How to Use LinkedIn to Grow Your Business in 2026

If you've been sleeping on LinkedIn, this episode is your wake-up call.

This week I'm sharing a conversation I had with a potential client last week that perfectly illustrates why LinkedIn is the most underrated tool in your marketing stack - especially if you're out there doing the hard work in person and wondering why it isn't converting faster.

I break down the difference between your personal profile and your business page, why you need both, and how the two working together can keep you in someone's mind long after you've walked out of the room.

Plus I share something that happened the morning this episode dropped that is the perfect example of LinkedIn working exactly the way it should.

Connect with me on LinkedIn: Loren Tomlinson

Free marketing audit: thesocialcollective.co.nz/marketing-audit

Interested in sponsoring an IHEE event or the podcast? Email info@thesocialcollective.co.nz

Links:

• Join the IHEE WhatsApp community
• Follow on Instagram: @inhererampireerapod
• Find Loren on LinkedIn: Loren Tomlinson
• Visit us at: inherempireera.com

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Transcript

0:00

Surprise. She is back. Hi, everybody. If you are watching this podcast as a video, hi, it is so nice to see you. I am in the podcast studio. Still needing a plant for the corner, but you know, we're here. We're making this happen. We're doing a video today. To those of you who are tuning in through audio only, hello. It is still lovely to be in your ears, of course. But to those of you who are watching me via video, hi, thank you for welcoming me into your room. Uh, I'm very excited for today's episode, actually. It's been uh something that has come through a lot of conversations recently, which I'm very, very excited to share with you all. But I thought I would just jump straight in to today's episode. I think we're just gonna get straight to it because I have something very exciting to announce at the end. But we're gonna dive straight into today's episode and get into all of the juicy things. So Monday's episode this week was obviously all of our updates, all the things that are happening in the social media space. Next Monday will be the exact same thing. But today's episode is really about an untapped platform that I think so many business owners and employed people as well are quite frankly just sleeping on. And I didn't really recognize just how much it's being slept on until I had a really interesting and very important conversation last week. I was traveling for work. We had a business meeting with a potential new client at the Social Collective who was very, very interested in starting to run some LinkedIn ads. They know a couple of clients of ours, they have seen the work that we do, and they wanted to talk about the power of running some ads and whether that was appropriate for them. And I thought the conversation that transpired was really interesting and brought up a lot of really great points that I think are so valuable to share on the pod. Mostly what I'm gonna share today will obviously apply to founders, as it always does. But I also think there's a lot of what I'm gonna share in today's episode that is also really relevant to those of you who are employed or are kind of in that juggle between working for yourself and also still looking for other jobs. Or if you were like how I used to be, I used to panic every time a client would like hand in their notice, or every month when I felt like, oh, I'm feeling a little bit wobbly. And I think, you know what, I just need to go out there and apply for other jobs. I also think now I have such an approach of everything when it comes to my work that I'm just gonna give everything my all. We're continuing to grow and scale the agency, of course. And I'm very grateful because TSC and also in her empire era are going from strength to strength. But I know because I have this tool in place that I will always be able to find myself an opportunity because I'm putting myself out there. And that starts with this wonderful platform that I think everybody has a love-hate relationship with called LinkedIn. Now, the reason I'm bringing LinkedIn to the podcast today is because I think it is one of the best ways to make sure that your marketing in person, all of that traditional stuff, is working that much harder for you. Going back to the conversation that I mentioned that I had last week was this said business owner is an amazing, amazing salesperson. They have decades of experience running businesses, they have decades of experience doing sales, they know their stuff. Marketing and business in the digital landscape has changed significantly in this time. And one of those tools that has come in to actually make our lives that much easier is LinkedIn. This particular business owner is amazing at doing a lot of face-to-face sales opportunities. They go door knocking, they are at conferences, they are at expos, they are showing up in all of the places that you absolutely should be as a business owner in the service-based space. This is a really great thing to be doing, is putting yourself out there. And obviously, as you know, in her empire era, also do our own community events. So I am very, very big on making sure that there is some kind of presence physically going out there to promote us both locally and internationally. But the reason that I bring this up is because this business owner was doing an amazing job of going door knocking and doing all of these amazing sales. They have previously owned multi-million dollar businesses and exited out of them. So they know what they're doing. The reason that this conversation came up is obviously the end goal for them was to be able to run LinkedIn ads. But what they didn't recognize was the power that LinkedIn actually has behind it to be able to fuel their business. This conversation got brought up because they had just been doing a sales pitch before they came to the meeting with us. We were talking about the sales pitch, and I was inquiring about what happens now between this sales pitch that this person had just done and getting it across the line. And they said to me that obviously they'll follow up, they will hope for the best, they will hope that they get back in touch or that they see the value. And I said to them, well, is there anything in the digital space that is really helping support that conversation and really feed into that narrative while they're in the consideration phase? Because that is one of the most important phases. Obviously, there's awareness, which is when