Today, LinkedIn is not only a social media site that links job seekers with potential employers. Instead, the platform has metamorphosed into an exceptionally instrumental marketing tool. But did you know that Statistica reports 43% of LinkedIn users are female, and 57% are male?
That makes it vital for every B2B business to develop a successful LinkedIn marketing strategy.
When implemented correctly, the LinkedIn advertising strategy can assist you in creating brand awareness and establishing lasting professional relations. It can be very efficient for lead generation as well. In essence, social media channels are of great benefit to B2B businesses.
Before discussing how to develop a LinkedIn marketing strategy for B2B, let’s check why it is integral to your social media marketing strategy.
Why B2B Marketing on LinkedIn is Important for B2B Brands
There are numerous benefits to using LinkedIn for B2B marketing. But, let’s discuss the four main benefits of investing more in LinkedIn marketing strategy.
1. Many Benefits
LinkedIn is a popular social media platform among individuals and organizations since it offers multiple advantages. For individuals, implementing an effective LinkedIn advertising campaign can assist you in landing your dream job, advancing your career, and building your brand.
Inversely, organizations can exhibit their services and products, promote their employer brand strategies and get to decision-makers.
LinkedIn offers a wide range of advertising options, which can be used to put your business in front of relevant customers. As a result, you have the chance to share your message with more people.
2. Growing Audience
Although it might not be as wide-reaching as Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, the LinkedIn audience continually expands. That is in addition to it being the leading professional network globally.
The latest data shows that LinkedIn users are 875 million in over 200 countries. According to LinkedIn usage data, two new members sign up to the platform per second. It’s one of the best places for lead generation.
LinkedIn allows advertisers to target highly-qualified professionals and business owners in the industry they specialize in. The platform also allows advertisers to create personalized campaigns based on a user’s job title, company name, location, industry, and more. LinkedIn advertising is not only effective but also easy to set up and manage.
3. Precise Targeting
One of the greatest advantages of LinkedIn for B2B marketers is the variety of targeting options. The social network offers over 200 targeting characteristics, much more than any other platform.
By late 2021, LinkedIn claimed to reach 65 million decision-makers. Moreover, 4 out of 5 LinkedIn users make business choices, and 33 percent of B2B managers use the LinkedIn social network for research purchases.
4. Great Conversions
Investing in a good LinkedIn marketing strategy gives the highest conversions and ROIs since most decision-makers are on the platform. Users on the social network have two times purchasing power in comparison to the average social media audience.
You can leverage LinkedIn to drive traffic to your website and convert leads into sales. You can also use this platform to grow your business, increase brand awareness, and increase visibility.
You can also use the LinkedIn sales navigator to find companies and people to target. Sales Navigator is an extension of LinkedIn’s professional social network, which companies use to find new prospects and customers. It allows you to:
- Search for specific companies, industry groups, or jobs.
- View company pages with insights into their size and location.
- See who works there.
- Find out more about your contacts at those organizations.
9 Steps to Develop the Best LinkedIn Marketing Strategy for B2B
Now, let’s explore the steps to develop a LinkedIn marketing strategy for B2B to aid your marketing efforts.
1. Set Clear Goals
You need to formulate your LinkedIn marketing goals before deciding on what you post and the posting schedule. Defining goals will help in tracking and measuring the effectiveness of your advertising strategy and assist you in establishing if there is a need to modify your content to satisfy your objectives at a later time.
Usually, you might need to consider one or more of these goals:
- Sell your products or services.
- Strengthen brand reputation.
- Build brand awareness.
- Generate qualified leads.
- Engage with the target audience.
LinkedIn makes it easy for you to set goals in your account, which makes it easier for you to track and measure the effectiveness of your strategy. You can also create separate marketing campaigns for specific goals such as generating leads or increasing brand awareness.
2. Know Your Target Audience
After making your marketing goals clear, it is essential to determine your target audience. That is a requirement for creating a successful LinkedIn B2B marketing strategy. You may profile your audience based on various parameters like geographic location, job title, industry, etc.
