For a long while now, marketers have played down the value of LinkedIn for marketing, but it has finally started to get the attention that it deserves, especially for B2B marketing. This became evident after Microsoft acquired LinkedIn. It has experienced massive growth in users, and its business-friendly features empower marketers to get high ROI on their marketing investments.
If you’re looking for the best LinkedIn marketing strategies to generate B2B leads for your business, then this article is for you.
How Effective Is LinkedIn For B2B Marketing?
Many people still don’t know or aren’t sure about the effectiveness of LinkedIn for B2B marketing. A common question is: how effective is LinkedIn for B2B marketing? The answer in 2 words is very effective!
According to Statista, after Facebook, the most used social media platform by B2B marketers is LinkedIn. This shows that LinkedIn is useful for B2B marketing, but there are other statistics to back this up as well:
• 80% of social media leads for B2B are gotten from LinkedIn.
• 44% of all leads relevant to B2B come from LinkedIn.
• 94% of B2B marketers distribute their content through LinkedIn.
All of these stats prove the same thing – that LinkedIn is useful for B2B marketing, so this should clear your doubt by now. The next thing on your mind should be the right strategies that you can use to generate B2B leads on LinkedIn. Some of these strategies are discussed below.
The Most Effective LinkedIn Marketing Strategies for B2B
You must note when you’re
marketing on LinkedIn: the audience is very mature, and unlike Facebook, they do not react to irrelevant and unnecessary content. This means that you can’t bring in the same marketing strategies that you used on other social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter and expect a good result. LinkedIn is a more professional platform, and if you want to get the best marketing results, you have to treat it that way.
Here are some LinkedIn marketing strategies that you should try out.
Make Your Company Page Compelling
Creating a solid business page that people can check up to get information about
your company and its culture is essential on all social media platforms, and LinkedIn isn’t an exception.
Company pages on LinkedIn are similar to business pages on Facebook that are dedicated to an individual company, institution, or organization. LinkedIn users can discover these pages and follow the page to stay up to date with job vacancies, company posts, and other significant announcements.
If you don’t have a company page on LinkedIn for your B2B business, then you are pushing away potential customers, followers, and other great talents. This should be one of the first things that you do on LinkedIn. So, you should create one now if you don’t already have one. However, if you have a company page already, then you have to make sure that it is useful and informative for your target audience. That is how you win customers over on LinkedIn and in B2B.
Organize In-Person Events With Leaders in Your Industry
Getting in touch with influencers and thought leaders in your industry is one of those B2B lead generation tactics loved my marketers. Not everyone can currently access LinkedIn Live, even though it is something we're all hoping will be available to every user, including company pages soon. However, you can still hold live sessions on LinkedIn by requesting early access to LinkedIn Live. You have to do this before Live sessions become a new norm on LinkedIn as it gives you a competitive edge over other competitors.
Once you can access live broadcasting on your company page or profile, you should leverage this to organize interviews and live sessions with industry leaders. Do this focusing on topics that can help you get the kind of customers or clients you are looking to acquire.
Share Quality Media Content
If you want to become viral on LinkedIn, sharing quality content is essential. There are different types of content that you can share on your LinkedIn company page and profile. Examples of these are videos, images, docs, text posts, and docs.
Unlike many other platforms, the most consumed type of content on LinkedIn is the text post. However, when it comes to lead generation for B2B, the most effective content forms are arguably videos and documents. This may be because documents (docs, worksheet, pdf) and videos allow marketers to showcase the expertise of their company in a very interactive manner, which helps build brand credibility and win over the trust of prospective customers.
Your Employees are Your Influencers
One of the things you need in the B2B industry is influencers with the knowledge, experience, and expertise to back their claims beyond just having a large number of followers on social media.
In the B2B industry, the influencers are usually the decision-makers such as the CMOs, CEOs, and other persons in higher management levels in some of the most successful companies.
Getting these people to speak and influence others towards your brand is a challenging task to accomplish. This is why you have to raise influencers from your organizations to do this for you. They'll also be able to highlight some of your company's accomplishments, customer success stories, services, and technologies.
Also, according to LinkedIn, content that employees share has 2x more engagement in comparison to those shared by the company, and salespersons that share content regularly on LinkedIn have a 45% likelihood to surpass their sales target. This is proof that getting your employees involved in your LinkedIn marketing is suitable for your branding and marketing and the business’s overall growth.
