LinkedIn Marketing Tools for Business

Are you seriously promoting yourself on LinkedIn, or planning to promote yourself?

Is LinkedIn marketing one of your topmost priorities? Then the tools reviewed in this post will certainly help you.

With more than 810 million active users from more than 200 countries, LinkedIn is the biggest professional social networking platform in the world.

Recognizing its potential, Microsoft acquired LinkedIn for $ 26.2 billion in 2016. 39% LinkedIn users are paid subscribers;

Unlike other social media platforms, it does not just depend on advertising revenue.

People actually pay to use its various features and promotional/marketing tools.

Different professionals may have different reasons of making a presence on LinkedIn. If you have an active account on LinkedIn, its purpose may be

• Seek job opportunities.
• Hire new employees.
• Build your business brand.
• Promote your products or services.
• Generate leads.
• Do networking.
• Establish yourself as an authority.
• Become an influencer.

You may use various LinkedIn marketing tools as per your requirement. You either make “connections” with people on LinkedIn, or you follow them.

Similarly, people interested in hearing from you either “connect” with you or they follow you.

These days people can even subscribe to your updates so that whenever you post an article on LinkedIn, email notifications are sent to your subscribers automatically.

For this article post, I am going to narrate the following LinkedIn marketing tools for your business growth:

1. Bufferapp
2. Hootsuite
3. Zoho Social
4. Canva
5. LinkedIn Sales Navigator
6. Sprout Social
7. LinkedIn Plugins

These tools may help you with;

• Building a compelling presence for your personal brand as well as company page.
• Helping you reach more people and draw greater engagement.
• Being consistent with quality content posting.
• Analyzing your performance marketing.

Please remember that tools are not ultimate solutions.

Tools definitely make you productive. They help you organize better. But ultimately, it is your effort and your strategy that wins you the game.

According to Pew Research Center, 29% of Internet users and 25% of American adults use LinkedIn on regular basis.

Nearly half of online adults with college degrees are on LinkedIn.

You need to engage this vast swath of people. For this you need to create a vibrant presence on LinkedIn. What does creating a vibrant presence mean?

When you post an update, people pay attention. Not just pay attention, they respond. They reach out to you. They interact with you.

Even, they share your content on their own timelines. They also visit the links you post on your LinkedIn timeline.

Whatever means are available on their social networking platforms, they use them to connect with you.

Engaging people, eliciting response from them, is one of the biggest challenges.

You can post scores of updates everyday but unless people respond, these updates mean nothing. You need a sustained effort.

LinkedIn is a vibrant professional social networking platform, which means, hundreds of thousands of people are constantly posting content on the network.

With so much activity going on, how do you expect people to keep track of your updates?

Even if you are an influencer, you need to be regular enough so that your content appears on people’s timelines.

Being a busy professional, it may not be easy for you to create and publish content with a routine, which is a must on any social networking platform.

Marketing tools not only help you post content at the right time, they also help you analyze the effectiveness of your effort.

Although the quality of your content depends on your personal effort (or the effort of your SM team) if you can automate repeat tasks and if you can analyze data, it can help you strategize your social media marketing efforts.

Buffer App

Buffer is one of the oldest social media marketing tools that is completely cloud-based. It also has a mobile app.

It has different versions for individuals, businesses, agencies, and brand management.

Buffer is a hardcore back-end solution. You don’t see timelines when you use Buffer.

For example, if you want to manage your LinkedIn account, unlike many other social media marketing tools, you won’t be able to see your timeline.

It is also not specifically for LinkedIn although just like any other social networking platform, you can also manage your LinkedIn account with Buffer.

So, what do you do with it? You can schedule your LinkedIn updates.

For example, you create 10 updates whenever you get time and then after choosing your LinkedIn account from all the accounts that you may be managing through Buffer, you post an update, one at a time, and then schedule it for different times.

Once you have scheduled all your updates, they will be broadcast at the designated time.

Feature highlights include content calendar, multi-user, campaign organization, content analytics, social engagement and the most important, campaign planning.

It is free for individual use if you don’t want to manage multiple social media accounts.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite came even before Buffer.

In the beginning it was just a timeline viewing and posting app like Tweetdeck for Twitter, but eventually evolved into a full-fledged social media marketing platform.

