How to build your B2B LinkedIn marketing strategy

It’s a no-brainer that LinkedIn is the ideal social media platform when professionals want to connect, build professional communities, do business and build a reputation as a thought leader in a field. But what are the marketing features that you can leverage from the platform itself so that you achieve business objectives? Keep on reading to find out.

Setting the marketing objectives

Before starting any activities, you need to have clear goals for your marketing plan in order to create the LinkedIn marketing strategy. You can set objectives such as:

• Brand awareness through the wide network of professionals and various types of audiences present on the platform;
• Employer branding and/or recruitment of talented people;
• Lead generation through the different types of campaigns that can be run on the platform;
• Positioning as a thought leader in a field by showing your cumulative expertise and ability to understand an industry and bring other perspectives into the game.

The other day we were discussing with a client and we proposed him to sponsor a specific piece of content about his business on LinkedIn. His reaction confirmed what we were thinking: “That is a great idea! I also always check out the sponsored content I see in the right sidebar to see what new opportunities are there!”.

If you’re wondering “Is LinkedIn really effective as a social platform for my business’ marketing strategy?” the answer to this is a definite YES. LinkedIn generates by far the highest conversions (from visitor to lead) at a 2.74% rate, which is almost three times more than Twitter and Facebook combined. Therefore, LinkedIn has become a very effective lead generation tool. Regarding the possibility of hiring candidates, it seems that the #1st source of quality hires comes from social professional networks.

The tricky part is emulating your brand according to the platform’s types of audiences and content with your B2B marketing strategy.

How to develop a LinkedIn marketing strategy

At the base of any marketing strategy, LinkedIn included, there are 3 essential aspects that you need to cover: research on your market and competitors, defining the audience and becoming aware of the available tools for marketing so that you select the most appropriate ones.

Research the market and competitors

Probably (we hope) your business is already aware of its main competitors and know how to differentiate yourself against them. But considering that you want to develop a marketing plan for LinkedIn, we suggest you check out exactly how their company pages are structured, what kind of information and design they have and last but not least, notice what kind of content drives engagement.

There are many simple adjustments that you could make based on the good practices that you discover through the research. Check out their ads section as well. Learn from them in order to surpass them.

Tip & trick: The Add section from pages is especially useful if you know how to view the level of engagement. For this, copy the link as shown below and open it in a new browser page. Et voila! You can see exactly how well their ads are performing and get some of your own ideas for your company.

Define the audience on LinkedIn

Two parts about LinkedIn that I really like and find especially useful in guiding the efforts of our content marketing team are the “Content suggestions” and “Analytics” sections from the company page (above the cover image).

The content suggestions is self-explanatory. The wonderful part here are the filters that allow you to set different types of audiences. After that LinkedIn curates for you the top most engaging articles for a specific industry and company role, while showing you ideas of topics you could work with. This way, you don’t only gather ideas of what to write about to spark conversations on your company page, but you can also share articles that already have a lot of traction and engage with well-established pages. Below you have a 1:50 minutes explanation of how this works.

The analytics feature also brings insights that can help you understand:

• How you are performing against similar competitors (Analytics > Followers > Scroll at the bottom of the page to find the stats);
• What posts are the most clicked and how much engagement you obtain, which in turn can help you figure out what kind of content your LinkedIn audiences dig the most (Analytics > Updates);
• Follower demographics based on location, industry, job function, seniority and company size help you know who are people that manifested interest at some point in your page and also to plan campaigns if you are actually targeting different audiences than the actual one (Analytics > Followers > Scroll to “Follower demographics” and select the ones you are interested in);
• Know your follower demographics which in turn can be compared with the visitors demographics. The differences might actually surprise you. The people that visit your page might not be the people that also follow you and that is something that you need to ponder over (Analytics > Visitors > Scroll to “Visitors demographics” and select whichever you are interested in).

LinkedIn marketing features

It’s time to get familiar with what the marketing features you can leverage on LinkedIn in 2020. We’ll give an overview of the available tools that a business could use when creating its marketing plan:

• LinkedIn Ads
  • Sponsored content;
  • Inmail (like an actual email, received BOTH on LinkedIn and the personal email of that person);
  • Text ads;
  • Dynamic ads (small, personalized ads placed on the right side of the news feed, available on desktop only. They are highly helpful because of their ability to customize ads based on the user's profile);
  • Programmatic display ads (it is based on bidding on public and private auctions; whoever bids the biggest wins the right for their ad to be displayed BUT an important aspect: if, for example, you bid 5$ per click and the second highest bid after you is 4$. You win the bid, and the actual amount with which you are charged/click is 4.01$. The tricky part is that bids are not public, therefore you do not know against who and for what sum of money you are competing against).

Tip & Trick: since LinkedIn has introduced Objective based campaigns, that allow you (similar to Facebook) to select which objective from the sales funnel you want the ad to support. There are also many targeting options available based on demographics, education, level of experience, interests and from what company the prospects are from. Bonus: LinkedIn has a forecasting panel with how big a specific audience is, how much do you need to invest financially for a 30-days spend with how many impressions you can also get for those 30 days.

• Matched audiences for retargeting (website, email contact or account targeting) - we recommend you this series of videos from LinkedIn that explains clearly what are these and how to do the retargeting;
• Groups - I’m not talking about only engaging and giving inputs, resources and promoting your business in a group, I’m referring to create your own group, on a specific niche in an industry. Afterwards, you can start sending invites to relevant contacts. In time, people will find the group on their own. The groups are very important since you can recommend some of your best-written posts and receive a significantly higher engagement and awareness of your brand;
• Hashtags & relevant keywords - LinkedIn offers the most popular hashtags on the right side of your company profile page. Adding hashtags to your posts makes 2 things happen: it helps people that are interested in a specific topic to find, share and contribute to relevant posts and it makes it easy for your company to be discovered, raising the overall brand awareness. The relevant keywords act in a similar way the hashtags do, the difference is that people find content, groups and companies based on the Search bar. It is used also for finding places where people can contribute and stay connected with issues they are affiliated with.
• Showcase page in your company’s profile - in short, a company can create a personalized page where it can showcase specific projects, the life inside the business, employees, the values that guide their work and any other interesting aspects.

Final thoughts

There is no doubt LinkedIn is the-go-to-platform these days for professional purposes. Building your B2B LinkedIn marketing strategy could be exactly the boost your company needed to thrive and achieve its objectives. Let us help you grow your business in 2020 with our innovative and outstanding marketing services. Get in touch with us and let’s discuss your needs or enroll in our ABM Bootcamp!