they're just starting to become aware of you. There's consideration, and then we need to move them to conversion. In this consideration piece, though, this business owner said, Oh, well, I've left them with a brochure and I'm kind of just hoping for the best. I'll follow up with them, but hopefully they'll they'll want to work with me. And I said to them, have you thought about posting on LinkedIn and sharing a little bit more about the business? So that if you were to connect with all of these people, as someone like myself does, after every meeting, I go and connect with every person, even if it's just over an email and I'm having an email conversation. I still go and hunt that person down and I connect with them on LinkedIn so that if we don't have a conversation for the next wee while, they still have the opportunity to be served up my content. They'll get my newsletters, they'll get my videos, they'll get the photos and the carousels and the content and the blog posts and the articles. They'll still get served that up on LinkedIn, even if we're not having an ongoing conversation. And it got this business owner thinking. And they said to me, well, that's a really interesting approach because I hadn't really thought about what happens when I walk out of the room. And I said, Well, the great thing is with LinkedIn is that you walk out of the room, but you don't walk out of their minds because LinkedIn continues to push that content. One of the things that I think is so fantastic about that platform is that you will see posts that were posted a week, two weeks, three weeks ago that are still continuing to trend on the platform as opposed to as opposed to something like Instagram, where honestly you'd be lucky if you get 48 hours out of it. And that's such a key difference because I will speak to somebody and it might be three, four, five, six weeks later, it might even be six months later that they reach back out. But my work and my effort and the energy that I've been putting into a platform like LinkedIn has such a like a much longer payoff because of the fact that it can continuously have these conversations with people when I'm not in the room. There's a couple of different ways though, when it comes to LinkedIn that you can approach it. And again, this is another common question that I get from people is how do I go about this? What do I do? What is the best structure? Obviously, personal profiles are key. Make sure that you have one of those. Like I said, whether you are a business owner or you are employed, this is where you can build trust. You can build trust on your credibility, you can showcase who you are and what you have to offer. You can obviously put your face, your voice, your point of view out there, which I do on almost a daily basis. And of course, people follow people. We don't just follow logos. I will, yes, subscribe to a business page, but I also want to connect with the people behind the business. I want to know who you are. I want to know what's going on. What's going on? And the founders who are winning on LinkedIn, they're not posting every single day. They're not coming up with tons of different pieces of material to share every week. They're just posting consistently so that when people meet them in person, they already start to feel like they know them. And this has become a really great tactic for especially the commercial companies that we work with. So I think of like the bigger corporates. We've got some clients where their work comes through like tenders or really, really big corporate projects or council projects. And of course, with these ones, we don't necessarily need to run things like a lead generation campaign. But what is valuable is going out there and making sure that when they get in like a boardroom or a meeting with some really important executives, is that those people have already had the opportunity to see their content, whether that's through an ad or it's just through connecting with them on LinkedIn. So I know if I'm in a conversation with somebody about something really important, I will often go and hunt them down on LinkedIn so that even while you're just sitting in that consideration phase of working with me, you're still seeing my content, which is reinforcing that I am the right person for this opportunity. And I kid you not, so many opportunities have come out of this. As this episode goes live, a couple of hours later, I will be having coffee with someone about doing a nationwide speaking opportunity. Again, because they have been following my content on LinkedIn, they have been seeing what I've been getting up to. I've reinforced my credibility, I've reinforced my tone of voice, my viewpoint, my face. And they've recognized that actually, yeah, we would love to have this girl on our stage and we'd love to see her speaking to our audience. So it is such an underrated tool. Then the other side of it is, of course, our business pages. This is where business really starts to take off because it's ultimately where people go to, I guess, validate that your business is legit before they reach out. I know I'm one of these people. I make very quick snap judgments on a business if I do or don't see a LinkedIn page there. A LinkedIn business page, while it doesn't get as much reach as a personal page does, it is such a great way to educate your audience on who you are, what you do, who you're for. It's another really great way to have posts that sit on that page that could actually just be reshared on the founders' pages. So for example, Aria, who's our social media coordinator, she works on a lot of our LinkedIn content. I have a lot of conversations with her throughout the weeks. And then she goes and she takes all of those conversations and all of that knowledge and she turns it into LinkedIn content. So to be honest, if there's days where I don't have anything to post, I can't think of what to post, I'm too busy to post something. Or if there's a piece of content that's gone up on the business page that is actually really applicable to my personal audience, I can reshare it. And it means that that is a great opportunity to be redirecting eyeballs to the business page. Speaking of which, I did that this morning. We had our newsletter that went up on our LinkedIn page. It's gone up as an article on LinkedIn, and I wanted to draw my audience's attention to it. I used to run the articles and the newsletters through my page, but as the business has grown and I've obviously taken on a team, it's no longer suitable for me to run it through there. So in her empire era comes through my platform, and now