Tag: LinkedIn

How to Use LinkedIn Insights in an Actionable Way

What is an insight? According to Merriam-Webster, it’s the “power or act of seeing into something.” LinkedIn Insights gives you the ability to see information about who follows you, engages with your content, or may be of interest to you as a lead or new hire. Whether you’re hiring, promoting, or putting together marketing strategies, …

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How to Use LinkedIn Insights in an Actionable Way

What is an insight? According to Merriam-Webster, it’s the “power or act of seeing into something.” LinkedIn Insights gives you the ability to see information about who follows you, engages with your content, or may be of interest to you as a lead or new hire.

Whether you’re hiring, promoting, or putting together marketing strategies, LinkedIn Insights can help you make the most of an already powerful business platform.

What Are LinkedIn Insights?

As marketers, we live and thrive with the data. Everything we do involves measuring different metrics to see what works and what doesn’t. The key to understanding the data is knowing how to look at it and turn it into action. That’s the goal of LinkedIn Insights.

These analytics aim to limit the amount of data you need to look at in order to get the results you want from your marketing campaign. You’ll essentially be able to optimize the campaign and focus on a more narrow audience.

One of the most powerful aspects of LinkedIn Insights is the fact that you can cater the data to your specific industry. For example, they have several different types of insights: people, industry, advertising, and talent.

LinkedIn People Insights

Developing the ideal buyer persona is something all great marketers must do. We need to understand our audience at a granular level; what makes them purchase, move, mad, sad, or happy? We should understand all of these factors because it’s how we’ll make the most of our marketing campaigns on LinkedIn and other platforms.

The people insights section on LinkedIn can help you learn more about your audience. The data provides you with information regarding their location, skills, occupation, and data about other people they like and follow on social media.

You can then take that data and filter it so you only get a list of the results you want. For example, if you’re involved with real estate marketing, you may need a highly targeted list within a specific location.

LinkedIn provides ways for you to narrow it down even further. You can get lists of people who engage with certain content similar to yours. Use this trick to your advantage by focusing on the content you think your target demographic will like.

For example, if you’re running LinkedIn ads centered around sports training and fitness for senior citizens, you may know that people interested in the topic are also interested in related topics about aging and retirement.

Having this data allows you to narrow down your search and zero in on your audience to provide you with the best chance of success.

LinkedIn Industry Insights

Understanding the ins and outs of a specific industry can also help catapult your marketing campaign in the right direction. Knowing what trends and insights matter to you is most important.

The industry insights section provides you with data on certain industries, such as healthcare and financial services. You can find out information and trending news within these industries, so if you’re targeting these people, you’ll know what’s important to them.

Tools like this are powerful because it helps take a lot of the guesswork and testing out of the game. It takes a lot of time to test ad copy, photos, and colors to see if they’ll resonate with your audience. While you might have a good idea of what will work before you start, you’re still not 100 percent certain (and can never be).

However, having industry insights and knowing for sure what your audience is interested in could make a significant difference in the reach and success of your campaign.

Another great thing LinkedIn industry insights can do is provide examples of what others have done correctly in the past. Thought leaders and frontrunners of a given industry tend to get a lot of attention due to their experience and reputation. Knowing what they’re doing right can help you gain a little insight into what you can do too.

LinkedIn Advertising Insights

Advertising insights exist to help you understand the LinkedIn advertising model from every angle so you can make the most of every dollar you spend. If marketers understand more about how advertising works, it can help them create more successful campaigns and ultimately a better ROI.

These insights assist with measuring the success of a campaign. You need to know which metrics are important and how they translate into certain actions that get a result.

This section also helps with branding and reach so you can better measure your performance on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn Talent Insights

One of the most powerful uses of LinkedIn Insights is the talent insight section. It’s a talent intelligence platform that helps you make better hiring decisions.

Investing in workforce development and onboarding is an expensive process. If you’re consistently trying to hire people and dealing with turnover, it may not be so much about the process but more about your talent acquisition.

Sometimes we have to face the fact that not everyone will work out even if they’re qualified for the job. By utilizing talent insights, you can get a snapshot of what other companies are doing and how skills are changing. Use that to narrow down your search with snapshots and benchmarks.

We all know LinkedIn is a great place to find new talent, but how do you tighten your search so you only discover the talent you want?

The talent insights section on LinkedIn helps you pool all your best candidates based on their experience, education, and history on the platform. You’ll receive real-time data on the supply and demand and a 360-degree view of what the current hiring landscape is like.

