How to build your brand presence with LinkedIn

Stefan

If you want to build your brand, LinkedIn is the largest professional network platform in the internet, with more than 400 million members in more than 200 countries and territories. The solutions it offers expanded beyond hiring and networking, to include robust company pages, highly targeted advertising solutions, and a publishing platform.

Build your education agency brand presence

Education agencies can build a profile on LinkedIn, that showcases products, employee networks, blog posts, upcoming events, and status updates. Users can follow your profile to learn more about your agency, just like on Twitter or Facebook. You can also advertise job openings on LinkedIn and search for potential candidates. This makes LinkedIn and great place for recruiting talent.

As an education agency owner, you should encourage your education counsellors and branch managers to participate on LinkedIn, so they can promote your brand and their own personal brands. Asking your education advisors and managers to share your education agency’s posts, and join and participate in relevant groups will build your brand’s presence in the international education industry.

In order to establish a strong LinkedIn presence, you will need to leverage different aspects of the social network, and these include:

Groups

These are communities formed around topics of interest, industry, title, professional organisation, brand, etc… In groups, users can share articles, post jobs, and exchange advice. Groups can be a strategic way for your education agency to create a community of international students, gain insight into their pain points, and develop relevant conversations.

LinkedIn offers a variety of functionality controls in groups. For example, you can choose to have an open or closed group, turning on or off the ability to post jobs, etc… These settings will need to match the goals of the community you are trying to build. You can use Groups to locate potential customers. All you have to do is make a list of keywords that relate to your international students or countries you are targeting, and run a search for any LinkedIn Groups related to the keywords. Once you find the right groups, you can participate in discussions, ask questions, and make connections.

Content sharing

You will be able to share posts on your education agency’s LinkedIn page. If you want to build followers, posting on LinkedIn is the key. LinkedIn is perceived as a professional network, therefor your content mix should be fairly professional and engaging. Educational posts perform very well, because members are on LinkedIn mainly for professional purposes.

If your purpose is to expand your personal brand and thought leadership, LinkedIn Pulse is the latest offering by LinkedIn. You can publish to LinkedIn Pulse and, if you get enough readership and distribution through their own network, LinkedIn will share it broadly across the network which in turn, will increase the visibility of your post.

If you want to build your education agency’s brand, cultivating a set of thought leaders in your company will definitely be beneficial. By using LinkedIn Pulse articles, you will increase your inbound links, support your thought leadership platform, increase the followers on your education agency’s profile page, and boost your social following on other social platforms.

Showcase Pages

These are extensions of your education agency’s company page designed to highlight specific services you offer. Showcase pages are useful when your education agency offers multiple solutions with different types of fans and followers. For example, if your company offers education counselling services as well as migration advice, you can build separate showcases that highlights these solutions to your target market. Having these segments will allow students as well as potential migrants, to follow the part of your business they are interested in.

Profile page

This is where your users land when searching for your education agency or clicks on the logo from a user’s profile. Profile pages are a free LinkedIn service for any user looking to start one on behalf of their brand. This is the primary, branded landing page on LinkedIn so make sure your give it a careful thought about the images and messages you will use, because they will represent your brand.

Tips and tricks

Participate

Encourage your staff, education counsellors, managers, etc... to participate on LinkedIn Pulse and LinkedIn Groups to build their network and generate awareness around your education agency’s brand;

Create

Create and build a group for your international students;

Optimise

Optimise your LinkedIn Page for SEO by including your top keywords in your education agency’s description, to see a real impact in search results;

LinkedIn Pulse

Use LinkedIn Pulse to engage with influencers and keep up with the international education industry news.

Free email course

Organise your students’ applications into a repeatable, automated process that will save you time

Best tools to use when launching your education agency start-up

Stefan

GSuite is Google’s response to Microsoft Office selection and can be one of the most useful tools for a new education agency founder that a lot of entrepreneurs out there are taking it for granted. Many well-established unicorns fondly remember using Google Sheets to organise things and keep everything in sync as well as Google Drive for storage when they first put pen to paper.

Launching your first education agency start-up is no easy business, especially if you are not familiar with the international education industry. Sewing together all those bits and pieces of an education agency business can seem a daunting task, especially if you are a first-time founder.

Launching an education agency business will find you managing things like customer services, cashflow, accounting, project planning, team communication, meetings, tasks, … and the list can go on and on.

Thankfully, we live in the information age, and technology start-ups have done the legwork for you by coming up with various tools to make your life easier when starting and managing your business. Most of these tools are free or relatively affordable.

So if you’re an entrepreneur looking to found a new education agency in the international education industry, check out these recommendations:

GSuite – spreadsheets, powerpoints, calendars and more

Trello / Jira / Monday – project management

Keeping all your staff in sync with all the projects you are working on can be a tough task, especially if you have multiple offices and branches overseas.

The most common recommendation from established entrepreneurs is to use one of the project management tools under the Atlassian’s umbrella. Atlassian is an Australian team-building software company.

Trello boards are praised for being great for creating personal, business and major projects, as well as keeping you accountable for what needs to be achieved. Trello is great for keeping track of projects and various tasks.

Monday (formerly known as DaPulse) is a great non-Atlassian alternative that is being howled as an amazing visual project management tool. Monday allows you to manage all your day to day projects in a visual way so you can really understand what is blocking the project from moving to the next stage.

Hubspot / Capsule – customer relationship management (CRM) tools

Your education agency is always in one of the two common situations: trying to get a customer and / or trying to retain or manage customers. It is not easy to find a CRM that really works for your business. Hubspot can automatically track your leads from emails or calls, allows you to create email templates to save response times as well as notifying you when people open your emails. Capsule is described as being a light touch CRM by entrepreneurs that used it in their early start-up days.

Slack / Telegram – communication for your team

Slack has become a classic in the tech industry and the application is commonly used by teams to communicate and share documents. It is very useful especially with teams that are spread geographically, such as your education agency branch offices, or subagents you are using to recruit your students.

Appear.In – simple video chat

Skype, Zoom, etc… too complicated. You want simplicity and an application that just works? Appear.In is the way to go. You can create any URL you would like and all your guest have to do is click on that link to join the video chat. If you need to connect with your branch offices overseas in a conference, Appear.In is what you would want to use. It just works.

Canva / Biteable – graphics and videos for your education agency brand

The Aussie company Canva produces beatiful design content for social media, for your website and images.

With Biteable you can make up explainer videos, sales videos and demos. You will get lots of attention and compliments.

inteleagent.io – your agency’s application management system

Your business is growing. Months ago, it was easy to remember each international student application you were sending through to your education providers, because there were just a few of them. It was easy to remember what stage each application is as, what documents are missing, what is the next step you need to take to make it happen, because it was only you with your company. Now, you have loads of applications, staff to manage them, and there is no way you will remember all these details from the top of your head.

In comes inteleagent.io – the only international student application management system you will ever need to improve your education agency operations. inteleagent.io will help you track those applications through pre-defined stages all the way to the end of the application process. Once your application is at the end of the pipeline, inteleagent.io will generate beautiful commission invoices for you, remind you when to send them through to the education provider. It will keep track of your agreements with the education providers and remind you when they are due for renewal. Your team will be able to collaborate on applications, you’ll be able to track actions performed on applications in time with the integrated timeline, and you will be able to generate easy to read reports to help you make better decisions in your business. These are just a few of the features inteleagent.io has packed in for you.

Give it a try now and experience the difference!

Tag: start-up