How to use LinkedIn to grow Business

LinkedIn is one of the world’s largest social networks with over 470 Million users globally. While most use LinkedIn to manage their professional profile on the web, SMEs have made the most valuable use of the professional network. Today, LinkedIn is considered to be amongst the top platforms for B2B lead generation globally.

The Sales-cycle is usually longer for B2B businesses. This happens because there are multiple decision makers involved in the process of onboarding a new vendor/partner. The most powerful way for B2B Businesses to increase sales while reducing the overall cost of selling is to build powerfully engaged customer communities. Building customer communities provides deeper insights into what customers find valuable.

Clearly define who your customer is and search – For a software development company the customer is the CIO/CTO/CMO/CEO. The second level to defining your customer is his/her geographical location. Once you define your customer clearly, use ‘LinkedIn Search’. The powerful LinkedIn Search shows results categorized into people, companies and jobs. Choose from the options and enter the location where you think most of your customers will be. LinkedIn will show the people working in various organizations who are your target audience. Even if LinkedIn displays a list of people that you are already connected with, visit their profile and explore the similar people suggestions that LinkedIn gives as ‘People also viewed’.

Connect and build relationships – Once you have a list of potential customers, it’s time to make connections. Being a professional network, it is important to keep in mind that you must not choose people at random and send LinkedIn invites to them. You must see if you have a common connection between you and the person you intend to connect with and ask for a recommendation. If you want to still explore the option of doing it yourself because you believe that people will find you valuable, before sending a LinkedIn invite, ensure that you write a ‘custom message’. When you are connecting with a third person for the first time, offer a valuable opportunity instead of asking for something on the invite itself. An invite tells the other person that you are valuable and you will not be another random connection that adds no value to the professional network.

Engage and Communicate Value – LinkedIn offers a powerful way to engage with one’s network at scale. Use the LinkedIn posts feature to author blog posts that you feel will be highly valuable and relevant for your network. Share actionable insights and thought leadership via your LinkedIn posts. As your network starts engaging with your content, your profile discovery increases. While LinkedIn posts are engaging and have an amplified reach via LinkedIn Pulse, the ones who find it hard to express their thoughts as a blog post can use images as status updates on LinkedIn.

If you carefully spend time to build a network of the most relevant and valuable people around you, it increases the probability of your message reaching out to the most relevant people who could be your potential customers or the audience that you intend to engage with. LinkedIn is a powerful platform for SMEs and startups. When combined with great quality content marketing it can help SMEs establish great relationships and grow faster.

Free tools in Digital Marketing

Every small business owner is well aware that, it is expensive to build an online business without the help of digital marketing tools. They also know that these various digital marketing tools greatly help them with their everyday tasks. SMEs and startups entrepreneurs can easily learn to master these free digital marketing tools and it will only boost their productivity.

Google Analytics – Launched in 2005, Google Analytics is undoubtedly the world’s most recognized free web analytics service. It has been setting industry standards by combining multiple analytical features for mobile as well as traditional user. Google Analytics must be the very first feature that you ought to install on your site. It will record just about everything, the moment that you go live and will track for you what is working and what isn’t. What make it unique are its tracking codes. The number of metrics that you get is incredible and to think that you get all of this for free.

Keyword Planner – It is a focused version of a combination of the Google Adwords. It is one of the best research tools available and is ideal for SEO purposes. There is multiple pertaining to keywords, but the tools focus is on a keyword’s traffic volume and competitiveness. You can search for relevant ideas pertaining to your keyword, assess the performance of a keyword, or try creating a combination of new keywords and a variety of options. It also has a free Adwords tool, for which the keyword planner helps in selecting competitive bids to use with your Adwords Campaigns.

BuzzSumo – It helps to provide more information to digital marketers through valuable content. Obvious that content marketing is not only essential to SEO, but to digital marketing as well. Just input the key phrase or long-tail keyword that you wish to promote and you get a list of the most popular posts that are currently trending. All you now have to do is to draft a suitable marketing strategy.

Hootsuite – It is one of those early multi-social networking clients, which integrated most of the popular Social Media platforms. This helps businesses, SMEs and startups to execute amazing Social Media strategies across their organizations so that their message is converted into relationships that matter. Hootsuite is an excellent SEO analysis tool for your Social Media accounts. In short, it is almost a necessary marketing tool for SMEs and startups in this digital age.

SimilarWeb – It is an online digital market intelligence tool that provides traffic and in-depth marketing insights for any website. With a single click, users can not only get a quick overview of a site’s ranking and reach but also its user engagement. By entering a specific website URL, or doing a category search by industry or country users get access to data from the top 50 websites. This will help users discover their market position by comparing key digital metrics, with direct competitors and leading companies and also craft suitable marketing strategies.

Boomerang – It is one of the more unique and good email marketing services that allow you to monitor your full email campaigns with ease. Boomerang, an effective plugin for Gmail, will schedule outgoing emails to hit consumer inboxes at an optimum time. You can also set up the “boomerang” effect where you can have the outgoing email send back to you when you haven’t gotten a reply from the original recipient thus making it an effective email follow up reminder. Boomerang not only allows you to create and monitor your email campaigns with ease, but is also easy to integrate with your Social Media accounts.

