LinkedIn has become an invaluable platform for B2B social media marketing. With over 590 million professionals and more than 303 million monthly active users, LinkedIn offers unparalleled reach to connect with your target B2B audience.
Whether you're looking to increase brand awareness, generate leads, or build relationships with prospective clients, LinkedIn provides a host of features to help you achieve your B2B marketing goals. From targeted content promotion to sponsoring posts and utilizing employee advocacy, LinkedIn offers versatile options to get your brand and content in front of decision-makers.
In this blog post, we'll explore top strategies and best practices for using LinkedIn to market your B2B company or service. We'll cover how to optimize your personal and company profiles, engage your target audience with compelling content, utilize employee advocacy, and analyze results with LinkedIn's robust analytics. Let's dive in!
The foundation of your LinkedIn B2B marketing is an optimized personal profile. This ensures you establish credibility and visibility to attract your ideal clients. Include a professional photo, a headline focused on your niche target audience, and a summary section clearly explaining your offerings.
Your experience section should highlight achievements, skills, and companies that would interest your audience. Also, be sure to claim your custom LinkedIn URL and complete the Contact and Background sections to further build out your profile.
In addition to your personal profile, fully complete your LinkedIn Company Page. This serves as your business’s digital storefront on LinkedIn. Ensure branding elements like logos and images align with other assets. Write an informative About section explaining core offerings, values, and mission. Include employee photos and statistics to add visual interest and credibility.
Conduct keyword research to determine terms and topics most relevant to your audience. Then create content pillars around these themes and incorporate keywords into page descriptions and content.
Leverage LinkedIn's audience demographics under Page Analytics to refine your understanding of follower segments. You can target content and messaging to specific job roles, seniority levels, locations, interests, and more.
Post regular, valuable updates aligned to each audience segment’s challenges and interests. Mix up your content formats to keep followers engaged – consider articles, infographics, videos, case studies, and slides.
Interact with other companies and professionals in your space. Share their content when relevant and comment with thoughtful responses. This raises brand visibility and positions your company as an industry thought leader.
Simply posting content is not enough - you need to actively promote it to your audience. Here are impactful ways to increase content views, shares, and engagement:
Share updates to your personal Connections to reach those most likely to respond. Leverage employee advocacy by encouraging colleagues to share company content with their distinct connections.
Promote key content through LinkedIn's built-in advertising options like Sponsored Content and Sponsored InMail. Target ads very specifically utilizing LinkedIn’s detailed member demographics.
Join relevant LinkedIn Groups based on your topics, niches, and target personas. Groups allow you to directly engage professionals in your space. Contribute helpful discussions and occasionally share your best content.
Encourage current customers and partners to organically discuss your brand on LinkedIn. Satisfied brand advocates can produce credible third-party endorsements at scale.
Evaluate metrics over time and optimize based on posts and tactics performing best. This ensures you’re efficiently reaching the right professionals with the most effective content.
Dig deeper by viewing content demographics - this shows which job functions, industries, regions, and companies are engaging most with your updates. Use these insights to further target your position and offering.
One of the most effective ways to get your content and offers in front of your target audience on LinkedIn is through Sponsored Content ads. These native ads allow you to promote existing posts from your Company Page to highly targeted professionals across LinkedIn.
Sponsored Content seamlessly appears in the LinkedIn feed just like organic posts. But by putting budget behind them, you can control exactly what content you amplify and who views it.
Utilize LinkedIn's sophisticated audience targeting to ensure your Sponsored Content only reaches relevant decision-makers. Select targeting criteria like:
Job Title/Function (Ex: Marketing Manager)
Industry (Ex: Information Technology)
Company Size
Geographic Location
Interests/Skills
And More
This targeting specificity is what makes LinkedIn ads so impactful for B2B brands. You can zero in on just those individuals that match your ideal customer profiles.
Continuously evaluate the performance of your Sponsored Content campaigns. LinkedIn provides excellent analytics around impressions, engagement rate, clicks, cost per lead, and conversion actions.
Assess which audience segments and targeting approaches are driving the most value based on your key objectives - whether brand awareness, leads, or traffic.
Double down on the top-performing targeting and content elements. And refine or eliminate those not demonstrating sufficient return on investment. This optimization process will improve results over time.
In addition to Company Pages, LinkedIn enables you to create dedicated Service Pages to highlight and promote specific offerings. These pages function similarly to Company Pages but with content and messaging focused very specifically around one product line, business category, or branded service.
Service Pages operate standalone from your main Company Page. You can utilize them to generate targeted leads specifically interested in that service offering.
For example, an IT company can have separate Service Pages for offerings like Cybersecurity, Cloud Services, Application Development, Managed IT Support, and more.
Each Service Page should speak directly to prospects interested in that specific area. Publish service-related content like use cases, product updates, cost savings calculators, and local market insights.
Promote your Service Pages through Sponsored Content just like your main Company Page. Again utilize precise audience targeting to ensure your ads only reach those prospects currently exploring a need for that particular service. Monitor lead generation forms and conversion metrics to optimize.
