Jewelry ECOMM Tech
How Jewelry Brands Can Use LinkedIn To Promote Their Line To Jewelry Stores August 22, 2018 (0 comments)
There’s no doubt about it - Facebook is the most powerful and important social media tool in the world by leaps and bounds. However, for jewelry brands looking to open new accounts with retail stores, LinkedIn provides a fantastic opportunity.
If you’re on LinkedIn, you can use this as a part of your content marketing strategy. About two years ago, LinkedIn opened its publishing platform to all members, allowing them to publish blogs directly and promote their content throughout the LinkedIn network and beyond.
While LinkedIn is primarily a B2B social media platform, both B2B and B2C brands can benefit from publishing on it. Publishing directly on LinkedIn increases their reach and allows them to connect directly with their customers.
There are two main ways to publish on LinkedIn. The first is LinkedIn Publisher, in which a LinkedIn member can write a long-form article – usually five to seven paragraphs – and share it with their LinkedIn network. The second is a LinkedIn status update – a Twitter-like feature that is perfect for short, concise updates and messages.
Why is writing on LinkedIn such a good idea?
For starters, I’ve went over many times how important it is to create and distribute quality content to attract website visitors. It’s also a crucial way to show your audience that you’re a thought leader in your industry, and to show why your products are a great choice for a store.
Posting articles on LinkedIn will also help with your SEO (Google) rankings.
Remember - online marketing helps you reach PEOPLE. And, people work at B2B companies. It’s easy to forget that digital marketing applies to reaching new B2B business as much as it does to general consumers. Typically when I work with a client, if B2B is a part of their sales strategy, we use two completely different campaigns - one to reach consumers, one to open new B2B accounts. The same principles apply to reach B2B customers as it does B2C. However, the content must be tailored to stores. This is a chance to show why stores should carry your line.
However, reaching business owners on Facebook may be tough since you have to sift through so many non-business owners from all different demographics. This is where LinkedIn comes in. Its a social site for work.
LinkedIn may have started as a way to find career opportunities via job listings and networking, but that’s not why people return regularly these days. Today, visitors view content on LinkedIn seven times more often than job listings. It’s not hard to see why. LinkedIn has steadily evolved into a content platform, acquiring and integrating other content services such as news aggregator Pulse, presentation platform SlideShare, and online learning company Lynda. LinkedIn is growing and building that reputation to be that one place for professionals to stay informed, stay connected, and learn.
So how can we begin using LinkedIn to reach new store accounts? It’s pretty simple.
Write regularly on your own website first - not Linked In. The ultimate goal of your marketing should be to drive traffic to your website and increase your site’s search engine ranking.
Blogging on your site is a fantastic way to do this. Google judges your website’s rank based on the relevant content you put throughout your site. So you should always begin by filling your website with great articles, opinions, and helpful tips.
2. Publish the same article on LinkedIn - You have two options here. You can either publish the full article, or you can post only some of the article. I like to post only about half an article, then say below “click here to read the rest of the article on www.mysite.com (enter the link to the article on your site)”. If you post the full article on LinkedIn, make sure to still give credit and say the article was originally published on your site. The idea is to show people your expertise, but to get them to click through to your site to read the rest of the article.
3. Make sure your segment your content - on your website, it doesn’t make much sense to mix the content you create for consumers with the content you create for retail stores. After all, a consumer is not going to care about the “selling points” of carrying your line.
If your website’s content is segmented - meaning, the articles directed at B2B accounts are on a different landing page than the articles directed at B2C accounts - then you can design these pages differently and add things like opt in boxes and other pieces of content to collect information from interested stores. You can also run seperate remarketing campaigns to these visitors - if they’re visiting a page or article that likely only a retail store would be interested in reading, you can follow them around the web with additional ads and pieces of content to get them to call you about your products.
4. Make sure to add links throughout your article - One major factor of how Google ranks your site in the search engine is with link building. Using sophisticated link analysis, Google can discover how pages are related to each other and in what ways. Through links, Google can not only analyze the popularity websites and pages based on the number and popularity of pages linking to them, but also metrics like trust, spam, and authority. Trustworthy sites tend to link to other trusted sites, while spammy sites receive very few links from trusted sources.
As such, make sure to link from LinkedIn back to your article, as well as linking to your website in the footer or signature somewhere. LinkedIn is a popular site, so Google likes links from here. You want to make sure there are a couple links back to your site, but not too much where Google will view you as being spammy.
4. Promote Your Content - now that your article is published on LinkedIn, you can promote and advertise your content on LinkedIn to your target demographic and types of business owners you’re trying to reach. These articles should go directly to the article placed on LinkedIn. Since you do have this original article on your blog now, however, you should also promote this to your retailer list through email and social media. This will reach potential new accounts, while also strengthening your brand authority with current ones.