TSC has its own collective press, is what we've called the newsletter. The collective press runs through TSC's Instagram, runs through TSC's LinkedIn page. So I've then reshared that onto my page so my audience gets to then come over. You following? So this is a really great practical way for people that know a little bit about you but want to know more, that they can visit your business page and they can get to learn so much more. It's also such a good tool if you want to be running LinkedIn ads, because obviously that should always be connected to a business page. It means that if somebody is clicking through to see, oh, I wonder who's running this ad, they have the opportunity to click through to your business page and of course find out so much more about you. So it's a really great way to kind of put two and two together. I always tell our clients that what we do, because we do this for a lot of our clients at the social collective, is we run their business pages and they run their personal pages. We've got the odd occasional client here and there that we basically get voice messages from them and we turn that into content for their personal pages. But for the most part, personal pages are such a good way to show what you're doing on a daily basis, what your job consists of, thought leadership pieces of content. So having, especially in your senior leadership team, if they can be posting on LinkedIn, it not only helps them for the future of their careers or you for the future of your business, but it also provides your business with so much credibility. Morgan and I are championing our LinkedIn strategy at the moment when it comes to how we show up on social media. Morgan, of course, shares a lot more from the client's perspective, and I share a lot more from the business ownership perspective. So Morgan's responsible for the day-to-day communications with our clients. So that's her realm that she gets to speak about on LinkedIn. Mine is, of course, running the business. So that's what I speak to about LinkedIn. And I think, to be honest, it's made the transition from me being the person that's always front-facing with our clients to stepping back a little bit, allowing Morgan to step forward and for me to then focus on the business. It's made that transition so much easier because clients have realized, because all of our clients are connected with us on LinkedIn, they can see that she really knows her stuff, she's intuitive, she listens really well. And then if they're wondering what the heck is Lauren getting up to these days, they can jump over to my page and they can read so much more about the day-to-day runnings of the business. And then, of course, like I said, it means that if there's business things that come up on the business profile, we can reshare those to our personal pages so that our connections and our audiences can get to see it. And it redirects people over to those pages. So you don't have to do any hard selling. Yes, there's people that will do cold outreach and things like that on LinkedIn, but personally, that's not my vibe. I much prefer connecting with people at in-person opportunities. Even if I didn't see them for another six to 12 months, we're still keeping in touch parasocially. So I guess I want to wrap up this episode by saying it's not rocket science to get on LinkedIn. It's really not that hard, but I can guarantee you, no matter whether you're the founder of a business or you work within a company, it is one of the best platforms to be on, purely for that reason that you are building future credibility. Like we've talked about for business and building that future pipeline security and making sure that there's always those opportunities that are coming up. LinkedIn is such a great way that you can provide yourself that opportunity to secure future opportunities, whether it's growing your business or it's growing your career. It is such a great space to be. So my homework to you is to jump on LinkedIn today. I want you to share a post, whether it's about you, it's about your job, it's about your company. I want you to introduce yourself to the LinkedIn world. Even if you've been on there for a while, I want you to re-introduce yourself. I also want you to click in the show notes and I want you to find my profile or just go onto LinkedIn and type in Lauren Tomlinson. I want you to connect with me so we can see each other's content. I can like and engage with yours. You can obviously get to learn a little bit more about how I share mine and hopefully take some inspiration from there. So that is where I'm leaving you with the homework. But the last thing I wanted to share before I wrap up this episode is we have our next In Her Empire Era event coming, and I am so ridiculously excited. I can't share too much because we're still finalizing the final, final details. But what I will say is it's going to be happening in Auckland in July. It is absolutely not something you want to miss. And hand on heart, I can say that this is going to be one for the books. So make sure that you are following In Her Empire Era pod on Instagram. And also make sure that you are subscribed to this podcast so you can get all of the latest and greatest updates. But I will say, if you saw the last event and you want to get your brand, whether it's a product or a service-based business, in front of a room of some of the most incredible female entrepreneurs, females in senior leadership, females doing amazing things with their businesses. Please reach out to us. You can reach out to us at infotesocialcollective.co.nz. We do have a In Her Empire Era pod email coming very soon. So stay tuned. But for now, reach out to us at the Social Collective and we would love to send you through our sponsorship deck, share with you the opportunities that are available. There's obviously the in-person and there's also some sponsorship stuff for the podcast now, too. So our fellas are out there. We are looking for our next partners to bring the next event to life. There's actually two events that I'm working on at the moment, plus a third that's coming later this year. So there are so many opportunities to get involved. If you've been thinking about getting involved for a while, please touch base. It is on an application only basis. So we are curating the best of the best events. But that is everything I wanted to share in today's episode. Make sure that you are subscribed to In Her Empire Era Pod. Share it around with all of your business friends. Go get yourself on LinkedIn. And I will see you on Monday with our next coffees and content update episode. Bye.