It has a wide range of options for different social media marketing needs that go beyond posting, collaboration, scheduling, and analytics.

It’s advanced automatic scheduling feature analyzes when would be the best time for you to post your content for maximum exposure.

Along with LinkedIn you can manage all contemporary social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Slightly on the expensive side (on an average $ 30 per month, billed annually).

It can help you track conversations. It can also help you find influencers. You can publish text, images, and videos.

You can track hashtags and keywords using its dashboard to make your conversations meaningful and far-reaching.

It also has a free account for your personal use and if you want to manage just one social media account like LinkedIn.

Zoho Social

Zoho Social has all the features offered by mainstream social media marketing tools, but with an added feature that is not available in many other tools:

the ability to republish older posts at pre-scheduled dates and times.

What is this?

Suppose you’re posting something today and you want to repeat the same update after two months automatically.

You can do this in Zoho Social. You need premium account for that.

Another great thing about Zoho Social is that it gives you live previews as you prepare your updates.

Although all the social marketing tools these days give you live previews, I find that Zoho Social gives the best reviews.

Again, just like all other social media marketing tools, Zoho Social allows you to test the waters with a free account.

Premium services like detailed previews and scheduling of existing posts are not available with the free account.

If you don’t have very advanced functions to use and you want to use it for your personal branding, this is one of the best LinkedIn marketing tools I can recommend.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social shows you what types of campaigns are working in real-time. It is great for campaign management and “social listening”.

Moreover, it gives you analytics, advanced scheduling, inbox management and multi-account management and is well suited for both personal social media marketing as well as brand promotion.

Customers prefer it for its solid reporting capabilities. It also gives social CRM and help desk features.

It is on the expensive side with $ 99 per month per user, but it has its dedicated fan following because of a huge assortment of features and capabilities.

Once you connect your LinkedIn account you will notice that you will also be able to connect your Google My Business and Google Analytics accounts.

This gives you better analytics abilities.

Other than then, you can maintain your online content library. There is an integrated social content calendar.

You can use AI-generated canned responses.

For private or direct messages from LinkedIn you can get real-time alerts so that you can respond quicker.

Canva

Now, what makes Canva one of the best LinkedIn marketing tools in 2024?

Social media marketing these days is a lot about visual or graphic messages and Canva is one of the best online tools.

It has ready-made templates for all your social media imaging needs. It also gives you perfect size for image posts for LinkedIn.

You can create your profile or your business page headers from inbuilt templates in Canva, for LinkedIn.

The best part is that it gives access to color templates and fonts that otherwise are not available without premium subscriptions.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Since marketing has got a lot to do with managing sales, this review of the best LinkedIn marketing tools in 2024 cannot be complete without mentioning LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

What is it?

For effective marketing, you need to reach the right decision maker.

For example, if you want to send an InMail message to someone on LinkedIn, how do you know that you’re sending the message to the right person?

LinkedIn Sales Navigator helps you achieve that through a personalized algorithm. It gives you an improved visibility into extended networks.

Through advanced search and filter features you can reach the right kind of prospects. It gives you a powerful set of search capabilities.

It allows you or your sales team to engage with contacts from within the LinkedIn platform.

Moreover, it can help you monitor and maneuver entire customer journey. It is best for B2B LinkedIn marketing.

LinkedIn Plugins

LinkedIn plugins are normally third-party, small program that you can install on your website to incorporate various LinkedIn functionalities right into your website.

These plugins can also function in the form of browser extensions. You can also install LinkedIn plugins on your WordPress website or blog.

Although there is no limit to the kind of plugins you can install on your website, the one that I would like to mention is WP LinkedIn Auto Publish.

Do you always publish an extract of your blog post on LinkedIn? With this plugin you can do it from within your WordPress dashboard.

Once you have installed the plugin, within the dashboard interface another section appears that allows you to enter LinkedIn related information such as the text that you would like to post, the attached image, the link of the post, the title of the post, and various other tags.

Of course, first you will need to connect your LinkedIn account with your WordPress installation.

Frankly, most of the mainstream LinkedIn marketing tools in 2024 more or less have the same features and capabilities.

Which tool you ultimately decide to settle with depends on your own preferences.

Just make sure that it delivers what you need to promote yourself or your business on LinkedIn.