Why Linkedin Marketing Is A Key Part of B2B Growth Marketing Efforts
When LinkedIn was launched in May 2003, it was mainly perceived as a professional networking site. However, in nearly two decades, LinkedIn has attracted 660 million users spread across 200 countries.
Today, it is not just a social media platform that connects job seekers with prospective employers. Instead, it has transformed into an extremely useful growth marketing channel.
It has become important for every business, especially those that market specifically to businesses, to develop an effective LinkedIn marketing strategy.
When executed properly, it can help you build brand awareness and forge long-term professional relationships. It can also be effective for lead generation.
Before we get into how your business can construct a successful LinkedIn marketing strategy, let’s take a look at why it is so important.
Why LinkedIn Ought to Be An Important Part of Your Business’ Long-Term Growth Marketing Strategy
Unlike other social networking sites such as Facebook and Instagram, LinkedIn offers a goldmine of opportunities for B2B marketers especially. Linkedin is the number one source for professionally relevant content that executives rely on. 80% of B2B social media leads come from Linkedin (the closest other network is Twitter, which provides 12% of B2B leads from social media), while 94% of B2B marketers use Linkedin to distribute content.
The biggest benefit that LinkedIn arguably provides is frequented by many senior-level influencers, decision-makers, and thought leaders.
If you want to grab the attention of top-level executives or corporate decision-makers, then you should strongly consider learning how to make the most out of Linkedin, and figuring out what tactics would serve you well.
Obviously, a detailed LinkedIn-focused growth marketing plan is crucial for the success of your business. It can help you build brand awareness, increase website traffic, quality lead generation, and much more. In addition, it can also help establish yourself as an industry thought leader. Let us start to examine how to go about creating this.
How to Create a Solid Growth Marketing Framework with LinkedIn as the Centerpiece
Promoting your personal brand on LinkedIn requires a set of clearly defined goals and tactics.
Developing an effective LinkedIn strategy also demands a deep understanding of your target audience. With that in mind, let us outline a few steps before delving into specific tactics, that can help you get more out of Linkedin.
Complete Your Own LinkedIn Business Profile
While at this, ensure you also have a complete and updated personal LinkedIn profile. It may not have a direct impact on your LinkedIn marketing effort.
However, your personal LinkedIn profile showcases the human side of your brand.
Creating a promising personal profile can help make your brand image even more powerful. Don’t forget to mention all of your special skills and professional achievements.
Get Familiar With Your Audience:
There are a number of different parameters upon which your audience can be defined such as job title, geographic location, industry, etc.
Let’s say your goal is to sell a guide on workplace safety for brands. In this case, your target audience may consist of those whose responsibilities entail occupational safety or workplace standards compliance.
In addition to defining your target audience, it is also important to have a clear understanding of your existing audience. A successful LinkedIn marketing strategy focuses on understanding who your audience is and what they like.
You can use the analytics section on your Company Page to learn more about your followers and page visitors.
Analyze Your Competitors
To amplify your LinkedIn marketing, you need to know how you fare up against your competitors. Knowing how you match up with them not only allows you to know what features you emphasize in your LinkedIn content strategy but also knowing what content works for your competitors allows you to recognize what type of features your potential customer base is looking for.
LinkedIn provides a feature called “Companies to track” that reveals a list of companies similar to yours. It also gives you access to a few key metrics including the total number of followers, follower growth, and social media engagement. Evaluating these pages can help you understand how your own Company Page fares in comparison.
You can identify what is working well for them and integrate those tactics into your own LinkedIn marketing efforts.
Use Images and Videos
It’s crucial to maximize audience engagement on your LinkedIn updates for your LinkedIn strategy to be successful.
One of the best ways to grab the attention of your audience is to use images and videos. This should be done ideally as a complement to text-based articles.
In fact, according to LinkedIn, images lead to a 2x higher comment rate, and LinkedIn videos are 5x more likely to create engagement.
In addition to images and videos, you can also upload SlideShare presentations and PDFs to make your content more attractive.
Generally speaking, it is better to upload videos directly to the platform rather than share YouTube links.
Create a Content Calendar
Generally, it is recommended that you post regularly and consistently in order to retain, as well as build your connection with your audience.
It is recommended that you create a calendar for your content as part of your LinkedIn strategy.
This can help you attract more followers and grow your audience on LinkedIn.
Establish a timeline for content publishing along with the types of content that you will create.
Another important aspect of your LinkedIn marketing plan is to post your content at times when it will get maximum traction. This means you have to find out the times when your audience is most likely to be online.
Experiment with different posting times and analyze the CTR to find out when it peaks by taking a look at your click-through rates in the “Updates” section of your Company Page analytics.
Automate Your Outreach
To grow the reach of your Linkedin company profile you need to create more relevant connections during the initial stages. For this, you need to do a considerable amount of outreach.
However, manual outreach can be challenging and time-consuming.
You have to shift through your prospects’ profiles, find their information, use personalization to customize your messages, and more.
Not exactly the most scalable approach.
That’s why automating your outreach makes sense.
