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If your business or brand is selling products to other companies, a marketing strategy for LinkedIn should definitely form part of your overall marketing approach. LinkedIn is one of the best digital spaces for B2B professionals to use for marketing, networking, connecting, and enhancing their brands’ reputations.
LinkedIn is also a valuable tool for lead generation, particularly when it comes to generating more B2B leads. While other social media channels may only produce sufficient B2B lead generation, LinkedIn shines in this category.
So much so that stats show 97% of a B2B business’ social media leads come from LinkedIn. In this guide, we’ll explore the benefits of having a B2B LinkedIn marketing strategy, how to create your own strategy, and tips and best practices for marketing success.
Why is LinkedIn Marketing Important?
LinkedIn is the epicenter of professional social media activity. As a business or even an independent professional, knowing how to navigate this platform is key to ensuring you maintain a competitive edge in your industry and stay abreast of changing trends and innovations in your sphere.
Furthermore, when a platform like LinkedIn is properly utilized as a powerful marketing tool, companies can generate leads, foster meaningful business partnerships, stimulate profits, encourage brand awareness, and drive more consistent traffic to their website.
In a nutshell, LinkedIn marketing is important because marketing is important. LinkedIn is one of the best places to market your business to other businesses as a brand that is serious about being successful.
How Do Businesses Use LinkedIn for Marketing?
There are many different ways to use LinkedIn as a comprehensive marketing tool. Not only is it a great virtual space to meet and connect with people in your industry and exhibit your brand’s progress over time, but it also comes with a lot of built-in features that promote furthering online reach and engagement with your audience. Here are some of the things you can use LinkedIn for:
1. Content distribution
One of the simplest and most straightforward ways in which businesses use LinkedIn for marketing is by using it as a platform for distributing quality content about their brand.
On LinkedIn, you can share photos, videos, and blog posts for a range of different content types that connect with followers in different ways. Experts suggest mixing things up on a regular rotation to find what works best for your brand.
2. Sharing updates on company achievements and successes
The people and businesses that follow you online want to know what’s happening in your world. Share relevant and interesting updates to keep them informed and engaged. Update your followers on how you are progressing and succeeding in reaching brand goals.
3. Showcasing the company’s values and work environment
LinkedIn is a great place to demonstrate company values, ethics, and culture. Use the content you upload to inform audiences about what ideas your brand is founded upon and how those ideas intersect with your vision for the future.
4. Generating leads
Another major way that LinkedIn is used as a marketing tool is by generating leads for businesses. On this busy platform, there are endless opportunities to identify and connect with different industry icons, clients, and collaborators that expand your network and improve sales.
Leading B2B LinkedIn Marketing Strategies
Use these proven B2B LinkedIn marketing strategies to reach your target audience with brand messages that resonate at the ideal times.
1. Define Your Brand’s Objectives
The first step to creating any solid marketing strategy is to define your goals. This is true for your marketing strategy for LinkedIn, too. Your goals should dictate the kind of content you share and the approach you use to share it.
These goals can include generating more leads, building brand recognition, improving brand reputation, engaging specific target audiences, or giving your sales a boost.
A Free 7-Step Social Media Content Strategy Template
Use Clearview Social’s seven-step social media content strategy template to define your company’s strategy and meet your social media marketing goals.
2. Research Your Audience
The better you know your target audience, the better you’ll be able to craft marketing messages that resonate with them. Create ideal buyer personas based on your target groups’ ages, professions, industries, locations, and other demographic data.
Additionally, focus specifically on job titles that align with decision-making power.
3. Design A Striking Company Page
Having a strong company page on LinkedIn is an effective way to catch and retain your visitors’ attention. When new visitors are checking you out, your company page is the first aspect of your brand they’ll interact with. Therefore, it needs to be memorable, professional, and informative for the best results.
Consider adding some vital information to your company page, including your business location, industry or sector, products and services, team members, headquarters, and more.
Also, add your company’s web URL, logo, company size, and other relevant details on your page. This will boost your credibility and enhance your LinkedIn marketing efforts. Include a cover image that aligns with your brand for a complete look.
Your company page will include space for a description of your business. Include important details about your company, your offerings, and how leads can get in touch with you via email, phone, social media, or live chat services.
Once you’ve set up your company page, you can use it to share relevant content that engages and intrigues your target audience. This will help you to establish your brand as a thought leader in its industry.
4. Optimize Your Company Page With Keywords
Your LinkedIn company page is essentially the face of your brand’s LinkedIn presence. Maximize its power to bring in qualified leads by using SEO practices and targeting keywords in your on-site content.
Use the SEO tool of your choice to research the words and phrases that your target audience is searching for. Then, incorporate them into your list of unique skills and your company description. This simple trick is a great way to ensure that your page comes up when people search for B2B businesses and services like yours.