Moreover, it is also crucial to understand your existing audience deeply. The focus of an effective LinkedIn advertising strategy is to understand the target audience, their taste, and preference.
The LinkedIn campaign manager can help you to find the right audience for your company. It can also help you create highly relevant ads that resonate with your target audience.
You can utilize the LinkedIn analytics section to learn more about your business page followers and visitors. This feature is instrumental in giving you a great understanding of your audience and the kind of content they like. This information allows you to customize your LinkedIn marketing campaigns to meet their needs.
Remember that the primary objective is to link with the right followers to prompt lead generation and conversion on LinkedIn.
3. Create Your Complete LinkedIn Company Profile
A company page is among the greatest assets of any LinkedIn advertising plan. It is where your target audience first interacts with your brand.
Make sure that you fill out accurately these seven items on your LinkedIn company page:
- Logo
- Company description
- Company Type
- Company size
- Industry
- Location
- Website URL
Click Overview on your company page to complete your LinkedIn company profile. Update all the relevant and vital details regarding your business on the information page.
Upload a high-resolution cover image and company logo and complete the About us section to give visitors more information. You will get more essential sections to fill out underneath the About us field.
Ensuring a complete company profile is critical to making your LinkedIn company page appear more professional and legitimate. Professionalism and legitimacy are vital for brand image and give visitors all the details they require to connect with your organization when they want.
4. Do LinkedIn SEO for the Company Page
LinkedIn SEO works similarly to website SEO. You need to strategically put relevant keywords all over your LinkedIn company page and profile to make it easy to find users. The search terms you choose should be related to and illustrative of your business and your products or services.
LinkedIn uses a search algorithm like Google, which will dictate your ranking in the search results depending on several factors. Furthermore, LinkedIn has an independent ranking system.
Another SEO technique to strengthen your LinkedIn marketing strategy is to boost the inbound link profile of your company page. The simplest way is by providing links to the company page through newsletters, blogs, websites, and social media profiles.
Moreover, you can motivate your employees to fill out their LinkedIn profiles and include your organization as their employer. That, in return, provides more inbound links to your business page and improves your B2B LinkedIn marketing campaign.
Apart from helping engage your audience, publishing and sharing relevant LinkedIn content consistently makes it indexed by Google. Consequently, this boosts the search engine ranking of your company page.
SEO shouldn’t be overlooked if you’re trying to implement LinkedIn strategies for B2B marketing.
5. Create Relevant and Captivating LinkedIn Content
After setting up the LinkedIn company page, the next step is creating engaging content. Content marketing is vital to any social network, and LinkedIn is no exception.
Retaining and engaging your company page followers is an integral aspect of your LinkedIn marketing strategy. You can achieve this by posting and sharing helpful content that resonates with the audience.
For example, retaining top talent is a common pain point for employers, and the field service industry is no exception. If your target audience is a business owner in plumbing, roofing, HVAC, etc., beneficial content to them would include tips for recruiting and information on competitive salaries to attract talent, like the average roofer salary.
Work towards posting at least once every week to keep your audience engaged. To ensure that you post regularly on your company page, create a posting schedule to help you plan.
When you reach a wider audience, accepting sponsored content is also a strategy to keep in mind.
Your LinkedIn content marketing strategy will work to your advantage if you incorporate the following:
- Descriptive caption: Aids in providing additional context about your content.
- Eye-catching images: Clear, simple aesthetic helps make your content attractive.
- Hashtags: An effective means of increasing your LinkedIn content visibility to new audiences.
- Bonus: Include bullet points, questions, and emojis to change the feel and appearance of your content.
Like all social media networks, LinkedIn currently values video posts more in its algorithm. Your content will perform better when it includes a video than text-only posts. As a result, video plays an integral role in generating leads through LinkedIn content marketing.