According to a content creator at thesis writing service, the best influencer you can have is someone that is on your team that strongly believes in your products and how it can help other businesses grow. So, rather than look outside for influencers, look inwards to your executives, founders, and other employees that are interested and are active on LinkedIn.
Have Your Employees Engage Your LinkedIn Posts
If you want your LinkedIn post to reach its desired target audience, you must first make sure that you beat the LinkedIn algorithm. This is how you can be sure that your content will be pushed out to reach a wide range of audiences.
If you make a post and within 30 minutes to 1 hour, you already have a good level of engagement, it is labeled as high-quality content, and the algorithm pushes it up to the 1st, 2nd, & 3rd-degree connection of the people that engaged with the post.
However, if it doesn’t get enough engagement after the first hour of sharing the content, that post won't have enough reach. This is because it would be limited only to 1st-degree connections. Pro tip: When sharing content with your company page, don't forget to integrate LinkedIn smart links to your posts so you can easily connect and re-engage with people who have clicked on your links.
The best part of this is a feature that LinkedIn recently introduced that notifies employees once their company page shares a new post. This allows the employees to engage the content in due time to have enough engagement to push it to the 2nd and 3rd-degree connections.
As a company, you also have to encourage your employees to get active and get involved. You could offer incentives or introduce an employee advocacy program that sees employees get rewards for their contributions tomarketing the company and its products.
Publish LinkedIn Articles
If your LinkedIn post has an external link in it, there is a high possibility that most of your followers and connections won’t see the post. Your LinkedIn post with external links can suffer as much as a 10x decrease in reach than those posts without links. This is why you cannot use the regular LinkedIn post as an effective avenue to share customers’ success stories, informative blog posts from your website, or even research data. Thankfully, there is a way around this.
With LinkedIn articles, you can publish your market research data, case studies, and other valuable things to your target audience. You can also add links to these articles to drive the audience to your website and increase the possibility of conversion.
According to one of the best writing services, the most exciting feature of the LinkedIn articles is that they are not limited to just LinkedIn users. They also search engine friendly and can even rank on pages of Google search engine results. So, when you publish articles on LinkedIn, you have to make sure that you do your keyword research well.
Leverage LinkedIn Ads
There is little or nothing that LinkedIn ads will do for your marketing goals if your brand does not already have an organically built reach. You should know that your LinkedIn audience is the decision-makers of the companies that you are targeting. So, if you want to win their trust, you need to develop your credibility first. To build credibility for your brand, you need to implement all the strategies mentioned above effectively.
After getting quality engagement on your company page’s content, you can start using LinkedIn ads to reach out to other targets.
One thing that makes LinkedIn ads stand-out from other ad platforms is that it helps with targeting your audience depending on professional attributes such as job role, job function, industry, company name, skills, etc.
While LinkedIn ads are more expensive than other social media ad platforms, it is worth it as you're able to reach high-value audiences directly.
Propel Your Business With an Efficient LinkedIn Marketing Strategy
Through LinkedIn, you can build a strong network of people who can add daily value and help you to create a sales pipeline. The best bit is that it’s completely free to use and it is very efficient when used properly. Unlike other social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, the number of followers you have on LinkedIn is not what defines your brand. The quality of information and content that you share defines you. So, a big part of your LinkedIn marketing strategy is the content you share. Make sure your target audience gets quality information from you, and you will easily win them over. Growth Hackers is a branding, influencer marketing, online marketing and growth hacking agency. We help brands from all around the world gain visibility, automate their LinkedIn strategy with AI, increase exposure, drive traffic to their websites, get downloads and users, generate leads and most importantly increase their revenue. We use many strategies to do so such as SEO, social media advertising, email marketing, copywriting, conversion rate optimization, A/B testing, lead scoring, process automation and much more. Growth Hackers can achieve a lot for your brand. Get in touch with Growth Hackers so we can start talking about your brand, your strategy and how we may be able to help you grow and succeed.
Tiffany Harper
I am a dynamic blog writer working for a career and jobs website as the lead writer and editor. I am also providing some essay help at Best Essays as a subject matter expert, to the professional writing services Pro Essay Writing with thesis and blogging, on demand.
2 Comments
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Absolutely great article you got straight to the point. Thank you for the help.