5. Promote Your LinkedIn Company Page
Now that you’ve created your company page, you need to use it to attract new followers and expand your audience on LinkedIn. You can achieve this goal by promoting your page and encouraging people to follow you for value-filled content and expert insights. Add a ‘Follow Us’ button in your email signatures, blogs, web pages, and newsletters to enable your fans to follow you with a single click.
Prompting people to follow your company page will boost your visibility and make it easier to generate qualified leads in the future. When someone follows your company page, all of your updates and posts will show up on their LinkedIn feed. This will increase your reach and improve the credibility of your brand as you gain more followers.
6. Build a Content Calendar
Organizing your content distribution system is crucial for maintaining consistency across social media platforms. It provides structure and foresight to your content strategy and makes it much easier to align your brand goals with brand actions.
There are plenty of spreadsheets, calendar apps, and social media scheduling software tools that can be used to form a cohesive content calendar. Many of them also offer data analytics tools that allow you to track the performance of each upload as well as general performance reviews over time.
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7. Craft Content that Captivates Your Audience
Once you’ve attracted a sizable audience with the best practices mentioned above, it’s important to retain them in the long run. You can do this by regularly posting engaging and informative content that your specific target audience will find genuinely interesting.
The higher the quality of your content, the more likely your B2B LinkedIn marketing strategy is to succeed. The best-performing forms of content on the platform include how-to guides, industry trends, and thought leadership articles that share fresh, unique perspectives.
Maximize your content’s reach by adding relevant hashtags to ensure that your content shows in search results for trending topics.
Read more: How to Use Hashtags on LinkedIn
8. Use Automation To Streamline Outreach
Outreach is an essential part of expanding your LinkedIn profile, especially during its earlier stages. Manual outreach can be seriously time-consuming. Using automation tools can streamline the process and lead to better results in many cases.
Specific LinkedIn automation tools allow you to automate the early prospecting stages and attract more followers using machine learning algorithms. Using them can help to enhance your engagement rates, fuel sales, and lead to higher profits in the long run.
The most effective outreach tools automatically identify your prospects and send them personalized messages from your brand. Some can even run drip campaigns without your intervention.
9. Use LinkedIn Groups
Joining and participating in LinkedIn groups related to your industry can be a great way to build your brand’s credibility and connect with potential customers. By engaging in conversations and sharing relevant content, you can establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry and gain the trust of potential customers.
Participating in groups can also increase your visibility and help you attract new followers and leads. By actively participating and engaging with other members, you can build authentic relationships with potential customers.
LinkedIn Posting Tips
Posting great content is essential for an impactful marketing strategy on LinkedIn, but knowing exactly how to approach it can be a challenge. We’ve rounded up a few LinkedIn posting tips and best practices so that your business can optimize B2B engagement as quickly as possible:
1. Learn the best time to post
As is the case with all social media platforms, there are peak traffic and low traffic times to post on LinkedIn. Knowing what time of the day to post means that each post is set up for success from the moment it is uploaded.
Using a tool like Clearview Social’s PeakTime™ can allow you to identify the best times of the day to post on all of your social media channels, including LinkedIn, so that every post scheduled is optimized for the highest level of engagement and performance possible.
2. Schedule posts in advance
Incorporating social media distribution software or a calendar tool in your B2B social media strategy can be a game-changer for how effective your content is online. By scheduling LinkedIn posts in advance, you can streamline the process, eliminating the need to individually manage each content piece. It’s an opportunity to get them done in batches for an easier and more time-efficient approach to LinkedIn marketing.
3. Set up a regular schedule for posts
This one ties in very well with the above advice. In addition to scheduling your posts in advance, consider setting up a flexible but consistent routine for when you post content on your LinkedIn profile.
For example, some brands may determine that posting a blog every Tuesday and Thursday works best for their engagement rates. You may need to experiment a little until you find your groove, but try sticking to a content schedule that incites familiarity and positive expectancy with audiences.
4. Post long content (at times)
Varying the length of your blog posts is a great way to hook followers. While not all of your LinkedIn posts should be long-form content, throwing one or two into your weekly or monthly schedule can add weight to your online presence and allow you to dig into deeper topics.
5. Try different content types
Don’t limit your B2B LinkedIn strategy to just posting photos and the occasional video. Expand your horizons by trying out different content types and finding out what your audience best responds to. Nothing ventured, nothing gained – switch things up with polls, profile pieces, infographics, links, and more.
Using a social media analytics tool like Clearview Social is key to ensuring that you understand exactly how successful each content upload is.
By tracking the performance of each content style or type, you can develop a social media strategy that plays to your strengths and adds sustainable value to your content schedule.
6. Post original content
High-quality content is a non-negotiable factor for any business wanting to establish itself online, especially with other businesses both in and out of the same industry. Place a high level of importance on the originality and authenticity of your content. This is a fundamental component that captures the attention of other businesses and compels clients to trust your brand.
