunity not to well understood and underutilized by companies on LinkedIn and other social media platform alike. Making sure that your most popular keywords are in your company profile and presenting a more consistent image to customers makes your company look more professional.

Sites like Wordtracker or GoodKeywords can be used to find the best and hottest keywords in your field (Elad, 2018).
As mentioned in the beginning LinkedIn is an enormous platform that helps individuals and companies reach millions of potential customers and employees as evident from this infographic. LinkedIn also has 42 million unique monthly mobile visitors and their conversion rate is 3 times better when we compared it to Facebook or twitter (SocialMediaMarketo, 2016).

LinkedIn should not be overlooked as a potential tool for reaching desired demographics along with being one of the best mediums through which communication with the corporate world is possible.

If utilized properly by a professional as mentioned above LinkedIn is a powerful medium of communication but one should never forget that having a ‘Dead’ profile page doesn’t speak highly of the company, Thus it should be avoided at all costs.
Good news is it is very easy to keep your company or personal profile updated.

As Horn, (2016) mentioned in his blog post about reinvigorating LinkedIn profiles “On LinkedIn, less is often more, and quality almost always trumps quantity” a quote which In my opinion perfectly describes the essence of LinkedIn.

This Blog on “How to Reach Desired Target Demographics using Linkedin” was done as a part of an marketing assignment by a student.

References:

BusinessNewsDaily, 2014. BusinessNewsDaily.com. [Online]
Available at: https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/7206-linkedin-marketing-business.html
[Accessed 20 February 2019].

Bonsón, E. & Bednárová, M. 2013, “Corporate LinkedIn practices of Eurozone companies”, Online Information Review, vol. 37, no. 6, pp. 969-984.

blog.drumup.io, 2017 [online]
Available at: https://blog.drumup.io/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/linkedin-400850_1280.png
[Accessed 2 March 2019]

Elad, J., 2018. dummies.com. [Online]
Available at: https://www.dummies.com/social-media/linkedin/how-to-market-your-business-through-linkedin/
[Accessed 20 February 2019].

Gregory, A., 2010. sitepoint.com. [Online]
Available at: https://www.sitepoint.com/use-linkedin-promote-business/
[Accessed 20 February 2019].

Horn, B. A., 2016. authorityalchemy. [Online]
Available at: https://authorityalchemy.com/reinvigorate-linkedin/
[Accessed 2 March 2019].

Hutchins, A.L. 2016, “Beyond resumes: LinkedIn for marketing educators”, Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 137-147.

Linkedin.com, 2019. Linkedin. [Online]
Available at: https://about.linkedin.com/
[Accessed 20 February 2019].

SocialMediaMarketo, 2016. socialmediamarketo.com. [Online]
Available at: https://www.socialmediamarketo.com/business-benefits-linkedin-company-page-infographic/
[Accessed 20 February 2019].

TripBuilderMedia, 2019. TripBuilderMedia.com. [Online]
Available at: https://www.tripbuildermedia.com/2019/02/6-reasons-email-marketing-doesnt-work-well-for-your-association/
[Accessed 20 February 2019].