Social media is an often-overlooked component of business to business (B2B) marketing strategies. For many companies, this makes sense. Traditional B2B relationships have historically been less digital and more personal, filled with account-based marketing and tight connections between key stakeholders. But with more millennials rising into decision-making roles, companies (even traditional ones) must go digital. One of the most essential digital marketing strategies your business needs to execute on is social media.
While many B2B companies are expanding their online presence among Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn remains the most critical tool for B2B lead generation and engagement.
Does your business generate qualified leads through LinkedIn? If not, it’s time to consider developing strategies for outreach and continuous engagement. These are critical factors that must be included in your LinkedIn marketing strategy to be successful. In addition to frequent engagement, you’ll also need to make sure your company profile(s) is impactful, proactively expand and nurture your network, and use LinkedIn ads for added visibility.
Why Use B2B LinkedIn Marketing Strategies for Lead Generation?
Plenty of research has been done to prove the effectiveness of LinkedIn for B2B marketing. Almost every blog outside of this one goes into depth about some of the metrics supporting LinkedIn in terms of developing marketing qualified leads (MQLs) and converting those leads into new business. When compared to Facebook and Twitter, it’s undeniable that LinkedIn is the go-to platform for business leaders.
By communicating with the right audience, your company’s marketing efforts are more targeted. By using the right tools, your marketing efforts are seen in the right place and time.
LinkedIn provides an unrivalled value proposition for B2B marketers – you can target and engage a network of professionals that makes sense for your business. By deploying the right outreach strategies while maintaining an excellent company profile, you can generate many high-quality leads that might’ve never known about your company otherwise.
LinkedIn Marketing Strategies: Develop Your Social Selling Plan
What does it take to create a bulletproof company profile and outreach strategy? Consider the four following tips:
1. Start with Your Business’ Company Page
Your business’ main profile page is the greatest opportunity you have to hook leads and convince them that your business offers real value. Unfortunately, many businesses are unaware of the best way to structure this content and lose leads that are confused about what the company does or is uninspired to take further action.
Company pages should use customer-focused language and be structured for conversions.
Yes, header images are important, but keep focused on your content. Let’s be honest, very few leads will care how many offices you’ve opened or how long your company has been operating – these are not always indicators of value. Instead, consider addressing your target customer’s biggest pain points. Explain how you can help solve a challenge for them and in turn they’ll be a lot more interested in your value proposition.
2. Develop Showcase Pages for Each Targeted Persona
Showcase pages are an opportunity that many B2B companies have not yet embraced. In addition to your company’s main profile, you can maintain up to 10 showcase pages that act as sub-pages and can align to many different purposes such as brands, industry segments, personas, and non-customer pages such as one for employment/hiring.
In each showcase page, consider how you’d pitch your brand or company to its most relevant user. Avoid being too general here – stay focused.
Like company pages, you should use every component of the page builder to be seen and understood by leads. Add a profile image and tagline, provide the content in multiple languages (if applicable), and support conversions through links to content, forms, and other important parts of your website.
3. Use Advanced Search for Powerful Prospecting and Discussions
It’s not good enough to just setup your company profile(s) on LinkedIn; you must also engage users in a variety of ways to realize the platform’s benefits. Proactive outreach to individual users, commenting on their updates/posts, and leading group conversations is a great way to show your authority and actually add value online.
LinkedIn engagement strategies are essential to delivering value and generating new B2B leads.
Advanced People Search offers filtering tools to identify leads in a given industry, location, current company, past company, and more. Likewise, you could also use advanced filters to find posts made by those made in your network so you can follow-up and interact with the right topic at the right time. Advanced group search is another great way to find industry niches, then offer value-adding content and comments to drive other group members to become more interesting in you or your company.
4. Pay for Ads and Sponsored Updates
In addition to the organic lead generation activities listed above, don’t forget that LinkedIn offers paid solutions to get your content in front of the right leads. Like the filters used to perform advanced searches, LinkedIn offers advertisers the ability to target their content to the ideal audience.
There are more options to advertise on LinkedIn than ever before. This includes video ads, thumbnail ads and sponsored updates that integrate into user newsfeeds.
Like any other paid marketing campaign, you must consider your budget and ensure your settings give the most value for money. Ads can be priced per impression (person seeing the ad) or per click. Keep in mind that 1000 impressions may be used fairly quickly depending on your target audience. Paying per click may extend the duration of your marketing campaign, but it could also be more costly depending on the price per click you commit to.
Bonus: Stand Out with Video Marketing
As a more traditional social media platform, LinkedIn and its users have adopted photo and video content at a slower rate than more visual networks like Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. Despite this, the growing millennial presence on LinkedIn combined with more seamless integration of media has meant that marketers need to consider using it.
In the last couple years, LinkedIn videos have become an appealing way to fight through the noise online and reach business leaders. Video content is a refreshing break from the constant scroll and read that many users do online, and it’s a great way to help prospects learn more about your company, products or services. If this is a strategy your business considers, make sure to hire a professional video team so that you have a great final result!
Discover and Deploy LinkedIn Strategies
Social media marketing is one component of a successful B2B marketing strategy that cannot be ignored. Does your business struggle to maintain a consistent social media posting cadence, lack the strategy to get results, or simply not have time for social media marketing?
Download the LinkedIn Strategies to Generate and Nurture Leads checklist to discover untapped B2B marketing opportunities.