7. Empower your employees to advocate for your brand
Implementing an employee advocacy program on your LinkedIn profile is one of the best ways to attract more clients and connect with both other businesses and your employees on a deeper level.
Clearview Social offers a comprehensive range of employee advocacy software tools designed to equip brands with everything they need to conceptualize, set up, implement, and track employee advocacy efforts with ease.
By empowering employees to advocate for your brand, you can increase their engagement levels at work, fulfill their needs for professional growth, and contribute to a stronger work culture.
Tips for Sending LinkedIn Direct Messages
Sending direct messages on LinkedIn is an effective way to engage with your audience on a more personal level.
There are several advantages to sending direct messages on LinkedIn and, indeed, on most social media platforms. Not only does it demonstrate a desire to connect with followers on a deeper level, but it can also serve as a mechanism for offering exclusive content or promotions, bolstering your ROI, and incentivizing audiences to follow upcoming content and projects on your LinkedIn profile.
Here are some tips for sending LinkedIn direct messages for enhanced engagement and online traction:
- Personalize your messages. People like to feel acknowledged. Stay clear of sending bulk, generic messages and instead focus on crafting messages that feature individual names and references.
- Keep your messages short. Lengthy messages (especially from a business or business entity) are a quick turn-off for most people. Keep things short and sweet.
- Don’t send DMs on weekends. For most people, weekends are a time to get away from the office, not be dragged in. Maintain a professional, considerate relationship with people you message by paying attention to the time and sending messages during business hours.
Measuring the Results of Your B2B LinkedIn Strategy
Before you launch your B2B LinkedIn marketing strategy, remember to review your current statistics on the platform and take note of key metrics.
Check how many leads and profile visits you are attracting, how many website clicks your brand receives from LinkedIn, and other figures you can use to compare your results once your strategy is in operation. These metrics should increase, giving you a clear picture of how your new marketing strategy is working and where it can be improved.
You can also measure the efficacy of your new strategy by using your LinkedIn company page analytics system. This system is designed to give you handy insights about your audience and their preferences, while the ‘Updates’ section allows you to view the performance of your updates.
The analytics page will give you access to click rates, engagement and impression rates, CTR, and more for each post you share. This data can then be used to identify the content types that are attracting optimal engagement. Then, you can share more of that content to boost lead generation even further.
As you measure the results of your strategies, we recommend keeping an eye on your competitors’ LinkedIn strategies and taking note of what they’re doing right – and what could be done better.
Use your insights as inspiration to adjust your own B2B marketing strategy in a way that maximizes your reach and gives you an edge over your industry’s closest rivals.
LinkedIn's Global Impact on B2B Leads
Data from LinkedIn shows that 80% of B2B social media leads stem from the platform. This makes it an invaluable part of any solid B2B marketing strategy.
Using LinkedIn as a marketing platform gives you access to specific industries, sectors, niches, and the associated target audiences within those groups. When used optimally, LinkedIn can drive sustainable growth for B2B businesses. At the same time, it can assist marketers with expanding their teams, raising their budgets, and improving their sales at the same time.
As of 2022, LinkedIn had over 875 million users across 200 countries and generated more than $14.5 billion in revenues during that year alone. Its user base includes more than 65 million key business decision-makers. Many of whom B2B brands are eager to reach with their brand messages. In 2020, 62% of all Fortune 500 CEOs were on social media – and 94% of those users were using LinkedIn as well.
When you target this powerful audience with the right B2B marketing strategy, you can use LinkedIn as a conduit through which to find profitable new business partnerships and clients.
Not only does LinkedIn enable you to reach specific audiences with your marketing campaigns, but it can also assist you in building more trust in your brand. Data from the platform shows that 55% of decision-makers on LinkedIn rely on thought leadership content to assess other businesses. If you create a strong marketing strategy on LinkedIn that bases content generation on thought leadership, you can boost your brand’s reputation and build more trust with important decision-makers and potential clients.
Boost Your Marketing Strategy On LinkedIn with Clearview Social
Clearview Social offers a host of tools to make your B2B social media strategy more effective than ever. Our Employee Advocacy Software makes it easy for your employees to promote company content on social media channels like LinkedIn—all while increasing your brand’s visibility and amplifying your social media traffic.
Our platform also offers a Social Media Analytics module that offers you key insights into the performance of every LinkedIn post you share.
Using software like Clearview Social means adding some of the most powerful and dynamic digital resources available to your arsenal in order to hit (and exceed) crucial performance targets.
Learn more about engagement rates and preferred content types and optimize sharing times in the same place with Clearview Social’s powerful artificial intelligence.
Boost Your LinkedIn Marketing Strategy with Clearview Social
Contact the Clearview Social team today to find out how our technology can drive your B2B LinkedIn marketing strategy.