LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network with over 850 million members. With its huge user base and targeting capabilities, LinkedIn provides an excellent platform for B2B companies to market their business. According to LinkedIn, 80% of B2B leads come from LinkedIn.
With the right strategy, you can effectively use LinkedIn to generate leads, build brand awareness, and establish yourself as an industry expert. This comprehensive guide will walk you through the steps to successfully market your B2B company on LinkedIn.
Why Use LinkedIn for Business Marketing?
Here are some of the key reasons why LinkedIn should be an integral part of your B2B marketing strategy:
Targeted Audience
LinkedIn has over 850 million members globally across all major industries and job functions. You can precisely target your audience based on parameters like location, job title, company, skills, interests etc. This level of granularity helps ensure your messages reach the right prospects.
Lead Generation
80% of B2B leads come from LinkedIn. The platform provides several lead generation opportunities through content promotion, direct messaging, sponsored ads, and more. You can directly engage with prospects to convert them into leads.
Thought Leadership
By consistently creating and sharing relevant content, you can position yourself and your company as a trusted industry expert. This helps build brand credibility and loyalty.
Competitive Intelligence
Analyze your competitors’ LinkedIn activity to gain insights into their content strategy, messaging, products, hiring, and more. These inputs can inform your own strategy.
Recruitment
LinkedIn is the go-to platform for recruitment. You can attract and hire top talent by posting jobs, developing talent pools, and headhunting.
Audience Insights
LinkedIn Audience Insights provides detailed demographics and interests of your target audience. These insights help create more relevant and engaging messaging.
How to Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile
Your LinkedIn profile is the foundation of your LinkedIn marketing strategy. An optimized, complete profile establishes credibility and helps you get found by your target audience. Here are some tips to optimize your personal or company profile:
Professional Headline
Your headline appears just below your name and photo. Include your current job title and company along with a few keywords.
Example: Director of Marketing at ABC Corporation
Profile Photo
Add a high-quality, professional headshot photo to humanize your profile. For company pages, use your logo as the profile image.
Background Photo
A banner image representing your brand helps make your profile visually appealing.
About Section
Detail your experience, skills, achievements, and company/product information in the about section. Use relevant keywords for better discoverability.
Experience
Include all your work experience with a brief description of your role and responsibilities. This establishes your credibility.
Skills & Endorsements
Add skills to showcase your expertise. Ask colleagues and connections to endorse you for those skills.
Education
List your academic credentials – colleges, degrees, certificates. Mention graduation years and GPAs if good.
Recommendations
Request past managers, colleagues, and clients to write recommendations highlighting your work. This builds social proof.
Contact Info
Add options for people to contact you – email, phone number, personal website links.
Links
Include links to your company website, blog, social media profiles, and published content.
Growing Your Network
Expanding your connections on LinkedIn allows you to extend your reach and exposure. Here are some tactics to grow your network:
Connections
Proactively connect with existing contacts, colleagues, clients, vendors, partners, investors, industry influencers etc. Personalized connection requests see up to 4x higher acceptance rate.
Search
Use LinkedIn search to find prospects based on parameters like location, company, job title, skills, groups etc. Send connection requests to relevant profiles.
Groups
Join industry/interest relevant groups and build connections with other members through discussions. You can connect with up to 150 group members at once.
Events
Attend relevant conferences, meetups, and seminars. Connect face-to-face with attendees and follow-up over LinkedIn.
Alumni Tool
Leverage your alumni networks from colleges and universities. The alumni tool lets you search and connect with fellow alumni.
TeamLink
Use TeamLink to share connection requests across teams. It enables connecting with up to 200 prospects in one go.
Content Engagement
Engage with your audience through relevant content. Liking, commenting, and sharing content establishes new connections.
Creating Compelling Company Pages
Company pages are essential as they help shape your employer brand and let prospects engage with your brand. Here are some tips for creating compelling company pages:
Complete Profile
Flesh out all sections like about, products/services, careers, culture, life pages, locations etc. Add logos, images, videos, employee photos.
Showcase Products
Use the Products & Services section to feature your offerings. Include images, videos, demos, and detailed descriptions.
Highlight Culture
Give an inside look into your work culture through the Life page. Share photos and content about events, values, and people.
Curate Content
Post regular updates including articles, infographics, whitepapers, case studies, news releases, videos, job posts etc.
Monitor Analytics
Track follower growth, content engagement, page views, and referral traffic through LinkedIn analytics. Optimize based on insights.
Be Responsive
Respond promptly to comments, messages, and follower questions. Assign admin roles to keep the page active.
Share Updates
Cross-promote new content through status updates. You can tag products, mention employees, and add relevant hashtags.
Growing Your Company Page Followers
Building a highly-engaged follower base for your company page amplifies reach and brand visibility. Here are some ways to grow followers:
Current Employees
Ask all employees to follow the company page and share updates regularly. This quickly builds initial followers.
Company Website
Add LinkedIn follow buttons to your website headers/footers. Offer followers-only content to incentivize sign-ups.
Email Signatures
Include a link to your company page in employee email signatures. Thispassively promotes the page through outbound emails.
Events & Offline Marketing
Promote your page at events, on business cards, packaging, storefronts etc. making it easy for people to find and follow you.
Sponsored Content
Run sponsored content campaigns targeting a relevant audience. Content promoted this way finds new followers for your page.
Retargeting Ads
Remind website visitors to follow your page through retargeting ads on social media and other websites.
Influencer Marketing
Partner with relevant micro influencers to promote your page to their niche audiences through posts and stories.