Software such as Dux-Soup LinkedIn Automation makes it easy for you to automate these prospecting stages so that you can focus your efforts on the more important stages. This tool automatically views your prospects, endorses them, and even sends personalized messages on your behalf, all automatically. It’s also possible to set up a drip campaign for your prospects. This can help improve your engagement and drive more sales.
Get Help from Your Workforce
Your employees and colleagues can be immensely helpful in growing your audience and increasing your reach on LinkedIn. Therefore, it is imperative that you make them a key part of your LinkedIn syndication strategy.
In addition to following your Company Page, you can also encourage them to like and share your updates. Make sure you notify them whenever you post an important update on your Company Page.
This will help your brand gain visibility in its networks. This, in turn, will boost brand awareness and help make your LinkedIn marketing efforts more successful.
Utilize LinkedIn Analytics
A crucial aspect of your LinkedIn strategy is to evaluate it on a regular basis. We have already discussed how your Company Page analytics can help you learn useful insights about your audience.
It can also help you analyze the performance of your updates. In order to do this, you have to know how the “Updates” section of your Company Page analytics works.
You get to see a table that reveals different parameters such as impressions, clicks, engagement, CTR, etc. for each of your posts. This information can be used to find out the type of content that is receiving maximum engagement, allowing you to refine your LinkedIn marketing efforts.
Track Website Traffic
When you share content about your brand on LinkedIn, you will come across those who find your content interesting or of value and may visit your website to check it out.
However, it’s very likely that they may not end up on your landing page and fill out the form. As a result, you will lose those leads. But, if you track your website traffic, you might be able to tap into this audience as well. Moreover, if you use heat mapping as part of your conversion optimization efforts, you can potentially determine where people drop in.
Linked-in Growth Marketing Campaign Tactics to Help Supercharge Your Revenue Growth
Now that we have established some of what is necessary to establish a proper framework for a growth marketing strategy, we can now delve into some potentially effective Linkedin-focused tactics that can go a long way towards helping your B2B business grow a solid customer base. While some of these are basic, they all are consistent with the notions that building a B2B-oriented growth marketing funnel is one that requires many steps. As such, marketing towards them should keep in mind the many stages and factors that are involved in making a decision on which service or B2B product offering to choose. These various stages need to be considered when conceptualizing and designing the creatives (in many forms and formats) needed to catch the attention of key and relevant decision-makers at different points in the decision making funnel (AIDA).
1. Get the Most Out of Your Linkedin Business Page
The audience that your B2B business potentially wants to reach is on LinkedIn. That is also true for 55+ million other companies (give or take). Here are some ways that can help your organization’s LinkedIn Page stand and drive growth:
Complete your Page: Pages with complete information get 30% more weekly views. Be sure to add your logo, lead with an overview of key terms and phrases that LinkedIn members can easily find in search.
Boost your Page: Amplify your best content getting the most reactions with a boost to extend your reach. Boosting helps your business become aware of potential customers that are not following you (yet) but might ultimately be interested in what you have to offer.
Invite people to follow: Prompt your first-degree connections to check out and follow your Page by selecting “Invite connections” within the Page admin tools.
Share Items that Concern Your Company: Companies that post weekly see double the engagement with their content. Bring people into your conversations, and join others on LinkedIn. Highlight your brand by re-sharing posts where your business is mentioned.
Share stories: LinkedIn Stories allow you to humanize your brand with bite-sized content, and to drive engagement and conversion: Stories viewers are growing 15x faster than feed viewers.
Go live: In 2020, 6.3 million members attended virtual events on LinkedIn. Communities are most active when they gather in real-time. LinkedIn Live allows you to build deeper connections with your audience with, on average, 7x more reactions and 24x more comments than native video.
2. Create Engaging Linkedin Content:
Attracting and retaining a significant number of followers to your Company Page is a difficult task. The only way to achieve this is by publishing and sharing meaningful content that will resonate with your audience.
The quality of your content can make or break your LinkedIn marketing efforts. Publishing content on LinkedIn requires a thorough understanding of why people spend their time on the platform.
You must also understand what they would like to read. Typically, blog posts, how-to articles and informative mid-length video content, white papers, case studies as well as infographics and checklists are content types that perform well on Linkedin due to the bite-sized format (so to speak) that these items are typically packaged in.
This is further helped by research that demonstrates that LinkedIn users are interested in content that educates them. They are also interested in content that helps them stay up-to-date with the latest developments in the industry.
Publishing these types of content will help you meet the needs of your audience. As a result of this, your LinkedIn marketing will get a boost.
3. Thought Leadership Articles
LinkedIn is a place frequented by strategic decision-makers and top-level executives.
An effective way of striking a chord with such an audience is to create fresh and original content.
That is why thought leadership content can help you grow your audience and boost engagement on LinkedIn.
You can create the following types of thought leadership content:
Industry thought leadership – Your viewpoint on the latest developments in your industry or the industries that are directly relevant for your customer base.
Organizational thought leadership – A reflection of the vision and ethos of your company.
Product thought leadership – Positioning yourself as the best solution for your target customers’ problems.
