B2B Marketing via LinkedIn: Strategies to Succeed

Today, digital marketing is a prerequisite for the success and online visibility of a company. One cannot ignore promoting their brand on the web if they want to see tangible results. The results include increasing user engagement and bringing more people into the sales funnel.

Social media management is one of the most crucial branches of digital marketing. The popularity of social media platforms has only increased over the past decade. So it has become an inseparable part of digital marketing. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc., are some of the goliaths in the social media marketing empire. They prefer B2C (business to consumer) marketing.

Another social media platform that is often overlooked and underestimated for its marketing capabilities is LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a social media network for business. It focuses on career development and professional networking. These aspects make it suitable for B2B (business to business) marketing.

Want to know more about B2B marketing via LinkedIn? Keep reading.

This article takes a look at the value of LinkedIn for B2B marketing. We will learn why it is suitable for connecting effectively with other companies. Furthermore, we’ll learn how to build a strategy to make your B2B marketing effort successful on LinkedIn.

Why LinkedIn and how can it help B2B brands?

A common perception going around is that LinkedIn is for job seekers. But in reality, it is a social media platform that aims to build and foster a community of professionals. It does much more than connect professionals to better job opportunities. It helps create and foster connections between brands and brings companies closer together.

LinkedIn has grown tremendously since Microsoft acquired it in 2016. It has seen a huge influx of new users and the addition of business-friendly features. Examples of some of these features include better search options, detailed user engagement analytics, a new blogging interface, and more. Many of these features are able to help companies get a better ROI (return on investment) on their marketing investments.

There is also plenty of data in the public domain to support the argument in favor of LinkedIn’s B2B marketing effectiveness. LinkedIn has emerged as the second most popular social media platform for B2B marketing. It only follows the social media behemoth Facebook (now Meta) at the moment.

Nearly 95% of marketers use LinkedIn for their organic B2B marketing. For paid B2B marketing, 76% trusted LinkedIn. When it comes to B2B social media leads, about 80% come from LinkedIn. The numbers speak for themselves.

LinkedIn has quite a bit of control over B2B marketing. It has the right tools and features to maximize marketing output for B2B companies. If you follow the right strategies and implement them successfully, it has the potential to lead your B2B marketing efforts.

Strategies to Use LinkedIn for Successful B2B Marketing

Digital marketers should embrace LinkedIn for B2B marketing by 2022. It will only continue to grow in its stature for maximizing lead generation and building conversion-qualified communities. It creates visibility in relevant circles and promotes a brand among professionals.

If you don’t want to take our word for it on LinkedIn’s effectiveness for B2B marketing, see for yourself. You can implement the following marketing strategies on LinkedIn and see visible results:

• Strengthen your LinkedIn company profile

A LinkedIn company profile is crucial for you as an entrepreneur. The latest updates in recent years have added more interactive features to the company profile. Now you can list more than just your work experience and education.

You can post status updates about your business on your profile. Status updates help strengthen connections to your networks. Your status updates can attract potential business leads if they are engaged.

You can ask for recommendations from your connections. Recommendations help you increase your expertise and learn about the new trends. They also help draw attention to your profile.

You can list your expertise as a business owner on your profile. It allows new visitors to get a better idea of your business.

You can add the projects that your company has completed. They can serve as examples of your work ethic and excellence in your field. Projects also help establish your company’s capability by exposing your connections to your projects.

You should also include any patents, awards, and certifications that you have collected. In this way, you can establish the credibility of your work and your company.

• Build an informative LinkedIn page for your business

A company page speaks volumes for your prospects. Having an informative and attractive company page is vital to creating awareness about your business. LinkedIn Company Pages are discoverable by your target audience and tell a favorable story about your brand.

Your business page should be useful to your connections and engage your target audience. It should contain clear information about your company’s work and its mission. It should also contain accurate information about the products and services your company offers.

The company page contains several essential elements. A suitable banner image and your company logo should be the starting point of your marketing. They introduce the leads into your business.

Your business description should succinctly include everything about your business. The first two to three lines of the description should be compelling enough to grab a visitor’s attention. It should force them to click on the See more option. Use the most relevant keywords here.

The company page should not overdo the marketing aspect and keep things minimal. It should be informative and satisfy the target audience’s initial curiosity about your business. But at the same time, it should not overwhelm the visitors. It should project a professional and sophisticated image of your business.

• Optimize the company page for performance

You need to optimize your company page to increase its visibility in LinkedIn searches. Users rely on keywords to search for relevant companies. Therefore, you need to identify the right keywords to optimize the content on your business page. Use a keyword research tool to find the most relevant keywords.

You should include images, graphics, and videos on your page to make it more interactive. The headers should catch the eye. You can further optimize your company page by adding details of key employees of your company.

You need to implement other SEO best practices to help your business page rank in the SERPs. Your brand presence on LinkedIn gets a significant boost when your company page is optimized for performance.

• Identify the target audience

You can only expect success for your B2B campaigns if you target the right audience. LinkedIn provides website demographics to help you understand your potential audience and their behavior. You can identify your audience with their characteristics through these statistics.

