A guide to measuring your success on LinkedIn
LinkedIn offers a variety of metrics which you can use to track the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. Here is a guide to what you need to know in order to give yourself the best chance of boosting your social selling potential.
Social Selling Explained
Let’s start by making sure you understand the term ‘social selling’ – in basic terms this is the process of building and developing relationships through the provision of valuable content.
Ideally, you should be selling your brand at all points in a buyer’s journey. The three main stages of making a purchasing decision are awareness, consideration and then decision-making. LinkedIn analytics and other methods can help you to measure your success at each of this trio of stages.
Monitor Awareness Metrics
Monitor the short-term effects of your efforts, including increases in connections, follower engagement and content likes and shares.
Make sure that you include your employees in your LinkedIn efforts. If you have 30 workers and they each share and promote your content and information, you could have 6,000 people learning about your brand if your employees each have 200 connections.
In order to make sure that you are delivering the type of content that your audience wants to see, you could use analysis to identify content gaps. You can see which topics interest people the most and which ones you can get rid of in the future. The information you find can then be fed back into your company’s search engine optimisation plans.
Other built-in analytics on LinkedIn allow you to monitor engagement, reach follower demographics and more. This will allow you to assess which people are engaging with your company and moving into the interested stage of a buying cycle.
Consideration Data
You can measure longer-term effects to gauge your success in raising visibility and brand awareness. To do this, track consideration data which should include how many people get to your website and then engage with it.
Placing a focus on providing high-quality, compelling content should result in interested buyers following status update links to reach your website. You should also include a clear call to action in each piece of content you post or share.
Google Analytics can be used to track how many people make the journey from LinkedIn and find your website. In the referrals section of Google Analytics, you can click on LinkedIn and see how much traffic you have been benefitting from.
Conversion Rates
Your social selling efforts through LinkedIn should ultimately be aimed at converting referrals into customers. This is why you need to gauge how many sales opportunities and actual sales result.
At some point, you will need to turn your online connections into interactions and you can monitor your efforts by tracking sales opportunities generated through meetings and calls resulting from LinkedIn connections.
You can also use Google Analytics to monitor purchases completed as a result of LinkedIn referrals. You can set up goals and then link your strategy for social selling with accurate numbers and financial rewards.