Your own employees can be incredibly powerful advocates for your B2B brand on LinkedIn. By sharing company content updates, commenting on relevant industry discussions, and posting about their positive work experiences, employees boost brand visibility and trust.
However, getting employees to actively promote your business requires initiative on your part. Here are some best practices:
Educate employees on the basics of LinkedIn marketing and the importance of thought leadership. Explain specifically how their personal engagement helps amplify your brand, products, and job openings.
Make it easy for them to get involved by creating pre-written posts for them to share and identifying relevant industry hashtags. Highlight topics and content you'd like them to help promote each week.
Incentivize advocacy efforts through workplace recognition, spot bonuses, or rewards programs for top employee influencers. Friendly gamification drives participation.
Share analytics on content reach and engagement fueled specifically by internal sharing. This demonstrates the tangible impact of their efforts.
Lead the way by actively posting and commenting on content yourself across LinkedIn. Employees often emulate executives and management when it comes to social media usage.
Consistent employee advocacy pays dividends for extending your message to new audiences and humanizing your brand image. Put a structured initiative in place to motivate and amplify colleagues on LinkedIn.
Develop an arsenal of content customized to the distinct interests and pain points of each audience persona you wish to engage on LinkedIn. Identifying these segments through LinkedIn Analytics can inform the themes and topics you should cover.
Aim to create a diverse content library across formats like articles, whitepapers, case studies, videos, slide decks, and more. Align messaging to the viewer’s specific role and industry.
For example, content focused on a healthcare practitioner may highlight industry compliance and patient outcomes. While messaging targeting a bank’s CFO could focus on cybersecurity, cost savings, and risk mitigation instead.
This tailored content demonstrates your deep understanding of customers’ needs and positions your brand as an empathetic, knowledgeable partner versus a disconnected vendor.
Store and organize your niche content assets using platforms like Google Drive, Dropbox, or a CMS. Then strategically promote specific pieces to aligned audience groups through ads or organic sharing.
Curating persona-specific content libraries takes concerted effort but enables you to engage and convert professionals on LinkedIn more effectively.
As the world's largest professional networking platform, LinkedIn presents a tremendous opportunity for B2B brands to reach, engage and influence buyers. By thoughtfully executing the strategies above you can establish your brand as an authority, connect with highly-targeted professionals, and unlock quality leads for your sales pipeline.
Keep profiles optimized, develop audience-focused content pillars, actively promote your content, and analyze performance over time. Following this comprehensive approach positions your company for LinkedIn B2B marketing success.
FAQs
How do I get started with LinkedIn B2B marketing?
The first step is ensuring you thoroughly complete and optimize both your personal LinkedIn profile and your LinkedIn company page. This helps establish credibility. Then conduct audience research to identify relevant segments, topics, and keywords to create tailored content around.
How often should I post on LinkedIn?
For business pages, aim to share valuable updates 1-2 times per week as a minimum. This allows you to build authority while not overwhelming followers. However, more active companies see greater engagement - so posting daily or multiple times per week can be very effective.
What type of content works best on LinkedIn?
Thought leadership content like articles, slideshares, videos, and infographics tend to perform well. Case studies, industry listicles, Q&As, stats posts, and quotes also connect when useful and relevant. Mix up your content formats to keep the audience interested.
How important are hashtags on LinkedIn?
Hashtags help content be discovered by professionals interested in or following certain topics. Include up to three highly relevant hashtags - primarily industry and niche-specific terms - and avoid overly broad tags with massive volume. Position hashtags naturally within caption text.
Should I use LinkedIn ads for our B2B marketing?
Yes, LinkedIn advertising can be tremendously effective due to the quality of audience targeting options. Utilize Sponsored Content or Sponsored InMail to ensure your updates reach the right decision-makers. Target by factors like industry, job role, company, interests, and more for more qualified views.
How can we leverage employees for LinkedIn marketing?
Encourage colleagues to share company content updates organically to their distinct connections for extended reach. Have them like, comment, and post insights demonstrating your organizational expertise. Recognize top employee brand ambassadors.
What metrics matter most for our LinkedIn performance?
Focus on the quality of follower growth, content engagement rate, organic impressions, social sharing activity, and click-through rate on posts. Evaluate over time and double down on content types and topics driving the most interest.
Do I need a personal or company account to use marketing features?
You unlock the most LinkedIn marketing capabilities with a Company Page license starting at $49.95/month. This enables advanced analytics, customized ad targeting, and other capabilities beyond basic personal accounts.
How can I make the most of LinkedIn Groups?
Thoughtfully join and engage Groups focused on your audience segments and niches to build connections. Contribute helpful advice and occasionally share relevant content updates. Position your brand and employees as subject matter experts.
Is a stripped-down or incomplete LinkedIn profile bad?
Yes - profiles lacking depth can negatively impact credibility with prospective customers assessing you on LinkedIn. Be sure to include a professional photo, headline, summary, ample experience details, skills, education, and other info expected in a robust profile.