SEMrush – It helps to research your competitor’s keywords and helps you dominate your niche in search rankings. Most digital marketers have indicated that SEMrush as one of the best SEO and competition analysis tool out there. Developed by SEOQuake, SEMrush tool is an awesome tool to analyze your competitor website traffic, check their backlinks, find better if not suitable keywords and also helps you fix any website issues.

Hotjar – It is a powerful marketing tool that has been designed specifically for webmasters to analyze and study their traffic better. It is a complete website and mobile analytics tool that enables web developers, analysts, digital marketers and UI developers etc. to optimize the usability and conversion rate of their sites. Hotjar combines both feedback and analysis tool to give users understandings into how visitors interact with their website, how they could enhance that visitor experience and finally what they can do to increase conversion rates.

Canva – It is a free simple graphic design tool for non-designers to create info-graphics as well as other presentations, visuals and graphics. Canva has a huge range of info-graphics, images, visuals, layouts, and templates for your Social Media, Content Marketing, Blogging and at times even advertising needs. It is a much needed free tool that simplifies the design process. 

SimplyMeasured – It is a marketing tool that is used by SMEs, startups as well as large corporations. It provides them social media analytics and metrics to measure their online media campaigns, social media performance etc. and also assist them in the monitoring of online mentions of specific keywords which triggers for specific instances.

Charlieapp.com – Charlie is must have tool. Just before a meeting, it compiles just about all the important info about the people that you are scheduled to meet, and stores them in your organizer or diary. You will have most of their personal info, such as common hobbies that you share, personal preferences, and their professional history, and much more which breaks the ice in any meeting.

SocioBoard – Social Media platforms have also played an important part in digital marketing. Likewise businesses manage multiple Social Media platforms and their activities. The SocioBoard platform being an open source tool makes it very easy for digital marketers, SMEs and startups.

Wistia – It provides online professional video hosting services for businesses, individuals, SEMs and startups. It is very much a pro-business oriented service, and helps SMEs to grow their brand and business. It tracks marketing performances through its built in metrics, analytics, and video marketing tools. Wistia also has tools for customizing videos, building brand awareness, increasing traffic via video SEO, and generating new leads.

SlideShare – The quiet giant of content marketing, SlideShare is the biggest, albeit simple photo slideshow software, that provides professional results. SlideShare gets over 130 million page views and over 60 Million visits every month. It is among the 200 most visited websites and is also the largest community for sharing presentations. Apart from presentations, SlideShare also supports PDF’s, documents, webinars and videos. It offers a variety of input and output choices as well as editing tools with images, effects, transitions and music.

Rapportive – It shows just about everything connected with the contacts in your Gmail Inbox. It will put up the Social Media details of the email sender. This is a free blogging tool and is blessings in disguise for those who receive tons of Gmail from you don’t know. Rapportive helps you get a peep into who is behind the email address. It also allows you connect with Social Media profiles of these emailers. In addition, it is the perfect tool if you are contemplating to bring LinkedIn functionality to your Gmail Inbox.

Know about Budget 2017

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley presented the Union Budget 2017-18 in the Lok Sabha. Here are the highlights of the Union Budget.

If you are a Salaried Employee – Government will slash the basic rate of income tax from 10 percent to five percent. The basic rate applies to those with annual incomes of between Rs. 250,000 rupees and Rs 500,000 rupees.

If you are into farming – Farm sector will grow at 4.1% this fiscal and government will double income of farmers in five years. For imparting new skills to people in rural areas, mason training will be provided to five lakh persons by 2022. Farm credit budget for next fiscal is at Rs 10 Lakh cr. Fasal Bima Yojana increased to 40% of crop area, raised to Rs 1.41 lakh cr. in Kharif 2017 season. Infrastructure investment pegged at Rs 3.96 lakh cr. Dairy processing fund with Rs 2000cr corpus to be set up and to double irrigation fund corpus to Rs 40,000 cr.

If you are a business person – Scope of domestic transfer pricing restricted to only if one of the entities involved in related party transaction enjoys specified profit linked deduction. Threshold limit for audit of business entities that opt for presumptive income scheme increased from Rs 1 cr. to Rs 2 cr. Similarly, the threshold for maintenance of books for individuals and HUF increased from turnover of Rs 10 lakhs to Rs 25 lakhs or income from Rs 1.2 lakh to Rs 2.5 lakh.

If you live in Rural India - The government aims to bring 1 cr. households out of poverty by 2019. They will take steps to ensure participation of women in MGNREGA up to 55%. For imparting new skills to people in rural areas, mason training will be provided to five lakh persons by 2022. The government proposes to complete 1 cr. houses for those without homes. Government will allocate Rs 19,000 cr. for Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana in 2017-18. The country is set to achieve 100% rural electrification by March 2018. With a progress of Swachh Bharat mission, sanitation coverage has gone up from 42% in Oct 13 to 60% now.

If you are into Real Estate – Finance minister has granted infrastructure status to affordable housing, a long-time demand from the industry. Owing to surplus liquidity, banks have started reducing lending rates for housing.

If you own a start-up – The three year tax holiday available to start-ups has been extended from the existing period of first 5 years of operation to 7 years. Removal of embargo on carry forward of losses if there’s a change in share-holding beyond 51% of promoter share.

If you are a student – Government has proposed to introduce a system of measuring annual learning. Science to be given focus, Quality Education will energize our youth. Skill centres will be set up across the country to help youth seeking opportunities outside the country.