For a long time, LinkedIn was considered a job search engine. But not any more.
LinkedIn is now a powerful business-to-business (B2B) marketing and sales tool.
Ready to put your LinkedIn business plan into action? We’re highlighting 5 ways to level up your LinkedIn B2B marketing strategy in this blog post:
What Is LinkedIn B2B Marketing?
B2B marketing does exactly what it says on the tin. It’s the practice of marketing products to another business, rather than the end consumer.
Unlike consumer-facing companies, which have broad audiences and can market to the masses, B2B companies (such as software, manufacturing, or even advertising businesses) have a more niche audience.
As a result, they don’t need to market to everyone. They only need to attract the attention of relevant business decision-makers in their industries.
And as it turns out, LinkedIn is a great place for businesses to promote products to professional audiences. That’s why LinkedIn B2B marketing is so popular — because it works!
Why You Should Use LinkedIn for B2B Marketing
With over 750 million members, LinkedIn is a massive global community of professionals, many of whom are company decision-makers. In other words, it’s a goldmine of potential customers for B2B companies.
According to LinkedIn, 71% of professionals use its platform to inform business decisions. If they’re already using LinkedIn to help them better their business, it makes sense for you to meet them where they are by becoming active on the platform too.
Ready to take your LinkedIn strategy to the next level? Plan and schedule your Linkedin posts in advance with :
5 Ways to Use LinkedIn for B2B Marketing
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Optimize Your Company Page
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Create Valuable Content
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Run Targeted Ads
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Encourage Your Colleagues to Share Their Expertise
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Leverage LinkedIn’s Search Features to Find Sales Prospects
Tip #1: Optimize Your Company Page
If you’re using LinkedIn for B2B sales and marketing, the first thing you need to do is optimize your Company Page.
Prospective clients who come across your brand on LinkedIn will likely browse your Company Page, and when they do, they should be able to find all the critical information about your business and how it can help them.
There are some simple adjustments you can make to your profile to improve its performance:
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Craft a compelling “About Us” section that expands on your company’s purpose, product(s), and unique value proposition (aka what makes you better than your competitors).
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Make it look nice! A well-designed cover image and profile picture can go a long way in making your account look professional. Plus, your cover image is an opportunity to add some personality to your page. Take Zoom, for example:
Tip #2: Create Valuable Content
According to a 2020 study from Edelman and LinkedIn, sharing valuable, industry-specific content is one of the most effective ways for companies to differentiate themselves from similar businesses and make more sales.
The study found that 89% of business decision-makers have a more positive perception of potential partner organizations if they share high-quality thought leadership (including opinion posts, webinars, presentations, research reports, and more).
Since so many of these decision-makers are already active on LinkedIn, it’s the perfect platform to reach them through thought leadership of your own.
Salesforce does an excellent job of this.
If you scroll through the posts on its Company Page, you’ll see a steady stream of content from webinars (which you can host live on LinkedIn) to media interviews and blog posts.
Remember though, quality is more important than quantity. Focus on enticing your audience by showing off your niche expertise.
And to increase the organic reach of your content and make sure it gets in front of the right people, always include relevant keywords and hashtags in your posts.
TIP: Experiment with types of media in your LinkedIn posts. The platform enables you to share photos, videos, and pdfs to your feed — and rich media posts significantly outperform text-only posts.
Tip #3: Run Targeted Ads
Organic growth on any social network can be a challenge, and LinkedIn is no exception.
If you’re using Linkedin for B2B sales, allocating some of your marketing budget to paid advertising can expand your reach.
Plus, ads are an effective way to get your brand in front of the right people.
Sponsored content shows up on users’ LinkedIn feeds, meaning it reaches them when they’re most engaged (while scrolling through news and updates from their personal connections).
With LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager, you can market your ads to tailored audiences.
You can target people with specific job titles or employers, or reach current warm leads by uploading a pre-existing contact list.
You can even retarget past visitors to your website. And for each distinct audience, you can create custom ad content crafted just for them.
Shopify Plus uses B2B content marketing best practices in their advertisements. This one, for instance, is targeted at business owners and provides them with a flash sale checklist.
By sharing this information, Shopify Plus establishes itself as a trusted advisor to potential customers.
Tip #4: Encourage Your Colleagues to Share Their Expertise
Having a strong company presence on LinkedIn is a great start — but it’s the individual members of a company that really bring a B2B strategy to life.
As people working directly in the industry, you and your colleagues are the reason branded thought leadership is credible.
If possible, encourage your employees and executives to share their professional insights on their personal LinkedIn profiles.
This content comes across as more trustworthy because it’s coming straight from an expert source. You can then reshare their posts to your brand’s account.
Doing this helps you and your employees grow your personal networks while enabling your business to leverage its staff’s specific knowledge and experience in a way that feels authentic. It’s a win-win!
Plus, according to LinkedIn, content shared by employees has 2x higher engagement compared to content shared directly by a company.
TIP: You can put money behind your top-performing LinkedIn content to reach a larger audience by “boosting” the posts.
Tip #5: Leverage LinkedIn’s Search Features to Find Sales Prospects
Your LinkedIn B2B marketing efforts will be infinitely more effective if you’re marketing to high-quality prospects — people you know would find your product or service helpful.
Fortunately, LinkedIn makes it easy for brands to find these prospects through its robust search functionality.
Even from a free personal account, you can search for members from a specific location, industry, or with profiles that include relevant keywords.
You can also use the LinkedIn Sales Navigator (a paid feature) to further target your searches by company name, company size, seniority level, and more.
Once you’ve discovered a potential prospect, you can reach out to them to develop a one-on-one relationship or add them to your contact list on LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager (as mentioned in tip #3).
Like any other platform, it will take some time to determine what strategies work best for your brand on LinkedIn. But following these tips will help you get started quickly, so you can promote your business to interested professionals and make more sales.
You’ll be a master LinkedIn marketer in no time!
Want to schedule your LinkedIn posts ahead of time? With , you can!
