To master B2B marketing, you’ve got to know your audience. And if you want to know your audience, there’s no better place to start than LinkedIn.
B2B marketing accomplishes precisely what it advertises. Instead of marketing to end consumers, this strategy targets other businesses. As a result, B2B enterprises have more specialized audiences than consumer-facing organizations that target broader markets.
LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network. It allows users to connect with colleagues, former coworkers, and anyone involved in their industries or fields. As a result, it’s one of the best places for B2B marketers to connect and engage with potential customers, including other businesses.
Looking to use LinkedIn for B2B marketing? We’ve got some tips for you!
1. Optimize Your Page
The first step in B2B LinkedIn marketing is to enhance your Company Page. When potential customers discover your brand on LinkedIn, they’ll look through this section. After doing so, they should be able to obtain all the crucial details about your company and how it may benefit them.
Write a brief summary outlining what your company is about and include any related keywords. Include your company’s mission statement and ensure the page includes your latest press releases. If you have any customer testimonials, add those as well. You also need to include an image for your Company Page to leave behind a more professional and polished impression.
If you have a blog, ensure your company’s posts are included in the feed. You should also add links to other social media sites like Facebook and Twitter so that people can easily find out more about your brand.
2. Create an Informative Page
According to research by Edelman and LinkedIn, posting helpful, industry-specific information is an excellent way for companies to stand out from competitors and increase sales.
According to the study, 89% of company decision-makers see partner businesses in a more favorable light if they share content that exhibits an excellent innovation culture. Due to the high number of decision-makers on LinkedIn, it is the ideal platform for connecting with them through original thought leadership pieces.
LinkedIn is one of the best online platforms for exchanging knowledge with fellow industry professionals. The site has over 875 million members from over 200 countries, making it an ideal place to connect with like-minded people who might be interested in your content. It also provides an easy way to share your expertise with others while providing them with helpful information that can improve their businesses.
Always remember that quality matters more than quantity. Concentrate on attracting your audience by showcasing your area of expertise. Include pertinent keywords and tags in your postings at all times to increase organic traffic and ensure that the right audience sees it.
3. Identify Your Audience
This leads us to our next tip: identifying your audience. The key to mastering B2B marketing using LinkedIn is knowing your audience.
So, how do you identify your audience?
Narrow your focus on groups or demographics who have a need for your products or services. After identifying them, you must work at thoroughly understanding who they are and what is important to them. Only then can you begin crafting messages that resonate with your target market.
Start with the basics. Who are they? What do they care about? How can you best reach them? Once you’ve answered those questions, it’s time to start thinking about how to connect with them. That’s where LinkedIn comes in.
LinkedIn is an excellent place for finding new leads and reaching out to existing customers. It also has features like Groups and Company Pages that make it easy for people in your industry to find each other. More importantly, these features enable you to find out what kind of content your audience wants from brands like yours.
4. Provide Valuable Content
One of the most important aspects of B2B marketing is providing valuable content to your audience.
To master B2B marketing with LinkedIn, you need to provide your audience with the right content which goes beyond posting articles or blog posts. You have to create value for your target audience by creating videos, infographics, podcasts, webinars, and other forms of content that solve their problems and make their lives easier. This is how you get your audience to trust you and see you as an authority in your space.
An effective way to do this is by writing blog posts relevant to your industry. For example, if you’re in the tech industry, write about how AI will affect customer service or how drones are influencing transportation. The more specific your posts are, the better because specificity shows you know what you’re talking about. It also helps you get the attention of potential clients.
5. Use Community Features
With help from LinkedIn’s numerous community tools, you can connect with new users, clients, and partners. Note that the two main types of LinkedIn community features are Influencers and Groups.
Keep up with developments in your industry and keep in touch with individuals as well as businesses within your network by joining relevant LinkedIn Groups. You can even establish a community for your business. Participating in debates is a fantastic approach to increasing your digital footprint and building relationships with people.
Another way to use LinkedIn’s community features is to connect with LinkedIn Influencers. What are LinkedIn Influencers? The professional networking platform has an invite-only program for 500 people who are leaders in their respective fields. Some examples are Bill Gates, Richard Branson, and Mohamed El-Erian. This elite group frequently discusses hot, current issues. You can get some B2B action by participating in their feed and commenting on their articles.
6. Set up a Schedule
Once you’ve gone through this article, create a checklist of things that you need to do to optimize your pages and engage your audience. Some items like optimizing your page and identifying your audience don’t need to be done every day, however, it pays to check on your progress and update them from time to time. Other items like posting valuable content and responding to comments need to be done more often.
When it comes to posting, it pays to analyze performance metrics so you know the best times to engage with audiences and publish posts. Depending on your audience and where they are, you’re more likely to get their attention and encourage more interaction by posting at certain times. Note that posting up to twice a week significantly improves your visibility on LinkedIn’s algorithm.
Create a calendar for LinkedIn so that you don’t miss anything and maximize your B2B LinkedIn marketing efforts. A more sophisticated approach is to use scheduling tools for posting. The platform endorses 10 tools that you can use to line up posts and automatically schedule them so you don’t have to publish each one manually every time.
7. Use LinkedIn Ads
In 2005, LinkedIn introduced LinkedIn Marketing Solutions which allows the account owner to connect a Company Page with LinkedIn ads. It shares some similarities with other social platforms in the sense that you can choose certain campaign objectives like awareness, consideration, or conversion as well as decide on target criteria. You can also choose the format of your ad, set a budget, and then measure your ad’s success.
There are a couple of reasons why LinkedIn Ads can be more effective for B2B marketing. Two of the biggest ones are:
- You can tap a more professional audience that other platforms don’t have.
- You can target your market based on industry and professional considerations. Unlike other apps, you can decide to direct your ads to groups with certain job titles, skills, and seniority. You can even tell LinkedIn to target certain companies, company sizes, and industries.
8. Test Your Profile
After optimizing your profile, don’t just leave it and forget about it. You also need to evaluate it from time to time to see if it’s still working for you.
- Ensure that your keywords are still relevant and your contact information is up-to-date.
- Check if your headlines contain keywords that your target audience uses.
- Review your About section to see if it’s still accurate. After you have more information about your audience, you may need to rewrite it so that it’s more relevant for them.
- Consider adding multimedia content to your About section. Videos, images, decks, and documents can help your network learn more about your company while engaging them more than ordinary text.
While it seems like an obvious thing to do, it’s easy to neglect these basic sections in favor of more dynamic content like posts.
Your Takeaway: LinkedIn Offers Unparalleled Opportunities for B2B Marketing
When we think about online marketing, Facebook and Instagram often pop up first in our minds. However, LinkedIn marketing can be very effective, especially for B2B marketing because of its focus on professional affiliations and companies.
As a professional networking site, no other platform comes close to the subscriber base, breadth, and reach that LinkedIn offers. So, it may not be the obvious choice but it can be the best tool for some serious business-to-business marketing.
To learn more about B2B marketing through LinkedIn, read The Best Ways to Market Your Business on LinkedIn on the Kala website.
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