These properties relate to your business page and how visitors respond to it. You gain insight into the content that your audience is most engaged with. You can analyze this data to better identify your target audience.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is another powerful tool to help you identify your target audience. Other third-party automation tools help identify the right audience across all demographics. You can generate potential leads by using these tools.

• Create and share high-quality B2B content

Once you’ve identified your target audience, focus on pushing quality content. B2B marketing, like B2C marketing, relies heavily on creating awareness about the products/services through valuable content. Engaging content grabs the audience’s attention. It forces them to learn more about your business.

Valuable content also helps to increase the number of followers on your business page. More followers indicate the trustworthiness of your business. The content should focus on solving common problems faced by the target audience in your industry. It should spread knowledge about your niche and the insider details of your industry.

Your content should be interactive to hold the audience’s attention for a long time. Use images, videos, infographics, etc. The idea is to make it more understandable. Your content should also showcase your expertise in your field.

LinkedIn allows you to share a variety of content, including videos, documents, PDF, images, and articles. Don’t forget to share content regularly. Consistency is the key to better user engagement.

• Take the help of your employees

Your employees can help your marketing efforts by engaging with your messaging. Early engagement with a post (within the first 60 minutes of posting) determines the quality of your post. The LinkedIn algorithm classifies your post as quality content if it gets good traction in this time frame.

Your audience’s reach will increase significantly if your posts are perceived as high-quality content. You can increase overall engagement with your message to all three degrees of connections. The Notify Employees feature helps remind your employees to start working on your content as soon as it’s published.

You can also turn your employees into influencers for your company. LinkedIn favors content shared by your employees and offers a 2x engagement rate compared to regular influencers. In addition, your employees know more about your products and services than anyone else. They can deliver the most relevant information and create a healthy impact on your B2B marketing campaigns on LinkedIn.

• Take advantage of LinkedIn analytics

LinkedIn has built-in analytics to give teeth to your B2B marketing campaigns. You can analyze the insights and extract actionable information to make relevant changes to your marketing strategies. You can also measure the performance of your business page and its content.

LinkedIn analytics provides data on a range of metrics. Ideally, you should analyze them all, but practically it wouldn’t be possible in some cases (due to time constraints, etc.). In addition, your goals determine which metrics are more important to you.

You can use the time range filter, page filter, or several other filters to get the required analytics.

Examples of some of these statistics include:

• Traffic

You can collect information about pageviews through this metric. It presents absolute and average pageview data.

• constituency

Find data about your followers and understand their engagement pattern. You can use this data to better engage people who are already in the fold.

• Demographics of visitors and visitors

You can find potential leads or followers among page visitors using the visitor statistics. You also have the option to identify your leads based on their job profiles, location, company information, seniority, etc. A B2B company needs this information for business development.

• Engagement

You can use this metric to monitor the performance of the content on your business page.

• Make good use of the community features

LinkedIn focuses on building communities and connecting companies with each other and professionals. It offers powerful community features. These features help improve communication with customers, partners and interested users.

Community features on LinkedIn not only help build connections, but they also aid in marketing efforts. There are two basic functions of the community, which are influencers and groups.

Influencers are thought leaders in their respective industries and help shape people’s perceptions. They connect with their followers by sharing knowledge and information about new trends in a particular industry. You can partner with influencers to increase the impact of your B2B marketing strategies.

Groups are formed based on interests, industries, expertise and skills. You can create a group for your company and add relevant participants to it. They are a great place to learn about new business trends and connect with people and businesses.

Using these community features judiciously will help you promote your B2B business and its product/services more efficiently.

• Trust LinkedIn Ads

Once you’ve built a significant organic presence for your company on LinkedIn, you can go the paid route and reap the benefits. LinkedIn Ads works wonders when you’ve established credibility for your brand.

When you start to get significant engagement with your quality content, you are moving in the right direction. It is a signal that you can use LinkedIn Ads.

You can choose from a wide variety of paid campaigns to promote your business through LinkedIn Ads. They are an effective way to generate quality leads for your B2B business. There are ad formats like TextAds, Sponsored Content, Sponsored InMail, Video Ads, etc.

LinkedIn Ads help you target your audience based on professional attributes such as skills, job titles, industry type, company name, etc. This helps with microtargeting, which is a very effective way of digital marketing. LinkedIn Ads help you reach a decision-making audience.

• Retarget website visitors on LinkedIn

You can extend the functionality of your website through LinkedIn . You can do this by tracking your website visitors’ interactions and using LinkedIn website retargeting ads. These ads work based on their past behavior.

These paid campaigns from LinkedIn allow you to target visitors who: jumped early, didn’t convert, or never returned. They help bring such visitors back to your website.

With these ads, you can significantly increase the conversion rate on your website. The retargeting ads should push communications related to their past interactions with your site.

You can get started by embedding the LinkedIn Insight Tag on your website. Once you’ve added the tag, you can use the LinkedIn Campaign Manager to analyze audience behavior on the website and do the rest.

Conclusion

LinkedIn can give wings to your B2B marketing goals with its hands-on features and user-centric approach. LinkedIn is different from other social media platforms because it focuses on content quality and building meaningful connections. You can create an effective LinkedIn B2B marketing strategy by considering everything discussed here.

Source: online sales guide tip