This is beneficial for businesses looking to grow and scale rapidly but don’t want to work through all the red tape involved in hiring and onboarding. LinkedIn talent insights help filter through the candidates so you can focus on hiring the best people for the job.

How to Use LinkedIn Insights

As we dive further into LinkedIn Insights, the benefits continue to pile up. If you’re considering implementing LinkedIn Insights as a part of your marketing campaigns, you may experience some of the following benefits.

Highly Targeted Content

Content is the name of the game, and it’s a code we’ll spend forever trying to crack. Unfortunately, there’s no handbook on producing highly targeted content (or is there?). All we can do is get as close as possible and do the best we can from there.

LinkedIn Insights can help by telling us what our audience wants to know more about and what they’d like to avoid whenever possible. We can learn this by translating the data we receive about the most engaged and least engaged content.

You can also use the insights to check out the competition and see what others are doing, then use that knowledge to craft unique content.

Improved Retargeting

Anyone in marketing knows a retargeting ad is worth its weight in gold. Retargeting involves finding someone who recently engaged with something you put out there but didn’t complete the desired action.

For example, you might have offered a free e-book in exchange for an email to add to your list. If someone clicked the ad for the e-book but never entered their email, you could then retarget them with another ad.

These campaigns are so successful because the lead is already warm. They know who you are, and they trusted you enough to at least click your link and go to the next page. Retargeting ads can have a CTR ten times higher than a regular ad.

Increased Employee Retention

A lot of hiring managers turn to LinkedIn to find and research candidates in the industry. The qualities and skills of candidates are changing all the time. One of the best ways to learn about prospects is to take a look at pools of candidates on LinkedIn and see what they’re all about.

Understanding your applicants can help you better understand how to find the best ones. If you’re looking to grow your business by hiring a few people, using LinkedIn Insights can help you find the best candidates without time-consuming trial and error hires.

Stay Hip to New Trends

Besides understanding what makes your prospective new employee tick, LinkedIn Insights also helps you learn about what customers want. With follower insights and trends, you can see certain characteristics about all the people who follow your company. You can also track trends that large groups of followers are interested in.

For example, let’s say you own an e-commerce store selling political-related gear, accessories, and clothing. Your popularity would generally skew higher around election time than it would in the other years between.

As the election approaches, you could see what trends people are most interested in, what pages they follow, and what content they engage with the most.

How to Access LinkedIn Insights

To get LinkedIn Insights up and running, you’ll want to log in to your LinkedIn account and click the “Work” button in the top right corner.

LinkedIn Insights - step 1 to set it up

You’re brought a page that displays LinkedIn’s product offerings. To set up insights, you will click the “Insights” button.

LinkedIn Insights - product offerings page

Next, you will fill out the following form for someone to reach out to you.

LinkedIn Insights sign-up form

You’ll eventually receive an email from LinkedIn asking for more information about your goals and objectives. This offers a nice personal touch by catering to an individualized plan rather than having a blanket offering that everyone gets.

They also offer a LinkedIn Insights tag you can put on your website to work alongside the LinkedIn Insights process. This tag works exactly like any other social media platform. You’ll copy a small snippet of code and put it on your website. You can then track all the conversions from your LinkedIn ad and gain valuable insight into who they are and what makes them tick.

LinkedIn Insights Case Study: KBC Bank

KBC Bank has one of the most prolific case studies for LinkedIn Insights. Their goal was to improve company culture by developing the best hiring and workforce management process. The problem was, they didn’t have a lot of data on candidates in the space their business is in.

While they had plenty of internal data about candidates they’ve hired in the past and retained, they knew in the current remote landscape it was important to understand the existing marketplace outside of their business.

The team at KBC Bank started using the real-time pool of data they received with Insights. They were then able to take the data and develop an action plan to hire the best possible candidates.

What did they gain as a result?

They gained a better pool of talent by tapping into markets they didn’t know they had. They took the skills and expertise of their candidates and compared them to those their competition was hiring. Finally, they accessed new data to continue to explore the marketplace and make better decisions on candidates in a shorter time using data-driven hiring.

Conclusion

If you’re considering giving LinkedIn Insights a try, my team can help you understand how to leverage your LinkedIn business profile to make the most of your efforts. LinkedIn has always been a powerful B2B platform, but a lot of businesses aren’t using it to its full potential.

Data is important, but it’s not just the data that matters. It’s how you interpret it and turn it into actions and steps to grow your business. That’s the key factor of LinkedIn Insights.

What do you use LinkedIn Insights for? Let me know in the comments.

