As a small business, you’re always looking for ways to stand out in a big company-dominated world. One of the best things about digital marketing today is that smaller companies have the ability to create engaging, high-quality interactions with clients, often better than the bigger companies. LinkedIn is one of the best social media platforms to do that.
LinkedIn offers numerous marketing benefits, including:
- Excellent lead generation opportunities
- Brand awareness building
- Targeted advertising to stretch your marketing budget
It helps you become the face of your brand through thought leadership. Done well, you’ll also find it’s an excellent way to build relationships with investors and talent. Sounds great, right?
The complex process of LinkedIn is that it takes time to plan and execute. You’ll need to invest wisely in the content you create to ensure it’s on brand and delivers the right message to the right audience. Once you do that, it helps to have a few tools.
The Benefits of Using Marketing Tools on LinkedIn
Small businesses using LinkedIn will find that they can save time and create a better overall experience for their readers if they use a few simple tools. It’s not about spending a lot of money or having to learn dozens of platforms. Our list of the best LinkedIn tools for small businesses gives you what you need to succeed without overspending or investing too much time in the process.
The benefits of using each of these marketing tools include:
- Consistency – it’s the factor that defines success. If you are posting consistently, you’re reaching more people, building a presence, and seeing regular growth because you’re mastering the algorithm.
- Improved engagement – creating that back-and-forth with prospects and other industry experts helps you see the biggest ROI for your investment. Tools make engagement less time-sensitive and demanding.
- Generate leads – today’s consumer expects to be able to turn to a business they know and feel they have a personal connection with. Increasingly, LinkedIn is an excellent tool for this.
There are many benefits to using the following small business tools for LinkedIn marketing. Before you dive in, make sure you consider the additional tips listed below to give you the support you need to improve your content's search engine ranking, creating reliable organic growth.
The Top LinkedIn Small Business Marketing Tools
Each of the following tools offers a slightly different take on what they can do for you. None of them are hard to learn (no worries on investing a significant amount of time on setup), and they are proven. This is your get-to-work list of the tools to put in place today.
1. Sprout Social
Use for:
- Publishing
- Response management
- Analytics
With a LinkedIn integration, Sprout Social is an excellent resource for publishing your content on the platform, responding to it, and analyzing the results. It has some great productivity tools that allow you to measure the performance of each post, allowing you to create better content (and improved results) with each post.
Track metrics for both organic and sponsored posts so you’re investing in marketing wisely. At the same time, you’ll find that this tool gives you a lot of feedback to help you stay up to date on what matters to your audience the most.
If you’re managing multiple business pages, Sprout Social allows you to see each and manage metrics over a period of time. It's also a helpful tool if you're using multiple social media platforms and one single, cohesive tool to manage them all.
2. HubSpot
Use for:
- Scheduling posts
- Social media management
- Tracking performance across all channels
HubSpot is a game-changer for anyone who’s just starting on the path to creating highly effective content on social media. It’s very easy to use and a robust tool that allows you to compete with the bigger companies without a huge learning curve to get started.
With HubSpot, you can streamline your marketing by gaining insights from the content you post. You can see who is engaging in it, track the performance of each post you create (across all of your channels), and schedule those posts well in advance. It automates a great deal of the process to save you time.
As a small business, HubSpot is also an excellent customer relationship management (CRM) tool. As you build leads through your LinkedIn marketing efforts, you can loop them into the CRM right away. That means you can keep your readers informed and continue to engage with them over time. It’s super easy to capture lead information from the LinkedIn forms that are linked to your HubSpot CRM. That means every prospective lead you get on LinkedIn is one you can continue to nurture over time.
3. Hootsuite
Use for:
- Post scheduling
- Advertising management
- Social listening
Hootsuite is another well-known and respected social media management tool. It works well for small businesses marketing on LinkedIn for numerous reasons. The first is the analytics. Though you’ll need to invest in the Business or Enterprise plan to get it, these custom-built metrics are spot on for the content and growth you’re looking for specifically. That means better business-specific success.
Social listening, a defining factor for some small businesses, is another excellent feature here. It allows you to comment on top influencers' LinkedIn posts, helping you gain the attention of others following those influencers. That’s your audience, too. This builds your reputation and can help you to get your thought leadership posts in front of more of the people you want to see them.
Hootsuite also offers OwlyWriter AI. It’s a post scheduler that’s really easy to use and automated to various degrees. You can use it to create bulk posts (do so wisely) and to generate captions. It’s an excellent resource if you want a bit of help with navigating the time management of marketing on the platform.