Regardless of the type of content you create, make sure it is not an obvious attempt at self-promotion. That can be detrimental to how prospects can perceive you, especially as it pertains to their potentially believing that you are all about promoting your business while providing little tangible value at the same time.
In addition to publishing and promoting your own content, you should also share useful and engaging content from other pages. It breathes new life into the feed of your Company Page and helps build relationships with other brands.
It is also recommended that you use relevant hashtags when you post content to increase visibility even further.
4. Evolve Customer Engagement Strategies
B2B customers today need more than a sales pitch: they need to know you know them. Understand their journey better with a buyer-first approach, and how your product or services can help solve their challenges.
Broadly speaking, understanding your prospects' decision-making cycle, as well as the factors underlying how their business operates, allows you as B2B focused business to:
Position for the long-term
Know your customer’s customer base
Revolve around the customer journey
Strengthen your sales and marketing collaboration
Earn trust through thought leadership
One way to truly understand your customers is to actually hear what your customers need directly from them, in a setting that centers on them instead of your brand. Consider hosting a LinkedIn Event or roundtable discussion where you can bring your customers together, safely and in real-time, to glean insights straight from the source.
Invest in Creativity in order to Differentiate
Let’s face it: B2B marketing has been stuck in a funk for years, caught in a monotonous loop of the rational sales pitch first content. Just the facts. But as research indicates, 75% of B2B creative is ineffective. Buyers today demand more.
One way to reverse that trend — without overspending — is to embrace the creative renaissance now taking place. Many B2B marketers are taking a page from the B2C marketing playbook, aiming to connect with buyers with more of an emotional-based appeal, which of course aims to resonate in the psychological place (so to speak) where the majority of decisions are made.
Let us be clear. Rethinking creativity doesn’t mean throwing out all the previous content you’ve created. If there are still valuable messages to share, consider ways to give them a new life, like turning them into videos or infographics that catch the eye of a scrolling member. This involves embracing evergreen content that has the power to stay visible and reach new audiences without being specifically time-bound.
5. Join and Get Involved in LinkedIn Groups
LinkedIn Groups have a poor connotation.
Since people post a lot of content that’s too sales-y and don’t put in the time to engage with the community.
People throw in a link to their article or job ad and run away. Very haphazard
However, the reality is that this gives you a great opportunity to stand out and establish yourself as an authority expert within the group.
Obviously, this will be more time-consuming, as you have to actually create original and valuable content.
LinkedIn groups allow you to reach a targeted audience of industry professionals and establish authentic relationships with these people.
It’s NOT just a place for businesses to blast advertisements and the sooner you start leveraging these groups, the better your payoff will be in terms of warm leads and closing that brings us to our next point: the community.
In LinkedIn groups, you’ll usually find fellow subject matter experts and influencers.
So, once you join a group, you should start:
Creating and posting content.
Connecting with relevant people.
Engaging prospects and potential LinkedIn sales leads.
By positioning yourself as an expert, people will naturally want to connect with you.
6. Linkedin Sales Navigator
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a powerful tool that allows you to do very effective prospecting and outreach. When it comes to LinkedIn lead generation, cold messaging, and Sales Navigator most people use only a few of the features available to find leads on LinkedIn.
In Sales Navigator, you can create large lists of highly targeted prospects where you can plug them into software and reach out to them in a very sophisticated and bulk manner.
Finding Active Targets versus Inactive Targets
You can adjust the Sales Navigator search and just target active people on LinkedIn. This is a huge bonus.
Outreach Segmentation Based On Company Size
You can also tailor and customize your outreach based on different company headcounts. You can create messages and launch outreach campaigns specifically for this split
Self (Get your first $10k/m)
2-10 employees (Create $100k/m message)
11-50 employees (Increase Leads and 2X conversions)
51+ (Throw fuel on the fire message since they already have a sales team)
200+ employees (Get HUNDREDS of Meetings messages)
Other Filters to Use in Your Advanced Search
Some of the other filters in Sales Navigator aside from keywords, titles, and company size, include:
Degree of Connection
Industry
Geography
Years in Current Company
Years in Current Position
Spotlights
Establishing Solid Growth Marketing Fundamentals Via Linkedin: An Essential Part of the B2B Growth Marketing Plan
Linkedin can be a great way to market your business, and the number of users and engagement on Linkedin is growing. By following these tips, you’ll be on your way to increasing awareness of your business, driving traffic to your business, and giving your growth-focused business a better chance of reaching potential customers.
However, to really win at Linkedin marketing, you need a well-thought-out strategy that requires proper research, planning, and great social visuals.
Overall, developing a long-term Linkedin strategy that aligns with your growth marketing goals is an ongoing process that requires careful planning, analysis, and execution. Using the above guide, there is no doubt that you can build the foundation for a comprehensive and successful content marketing strategy using Linkedin.
However, if you are looking for outside growth marketing expertise to help you get started and create a Linkedin strategy that is aligned with a growth marketing-focused approach, why not schedule a free, no-obligation, growth marketing consultation with one of our expert growth consultants today? We look forward to speaking with you and learning more.
Are you currently using LinkedIn? Where are you finding success, or what aspects do you struggle with?