10 Tips For Writing a Winning LinkedIn Headline

LinkedIn’s 690 million members include 180 million senior-level influencers, 63 million decision-makers and 10 million C-level executives. 

Hence, there are a lot of influential people on LinkedIn that have hiring power and purchase power. Whatever you hope to achieve from using the network, you’ll want to make a good impression.

Your headline is the first thing that people see aside from your profile picture. It’s how decision-makers will find you. It’s how you get people to notice you and what will make them want to visit your profile to learn more. Thus, it’s safe to say your headline is pretty important.

So, I thought I’d share my top tips for creating an effective headline with you. But, first, let’s look at the basics:

What is Your LinkedIn Headline?

Your headline is the tagline that appears under your name on LinkedIn and at the top of your profile page. The headline used to be limited to 120 characters. But, here’s some good news, LinkedIn extended the headline to 220 characters in 2020. So, you have a little more space to sell yourself, share your vision or whatever it is you’d like to express via your headline.

What Makes a Winning LinkedIn Headline

There are some important criteria for creating an impactful headline. The best LinkedIn headlines do the following:

Make Use of Keywords

Keywords aren’t the only thing your headline should include. But they are key to helping the right people find your profile. Keywords can include your job title, skills and areas you specialize in. Place keywords towards the beginning of your headline and then expand with further information.

Express Your Value

Expressing you or your company’s value means sharing more than the tasks you carry out. Your headline should be driven by the benefits of the services you provide and the kind of results you achieve. For example, rather than saying you do tax planning, you’d say you help businesses to save money.

Are Unique

A winning LinkedIn headline is one that stands out from the crowd. Think about how many people do the exact same job as you or offer similar services. You can give yourself a competitive edge and encourage more people to visit your profile by making your headline different.

Help You Meet Your Goals

You need to think carefully about why you’re on LinkedIn and what you hope to achieve. This should inform what you include in your headline (and the rest of your profile). If you’re not sure about what you can accomplish on LinkedIn or how to go about it, you may wish to speak with a social media consultant.

Now let’s look in more detail at exactly how you can create a winning headline:

1. Get Inspiration

By default, LinkedIn uses your job title and employer as your headline. What a snooze fest. If you want to do better, the first step is to get inspired.

Search for people in your field or who have similar roles to you. Take a look at how they’ve formulated their headlines. See what appeals to you and what doesn’t. Of course, you shouldn’t just nab somebody else’s headline. But, doing this will help you come up with ideas for how you want your headline to appear.

Also, pay attention to those who appear at the top of the search results for your industry. What keywords do they use? Note these keywords as they likely contribute to why these pros are doing so well in the search results.

2. Ask Yourself These Questions

When you decide to upgrade your LinkedIn headline to maximize its impact, it’s a good idea to have a little brainstorming sesh. Here are some questions that will guide you when you’re coming up with ideas:

  • How would you describe yourself to a new colleague if you only had five seconds?
  • What makes you different from others with the same job title?
  • Why should users click on your profile?
  • What are your most in-demand skills?
  • What are your biggest accomplishments?
  • What makes you unique?

3. Choose the Right Keywords

Include relevant keywords in your headline so that you appear in more search results. 

To do this, you’ll first need to think about who you want to find your profile on LinkedIn. A recruiter? A potential lead? Influencers you hope to connect with? And so on…

This will guide you in figuring out the right keywords to use. For example, you may include your specific skills or specialisms to get found by recruiters with the most relevant job opportunities. 

In this example, we don’t just have a “developer”, nor do we just have a “chatbot developer”, the user goes even more specific with the terms “Facebook Messenger Marketing” and “Automation Practitioner”:

Whereas, if you’re using LinkedIn to network and boost your authority, you may want to use broader terms. Your job role might be “Artworker” but in order to be found by more people, it’d be a very good idea to include the term “Graphic Design”.

4. Include Your Unique Selling Proposition

Keywords alone aren’t enticing enough to get users to visit your profile. State the value that you provide by doing what you do, in particular something that makes you stand out from the crowd.

There’s a simple formula you can use to express this: I help X do Y by doing Z. Here’s an example from an accounting consultant:

When she says “I help women build profitable businesses”, she outlines the beneficial results of her work, not just the tasks that she performs. You should do something similar.

You can also use data to drive your point home. Here an email marketer shares the average results he achieves:

There are tons of relevant data points you could include to prove your value, such as the number of customers you’ve helped achieve a particular outcome or the results of an impressive case study.

5. Share Your Achievements/Credentials

When you make self-aggrandizing claims on LinkedIn, people will either think you’re arrogant or full of it. Instead, you should go by the old adage, “Show don’t tell”. Show that you’re great at what you do via your achievements or credentials.

