Yes, that’s right, LinkedIn for B2C. It is a social platform full of businesses, professionals, freelancers and students, what’s often overlooked is that these people are real people outside of their day jobs and behind the corporate mask of their companies. Whether you are a services-based business or product-based business, they might just want to buy from you, but you need to be clever about it…
Here’s a guide to use LinkedIn for B2C:
- Let’s run through the basics. So, to start you need two profiles. Your personal profile and your business page. Make sure your personal profile is up to date and explains that you work at your business with your business page linked to your profile. It doesn’t matter what your business is whether it’s a home décor shop, a makeup brand or a bakery, it doesn’t need to appeal to other businesses.
- Over the course of a couple of months, you’re going to want to start populating your personal feed with business-related content. So, we’re talking: a day in the life of a small business owner, details of your growth and business journey, behind-the-scenes footage, tips and tricks, lessons you’ve learned, your successes, your failures, future plans, testimonial quotes of great customer feedback, funny relatable content which links to your business. Let people get to know you as a person first, you are your brand.
- Back over to your business page, you want to begin to populate it with all your usual business-related information and a link to your website, product imagery and explanations of your product or services. Remember, this is not Facebook or Etsy so the posts need to be angled differently. Examples of posts which will display your products are but also don’t show you are overtly trying to sell them are: “I’m so proud I trusted my gut with this product, it’s gone on to be our best seller…” or “We’re proud to say our businesses don’t use stock imagery, all the imagery we take of our products are our own. Look at our stunning candles, we’re able to capture them much more aesthetically.” It’s got to be tailored to a business audience, giving people some sort of take-away nugget of information all whilst showcasing what you have in your store.
- Once you’ve built up your connections on your personal page and are receiving some form of engagement on your content, start to send your prepopulated business page out to your following. If they’ve bought into YOU they will also buy into your brand, they will be curious about the products and services your brand offers whether you are b2b or b2c.
- Before you know it, you will be getting website traffic from the social platform and actually using Linkedin for B2C. It’s also a great way to network with other business owners in your field and arrange collaborations, gaining you even more exposure and website traffic.
- The next step is to cross reference your other social channels and website on LinkedIn, to get them to follow you on your other social accounts where you DO focus on selling your products.
- Most importantly use LinkedIn as an opportunity to get their email into your database, you’ll need incentivization to do this. An example could be “Sign up to our emails for business hacks AND product discounts” Tip- make sure they sign up with their personal emails as opposed to work emails.
- LinkedIn Campaign Manager – how often do you see retail products or services for the public, that are non-business related on LinkedIn? We can take a guess at, rarely to never, but there’s no rule to say you can’t do this. Make sure you are still coming from a business angle with the kind of wording we have referenced throughout this blog and give it a whirl, we think you’d be very surprised at the response AND LinkedIn ads are much better value for money than Meta and Google ads too!
Let us know if you’d like to learn more about Linkedin for B2C we’re more than happy to help!
We’ve also written a blog about marketing your B2B business on Linkedin too, have a read.
