Social media is changing the way we communicate and the way we are perceived, both positively and negatively. Every time you post a photo, or update your status, you are contributing to your own digital footprint and personal brand.
Amy Jo Martin
How to Use LinkedIn for Your Ayurveda or Natural Health Practice
As the owner of an Ayurvedic or natural health business, it's important that you take advantage of every marketing opportunity. LinkedIn can be a highly effective marketing tool. It’s free. It exposes your products and services to about 250 million other LinkedIn members and it’s a great way to attract great employees to your business when you want to hire more people!
Are you ready to get more out of LinkedIn for your Ayurveda business? Here’s our collection of the best tips and practices that you can implement today.
Understand the Value and Usefulness of LinkedIn
You may not see the value that LinkedIn can offer for your practice. Isn’t it just like any other social platform? Do I really need to use it to attract clients?
Well, over the last five years especially, LinkedIn has taken impressive strides to make their platform highly useful for small businesses.
Showcase Pages are a perfect example of LinkedIn making it easier for businesses to share and spread content updates. Setting up a LinkedIn page to market your Ayurveda business doesn’t take up much time at all. At the most basic level, all you need to do to start is spend 5 minutes setting up your personal profile and business page.
How to Set Up a Profile for your Small Business on LinkedIn
Creating a company page for your business can be done in about two minutes, depending on how fast you are at typing!
Before you can create a company page, you must have a personal LinkedIn profile set up with your first and last name. Also, make sure you meet LinkedIn's requirements to add a Company Page.
To create a Company Page:
- Click the Work icon in the top right corner of your LinkedIn homepage.
- Click Show More at the bottom of the menu that appears.
- Click Create a Company Page.
- Enter your company's official name and your work email address.
- Check the verification box to confirm you have the right to act on behalf of the company to create this page.
- Click Continue and enter your company information.
- If the work email address you provide is an unconfirmed email address on your LinkedIn account, a message will be sent to that address. Follow the instructions in the message to confirm your email address, and then use the instructions above to add the Company Page.
- A red error message may appear if you have problems adding a Company Page.
To publish your Company Page you must include a company description and a company website URL. When you publish the page, it is live on the LinkedIn website.
Once you’ve done that, you’ve setup your profile and you’re ready to start using LinkedIn for your small business!
Do You Have Employees? Encourage Them to Join!
Whether you’re the only employee or you have a few, you need to connect your personal profile to your company’s page. Encourage your employees to follow your company on their personal account and add to their profile that they work for your business.
With a small Ayurveda business, this step is crucial: your customers might want to see how your employees are qualified for their position or get an idea of what your employees look like long before they schedule an appointment. This is especially important with a niche like Ayurveda, because trust in someone's knowledge and experience is one of the most important things people consider when beginning work with a natural health practitioner. With any small business, personal connections are what sustain and expand your reach and client base. When you add yourself and your employees to your company profile, you make personal connections easier to make.
Build Up Followers
This part is often fun but challenging! It's enjoyable to watch your follower count rise, but it can be challenging to reach out to your friends, family and business connections and ask them to follow your LinkedIn profile page and company page.
If your small business primarily targets potential clients who live near you, then you’ll want to aim for a local following in your target cities.
Your goal is to target your desired customer base. Convert customers into followers by adding links to your LinkedIn, Facebook and other social media platforms at the bottom of every email you send, for example. If you want to be more upfront or if you’re already close to certain clients, consider asking them personally to follow your LinkedIn page.
Interact with Groups to Build Expertise and Attract Customers
Your small business likely doesn’t have the marketing budget of a larger company. But what you do have is an ability to personally connect with your current and potential clients on a more personal level.
This is also where LinkedIn’s "Groups" feature can be a great help. Find Groups talking about your brand or industry and start taking part in the discussions.
Start looking for groups!
LinkedIn Groups is where your inbound marketing will come into play. Nobody will appreciate your content if you just use the groups to spam your qualifications or wave your business around. But if you provide helpful and well thought out articles and responses to the group discussions, then people will naturally become interested in what you and your practice has to offer.
Monitor Company Analytics
When you’re a small business, LinkedIn page analytics can tell you a lot about how people are interacting with your content and your practice.
You can view analytics for each status or piece of content that you post, letting you monitor the impressions, clicks, and interactions of each update. You can also measure the number of followers you acquired from that update.
You can take this information and use it to narrow down your target audience and determine what they want to see. Maybe you noticed that a breakfast recipe or a post about the six tastes in Ayurveda a attracted huge engagement among your target audience and then you can use that information to get more people talking about your practice’s at-home Panchakarma package.
LinkedIn’s analytics will also appear in your followers section, where you can view the type of followers you have (organic versus acquired through ads), demographics and trends.
Treat this information like a free marketing analysis. Your Ayurveda practice or spa may not have a dedicated marketing department, and you may not be able to afford an independent marketing analysis. But you can get valuable information from LinkedIn’s free analytics.
Start Publishing the Right Content at the Right Frequency
When it comes to LinkedIn content updates, it's best to post a small number of very high-quality updates. It’s not like Twitter, Instagram or Facebook, where it's more acceptable to post multiple times a day. LinkedIn is more like a bulletin board where companies post their most important updates and most thoughtful articles on Ayurveda.
- Use your content and blog post updates on LinkedIn to comment on major industry news
- Use it to highlight new services offered at your treatment center or certifications earned by your employees
- Post content updates containing images or videos your followers might want to see. LinkedIn is a professional network, but it’s still part of the internet, and a photo or video can equal a thousand words!
After posting content on your page, be sure to respond to comments. This does two things: it shows people that you’re reading their messages and it encourages more customers to come forward and comment on your next post because they know they won’t be ignored.
Ask your Employees to Publish Content to Spread Unique Industry Information
Your Ayurveda practice may have a number of talented employees who play specialized roles or come from unique backgrounds. Highlight these employees and share their talents and knowledge with the world! Ask your employees to create their own blogs and publish their own content where they explain some unique industry information, like what they do and how they do it.
If you can leverage each employee in your practice, you can spread out the responsibility of updating your LinkedIn page while also highlighting each employee’s unique talents.
Build Out Showcase Pages
LinkedIn’s Showcase Pages are typically under-utilized by small businesses. Some small businesses don’t need them. However, if your Ayurveda practice has multiple major products or services, then the Showcase Pages are a great way to give each one the attention it needs and deserves.
Use Your Best Competitors As Inspiration
This is an aspect of online marketing that many people don’t like to talk about. But the truth is that most marketing efforts are just an altered version of something that’s been done in before!
If you ever start running out of marketing ideas, look at what your competitors are doing.
We’re not saying you should copy their pages or content! But spend some time analyzing why that company is so successful. What are they doing differently from you? How can you add your own unique perspective to what they're doing?
Continue Focusing On Growing Your Following
So once you’ve set up a good base, attracted followers and any employees you have are contributing content, your profile’s analytics will keep improving!
Where do you go from there?
Keep growing your following by promoting your LinkedIn page wherever you go. Add a LinkedIn button to your website and add a follow button to your email signature. When you meet a new business connection or possible client, add them on LinkedIn!
Ultimately, LinkedIn is a powerful and free marketing tool! Get active on this platform and potential clients and collaborations will find you.
Social media is not about the exploitation of technology but service to community.
Simon Mainwaring
Interested in learning more about growing your Ayurveda practice using social media? Browse through our Social media section here!