Compelling Content
Consistently publish engaging, valuable content. Ask followers to like, comment, share to expand reach.
Promoting Your Content
Creating quality content is half the battle won. The next step is amplifying the content to reach and resonate with your target audience. Here are some content promotion tactics for LinkedIn:
Company Page
Share all new content through your company page status updates. This reaches all your page followers.
Employee Profiles
Leverage your employees’ networks by asking them to share company page posts through their own profiles.
Groups
Join relevant industry/interest groups and post your content in those groups to get in front of a targeted audience.
Influencers
Partner with LinkedIn influencers and industry experts to share your content with their extended networks through posts.
Sponsored Content
Pay to amplify high-performing organic content through LinkedIn’s sponsored content ads. Target based on audience demographics and interests.
Hashtags
Include relevant hashtags in your posts to appear in those niche streams and get discovered. #b2b, #smallbiz are widely followed hashtags.
SEO Optimization
Optimize posts for SEO by including target keywords so the contentappears in search results on LinkedIn and Google.
Email Marketing
Promote new posts through your email newsletter, drip campaigns, and automated email sequences.
Retargeting Ads
Remind people who have visited your website to check out your latest LinkedIn content through retargeting ads.
Content Uploads
Directly upload gated content like whitepapers, ebooks as native LinkedIn posts for wider reach.
Driving Leads and Sales with LinkedIn Ads
LinkedIn advertising provides a game changing opportunity for B2B lead generation and sales. Here are the top types of LinkedIn ads for businesses:
Sponsored Content
Promote your best performing organic posts as sponsored content to reach a wider audience.
Sponsored InMail
Send targeted direct messages to connect with prospects and share content. Open rates are up to 90% higher than email.
Text Ads
Run contextual text ads on LinkedIn feed and pages. You can tightly target based on member data and activity.
Dynamic Ads
Automatically serve personalized ads by dynamically pulling content from your website or blog.
Conversation Ads
Foster engagement through interactive carousels, polls, and questions in your ads.
Lead Gen Forms
Add lead capture forms to ads so prospects can submit contact details right from the ad unit.
Spotlight Ads
Sponsor your company page post and pin it to the top of followers’ feeds for high visibility.
Message Ads
Combine the power of InMail with ad targeting for more response. Messages go to the prospect’s inbox.
Follower Ads
Target non-followers by promoting your company page to get more relevant followers.
| Ad Type | Description | Use Case |
|---|---|---|
| Sponsored Content | Promoted organic posts | Amplify best content |
| Sponsored InMail | Targeted direct messaging | Personalized outreach |
| Text Ads | Contextual text ads | Brand awareness |
| Dynamic Ads | Automated personalized ads | Retargeting |
| Conversation Ads | Interactive polls & quizzes | Engagement |
| Lead Gen Forms | Lead capture forms | Lead generation |
| Spotlight Ads | Pinned company page posts | Increase reach |
| Message Ads | InMail + ad targeting | High response |
| Follower Ads | Promote company page | More followers |
Best Practices for LinkedIn Ads
Here are some tips to maximize the performance of your LinkedIn ads:
– Target by member attributes like job title, skills, company, location etc. to reach your ideal audience
– Test different objectives like website visits, lead generation and content views.
– A/B test ad variations like messaging, headlines & call-to-actions.
– Analyze performance data to identify best performing segments and optimize targeting.
– Use lead gen forms and integrate with your CRM to capture high quality leads.
– Retarget website visitors with LinkedIn remarketing to convert them into leads.
– Ensure a seamless post-click experience that aligns with your ad messaging.
– Monitor engagement metrics like CTR, conversion rate, cost per lead to gauge performance.
– Combine LinkedIn ads with content marketing for an integrated approach.
Measuring Your LinkedIn Marketing Results
To continually refine your LinkedIn marketing strategy, you need to actively track, measure and analyze your performance through key metrics and data points. Here are the top LinkedIn marketing KPIs to monitor:
Company Page Views
This shows how many times your company page has been viewed. Higher views signify greater brand visibility.
Company Page Followers
The number of followers indicates your reach and organic audience size on LinkedIn.
Content Engagement
Likes, comments, clicks and shares on your content show user engagement and content quality.
Content Reach
The total number of people who saw your content is important for gauging content amplification.
Lead Generation
Track form submissions, profile visits and InMail responses to measure content ROI and lead gen efforts.
Website Referral Traffic
This shows the volume of visitors referred from LinkedIn to your website. Optimizing this can boost overall traffic.
Ad Performance
Monitor metrics like impressions, CTR, conversion rate, cost per lead for each of your ad campaigns.
Sales Revenue
Measure LinkedIn generated leads that turn into customers to understand true business impact and ROI.
Regularly analyzing these KPIs will reveal what’s working and where there’s room for improvement. You can then refine your LinkedIn marketing approach for optimal business results.
Conclusion
LinkedIn’s growing dominance as the go-to B2B marketing platform means you simply cannot ignore it in your marketing mix.
By establishing an optimized company presence, fostering an engaged follower base, sharing useful content consistently, and running targeted campaign ads – you can successfully generate leads, drive website traffic, build brand awareness and position yourself as a thought leader.
With its unparalleled targeting capabilities and depth of audience data, LinkedIn provides unmatched opportunities to engage with the world’s professionals and grow your business.
Following the strategies and best practices outlined in this guide will enable you to maximize your LinkedIn marketing investment and fuel business growth. So what are you waiting for? Get cracking on LinkedIn marketing and start reaping its benefits!
