LinkedIn Marketing: An Absolute Must for B2B Businesses

No doubt you’ve used LinkedIn to help market your B2B clients, but are you really using it to full potential? LinkedIn is a unique platform that can be immensely helpful in growing a business. It has 810 million members globally.

Facebook, Twitter and Instagram can’t approach LinkedIn marketing in the B2B space. LinkedIn has fewer users than Facebook and Instagram, but they are a lot more targeted, because LinkedIn is a platform for professionals and business people. It exists to help people make and build business relationships. That’s why 93% of B2B marketers consider LinkedIn to be the most effective site for lead generation

And unlike a typical user who uses social media for leisure (kitten videos, make-up tutorials, dance routines, you name it) and bite-size information on current events, LinkedIn members actually WANT to connect with companies to learn more about their products and services.  There’s a reason why more than 80% of social leads for B2B are generated on LinkedIn.

Since LinkedIn is all about business, if you have any B2B clients, you should constantly be looking at how to leverage LinkedIn for their benefit.

What Can LinkedIn Marketing Do for My Clients?

LinkedIn is an invaluable platform that enables marketers to accomplish far more than most people think.  Use it to generate leads, build your clients’ professional networks, create partnerships, build brands, drive website traffic and increase sales and revenues. It also has all kinds of useful analytics to help you tweak your marketing campaigns. There is no doubt about it: LinkedIn should be integral to your clients’ B2B marketing strategies.

Let’s look at an overview of some of the possibilities.

Generate Leads

Now don’t get us wrong. Other social platforms certainly have their places. A lot depends on your client’s audience. But the fact remains that LinkedIn lead generations is 227% more effective than that of Facebook and Twitter.

Watch Your Tone

To effectively put LinkedIn marketing to work for your clients, you need to be very familiar with LinkedIn rather than just cutting and pasting content you used on another platform.

LinkedIn fosters a sense of business community. It’s all about connecting rather than hard-selling your products and services. LinkedIn has its own tone. It’s critical to formulate a marketing strategy specific to LinkedIn.

So, tone down those loud, abrasive calls to action and aggressive ads.

Set Up a LinkedIn Business Page

Your clients all have websites, right? Well, each of your B2B clients should also have a LinkedIn page. If your client wants to connect with customers on LinkedIn, generate leads and make conversions, it only makes sense that they take this basic step of establishing a respectable presence.

Of course, the logo, colors, voice and other branding elements must be consistent with your client’s other marketing. You will want to regularly update the content on their page update rather than just letting it lie there inactive. And “regularly” doesn’t mean once a month.

Oh, and make sure to claim a custom URL for your client on LinkedIn.

To learn the specifics of setting it up a business page on LinkedIn, see LinkedIn’s help page.

Complete Individual Profiles

LinkedIn is about business relationships, so it’s not enough to just have a business page. Most connections happen between individuals. That means it’s important for business owners and executives to complete their own profiles.  Don’t neglect the 2,000 character summary sections. Make sure some of those characters include your contact information.

Post Valuable Content

We’ve already talked about how LinkedIn is about business relationships rather than blatantly pushing products and services. You want to instill trust in your company and present yourself as an expert.

How do you do that? You do it by posting content that is of real value to your targeted readers rather than a lot of information about product features and sales.

If you question the value of marketing with the customer’s needs in mind, there’s proof this is the way to go. B2B marketers who put their audience’s informational needs first make up 88% of the top performers in content marketing.

Valuable content promotes engagement. And when someone likes and comments on your content or follows you, it doesn’t just end there. There’s a good chance that this activity will push your content to also appear in some of the feeds of their connections. In other words, engaging content doesn’t just please your current audience. It increases your reach.

Though we encourage original content, feel free to mix in sharing (attributed) relevant insights from third parties also.

Boost Your Posts

One of the easiest ways to reach a lot of people quickly on LinkedIn is to use sponsored updates to boost your posts to the feeds of a bigger audience. You can customize who you want to see your posts by industry, job function, company name and much more.

Advertise and Retarget

Advertising on LinkedIn is particularly effective because of its Matched Audiences feature. You can advertise by the precise company size, position and industry of those who are good prospects for what you are selling.

LinkedIn’s Matched Audiences enable you to sort by

• Company Targeting: Run account-based marketing campaigns that reach important companies and decision-makers
• Contact Targeting: Market to prospects and existing contacts by uploading your list of contacts or connecting to your contact management platform
• Retargeting: Segment your audience to show them specific content based on behaviors and actions they have already taken with your brand such as visiting your website

Use InMail to Connect on a Personal Level

If you have a premium individual LinkedIn account, you can send personalized InMail. You can’t do this through your LinkedIn business page. However, your executives and others in your company who are out-facing such as salespeople can take advantage of this effective tool through their premium individual accounts.

InMail enables you to contact LinkedIn users including second and third degree connections.

The major upside is that LinkedIn InMail is much more effective than regular email. InMail generates three times more responses than regular email.

You are only allowed a limited number of InMails each month. Use them to contact people you think would be very interested in your products and services given their profiles. Also use them to make connections with LinkedIn influencers and others with whom you would like to connect.

Needless to say, LinkedIn provides analytics so you can track the success of your InMails.

Join and Create Groups

It’s not enough to stay on your own business page and profile in order to reach the potential of LinkedIn marketing. You will want to join groups whose members meet the criteria of your target audience.  This will enable you to

• Hear first-hand what your target demographic wants and needs
• Interact with members of the group and set yourself up as an expert with good advice
• Message group members – even if you are not connected to them

Don’t stop at just joining groups. Create your own! You can invite members of groups to which you belong to join. When you have your own group, you are in an even better position to enhance your image as an expert in your field.

Invite Your LinkedIn Connections to Your Email Marketing List

What starts on LinkedIn can expand to other channels. Choose important LinkedIn contacts to invite to your company’s email marketing list. Make sure to name the benefits or hold out some special carrot usually not available.

Just the Beginning

This article covers just the beginning of the many facets of LinkedIn. Effectively marketing on LinkedIn is a specific skill set that requires keeping up-to-date. If that is not your agency focus, remember you can always resell LinkedIn marketing services through Umbrella. Contact us for a free consultation.