What’s your most impressive achievement? Have you won an award perhaps? Been featured on top media outlets? Sold a bunch of books? Grew a well-known company? Those are the kind of things you’ll want to share.

This professional shares the fact that he’s been a LinkedIn Top Voice honoree four times and sprinkles in some serious social proof by mentioning his work with Mark Cuban:

Furthermore, certain credentials that are recognized by people in your industry will give you clout. For example, in the marketing world it’s good to be Google-certified, like this pro:

Share credentials relevant to your position to show that you’re not just messing around, you really know what you’re doing.

6. Use Natural Language

Keep your headline free of jargon, particularly if you’re using LinkedIn for sales or lead generation. If a prospect doesn’t understand what you’re selling, you won’t have much luck.

Similarly, make your job title clear and simple unless you’re seeking a specific job role. Again, users you want to connect with may not understand what you do. Even if you think the term “Business Development Manager” is clear, trust me, simplifying it to “Sales Manager” is much more transparent.

Also, avoid buzzwords. After a time, every Tom, Dick and Harry will be using the same trendy terminology to describe their services. Thus, your words become meaningless.

And saying that you’re a “Guru”, “Ninja” or “Wizard” is a bit cheesy and old-fashioned. It won’t help you in the search results either. When was the last time you searched for a ninja on LinkedIn or anywhere for that matter?

Try to use simple, everyday language to explain your role or value proposition. Here’s an excellent example from a marketing professional:

Her target audience, small businesses, may not be familiar with or fully understand industry terms so she offers a straightforward, benefit-driven value proposition.

7. Don’t Put “Unemployed”

Even if you’re currently looking for a job, you shouldn’t put “Unemployed”, “Seeking New Opportunities” or similar in your headline. 

The thing is, recruiters or companies aren’t searching for the term “Unemployed” on LinkedIn. You only get a couple hundred characters for your headline, so it would be better to utilize that space for keywords that they are likely to search for, and your experience, specialisms, credentials etc.

You can show that you’re looking for work on your profile instead. At the top of your profile, you’ll see a section that says, “Show recruiters you’re open to work”. 

Simply, fill in details about the type of role you’re looking for and the location. You can even change the settings so that your current employers won’t see that you’re seeking work.

8. Share Your Mission

Maybe you’re not looking to promote yourself. Perhaps, you’re in the process of growing a startup or maybe you or your company are trying to achieve a wider goal that you want people to know about.

If this sounds like you, then you should definitely share your vision in your headline. In this example, the professional shares what he does “mass transit” but also why he does it “to reduce our carbon footprint and create a more connected community”:

You could use a similar formula. Start with the what and then go into the why. If you’re unsure about how to phrase your goals, you can always take inspiration from your company’s mission statement.

9. Show Your Personality

Like with any other social media platform, users skim through their LinkedIn feed, groups and even search results at speed. So, you need a headline that’s going to make somebody stop and take notice.

Get creative and use your headline to express your personality. Not only will it make you stand out but it’ll also make your profile memorable.

Here’s an example from an SEO manager with a quirky sense of humor:

Don’t worry, though. You don’t have to be the Kevin Hart of LinkedIn. There are other ways to express your personality via your headline. Perhaps, you want to project positive vibes or enthusiasm. 

You could even share a little personal tidbit about yourself. Maybe you do PR during the day and rule at Settlers of Catan by night… This kind of thing will also help start conversations between you and new connections.

10. Keep Your Headline Updated

It’s easy to set and forget your headline. But to get the most from it you need to keep it up to date.

Firstly, be sure to add new skills, achievements, career developments and so on when they arise. Your skillset will develop over time and your headline should reflect this.

Moreover, you may wish to test the impact of your headline and update it accordingly. When you make an alteration, keep an eye on the number of people who have viewed your profile. 

With LinkedIn Premium, you can also see who has viewed your profile. Therefore, you can discover if your headline is attracting who you want to attract or your target audience.

Conclusion

You can use your LinkedIn headline to get noticed by influential professionals and encourage more people to visit your profile. A winning headline combines relevant keywords and your unique value proposition.

Don’t forget to think carefully about who you hope to attract with your headline. And don’t be afraid to sell yourself as long as it doesn’t come across as too boastful.

Take the first step towards creating a great LinkedIn headline. Do some research to see what works well in your industry and brainstorm ideas for your own headline.

The post 10 Tips For Writing a Winning LinkedIn Headline appeared first on Neil Patel.