4. Canva
Use for:
- Creating infographics that get attention
- Create shareable content that others want to save and share
- Implement content with professional-quality graphics
Canva isn’t just for LinkedIn marketing. It is easily the best tool for creating graphics, logos, images, and overall content for your business. By using these tools, you can reduce your overall marketing costs while also ensuring your branding remains consistent across all of your customer touchpoints.
Canva lets you create images from stock photos, graphic designs for your LinkedIn posts, polls, and graphs to break down information for your readers, and countless other visual elements for your posts. It’s also a great way to add vibrance to your website, emails, and other marketing materials.
There's a slight learning curve, but Canva is built to be easy to master. No matter if this is your first time using the tool or you're a seasoned pro, chances are good that the content will look professional every step of the way. That really helps to create content that resonates with your brand, but also is just as stunning and crisp as what the big brands are launching.
5. Crystal Knows
Use for:
- Learning about your prospects during outreach
- Get more insight into targeted buyers and customers
- Gain details on how and how well to reach them
Crystal Knows is a tool that enables small business owners to know their audience more fully. There are numerous benefits to using it, especially if you are in a sales-oriented role. It allows you to understand your target audience better. That's not just about the topics they are interested in, but more about the communication style they appreciate and react to. You'll learn when to post based on when they are engaging. This enables a small business to capture more engagement with higher-quality target buyers.
With detailed personality data and insight into how and when to connect with them, even the tone of voice or time of day to post, your time is better spent using Crystal Knows on LinkedIn. Even if you know your customer well, it’s fascinating to see the details that resonate with them through these tools.
Another nice feature is that it has a segmentation builder that allows you to tailor user segments based on personality data. That allows you to create content that’s very narrow in and what the reader needs to see to act. More often than not, you’ll see that Crystal Knows is capable of driving better marketing outcomes when you put these tools to work.
6. Native LinkedIn tools
Use for:
- Results-driven marketing campaign creation
- Tracking and management of LinkedIn Ads performance
- Free native analytics tools
LinkedIn offers its own suite of marketing tools that small businesses can use to see how well they are doing on the platform. These organic tools allow you to capture more authentic results quickly. They can help you to increase your brand’s reach and engagement without having to invest in additional resources.
Using LinkedIn’s marketing tools, you have the ability to see how well any of your LinkedIn Ads campaigns are working and tweak them right away. It offers excellent visibility into who is interacting and where your opportunities exist. The company offers both organic and paid marketing tools you can use, and for those just getting started, the organic tools are a solid solution.
The Campaign Manager is easy to learn, and the native analytics tool (which is free to use) allows you to see engagement metrics and track changes based on the types of posts you create. You can upgrade to more in-depth information, including competitor comparisons that can help you see what the competition is doing to reach your audience.
7. Taplio
Use for:
- Creating content that goes viral
- Using visual analytics to see how you’re doing
- Finding people who are engaging with your content to interact with them
Another of the best small business marketing tools for LinkedIn growth is Taplio. It’s going to give you the resources you need to create content that people want to see – and more importantly, want to talk about and share. The content can be on any type of topic, and you’ll gain all of the tools necessary to connect with your audience.
Use Taplio to determine who the top influencers are in your field. Use it to create, schedule, and manage posts, and to target leads. You can use the built-in tools to help you automate the entire marketing process as well. It’s an overall resource for small business owners because it helps you create content and then provides visual analytics that show you how you are doing.
Once you’re getting interactions and engagement, Taplio also enables you to find the people who are engaging with your content. You can help them by boosting their content’s visibility while they help you do the same. It’s an intuitive system.
SEO and Your Marketing Strategy
Creating content on LinkedIn as a small business is a game-changer for creating leads. However, people still need to find your business online. It’s critical not to overlook the importance of building search engine optimization (SEO) into your marketing plans. But, like LinkedIn posts, there’s an excellent way to see success without feeling limited by a time drain.
Kit, Hike’s AI SEO agent, is one of the best resources available to automate much of the process. You may know Hike SEO for our small business & beginner-focused SEO platform. Kit takes things a bit further.
Kit levels the playing field when it comes to SEO. It allows a small business to authentically and effectively compete, even if it cannot afford to hire a specialized SEO agency to do the work for it. Kit will help you get found on Google, Maps, and all major search engines. It allows you to optimize your website and create a full SEO strategy that is modernized to the latest algorithm updates and changes Google implements. What’s more, it’s always growing and changing, increasing your visibility.
As you work to build your brand on LinkedIn using these small business marketing tools, invest in Kit to help you build your presence organically. If you need to start seeing results for your business now, this combination makes it possible.
About the author
Gabriel Both
SEO Manager
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