According to research, LinkedIn users prefer educational, quality content and those that help them remain updated on the latest trends in the sector. Posting these types of LinkedIn content will assist you in fulfilling your audience needs and boosting your LinkedIn advertising campaign.
6. Target the Biggest Relevant Audience
LinkedIn has several targeting options, and it is enticing to focus on an exceedingly specific subset. However, your social media promotion strategy might only be successful when the audience is small. Worse, it might need to generate more data for future LinkedIn marketing strategies.
Conversely, targeting an exceptionally big audience might forgo relevancy. For that matter, you should focus on a large audience of at least 500,000 that only constitutes your most valued prospective customers.
LinkedIn targeting tools will approximate the potential audience size as you choose your target audience. Merge targeting features till you reach the right size, and be bold in experimenting with varying demographics as a bit of a trial.
7. Promote The Company Page Outside of LinkedIn
Content marketing is among the many ways of promoting your business on LinkedIn. There are different strategies you can incorporate to realize better results. You can apply a mix of these five techniques in your LinkedIn marketing strategy:
- Encourage all your staff to follow, like, and share your company page posts. They are your greatest brand ambassadors.
- Request your partners and customers to follow your business page. Market your LinkedIn company page on your email newsletter, blogs, and press releases.
- Share other creators’ content, particularly when it is relevant or is done by an influencer in your field.
- Tag your connections in LinkedIn content advertisements if you presume they will find them helpful.
- Request your loyal clients to write testimonials and recommendations for your company page—it is excellent social proof. Remember also to make recommendations for others.
8. Experiment with Different Approaches
After mastering the fundamentals of LinkedIn marketing, you can then diversify. Test with posting content at varying hours of the day or week. When you notice that a specific post attracts more engagement than others, make more of it!
Again, check your competitors’ pages and establish how effective they are utilizing LinkedIn. Determine the things that both of you are implementing and those that they are not that you can implement to have leverage over them. Look for the existing gaps in your industry and explore how you can bridge them.
9. Measure Your LinkedIn Marketing Results
To develop a data-driven LinkedIn marketing strategy for B2B, you should analyze your campaigns consistently. The majority of social media schedulers feature reporting functionality as standard.
Stay calm in case you cannot access one. LinkedIn Analytics can supply you with a considerable amount of insight.
There are three sections of the LinkedIn Analytics tool:
I. Visitor Analytics
Shows all the information you should be aware of about the individuals who visit your LinkedIn page, including:
- The total of unique visitors and pageviews over time.
- The proportion of visitors from mobile and desktop.
- Demographic information like job function, industry, company size, and location.
II. Update Analytics
Displays all the LinkedIn engagement metrics for your posts, consisting of:
- The total likes, comments, shares, and clicks your LinkedIn posts have received over a specific period.
- The engagement ratio between sponsored (when running LinkedIn ads) and organic content.
- Real-time data on each post, including views, impressions, clicks, and aggregated engagement rate by LinkedIn.
III. Follower Analytics
Provides all the necessary information relating to your audience, consisting of:
- The total of followers you have and the number of new followers you got over the past 30 days.
- Your followers’ demographic data shows where they work and live.
- A competitor tracker that compares your updates and followers to those of similar companies.
What is LinkedIn Marketing?
LinkedIn Marketing is a form of social media marketing that focuses on creating relationships with other professionals and businesses. It involves using LinkedIn’s tools to build relationships, share content, and drive website traffic.
This includes creating profiles, joining groups, and participating in conversations. The goal of LinkedIn marketing is to establish a presence on the platform, develop connections, and ultimately generate leads for your business.
Use LinkedIn Strategies for LinkedIn B2B Marketing: Wrapping it Up!
LinkedIn has developed into an authoritative digital marketing platform that can assist you in selling your merchandise or services and establishing brand awareness. But marketing on LinkedIn requires some work, which will be worth the effort if you decide to take the initiative.
You can apply all the tips discussed in the article to promote your business on LinkedIn for free. These LinkedIn advertising strategies will help you create a successful social media marketing plan.
