6 Ways to Market Your B2B Brand on LinkedIn

Lead generation with B2B

With more than 645 million users, LinkedIn is a goldmine for marketers to market and grow their businesses. And being focused on a professional audience makes the platform perfect for B2B marketers to attract valuable leads.

In addition to generating high-quality leads, the platform allows you to build targeted connections, increase brand visibility, and reinforce relationships with potential customers.

This guide will show you the best practices to use LinkedIn to promote your B2B brand.

Best Practices for LinkedIn B2B Marketing

1. Know Your Audience

One of the biggest problems B2B marketers face is matching the right content with the right audience. You can design content that appeals to your audience only when you know about your target consumers and their preferences.

Knowing your prospects will make it easier for you to design content that provides added value to them. When you produce content that your connections want to see, they are far more likely to engage with it and even share it with others. 

This shared content is then exposed to people outside your immediate network, bringing in more readers. In other words, you will be able to increase your reach and influence on LinkedIn.

With their Website Demographics tool, LinkedIn now makes it very easy to see what type of professionals are visiting your page. You can use this data to create better engagement goals.

Website Demographics on LinkedIn
LinkedIn introduces website demographics – Image source: LinkedIn

You can also filter your visitors based on eight professional dimensions. These include company, company size, industry, job title, job function, job seniority, location, and country.

It is crucial to identify your audience and be very specific about who you want to create relationships with on LinkedIn. You can use these insights to create relevant audience personas and then create high-quality content to cater to each persona.

2. Roll Out a Strategy

In order to fully leverage the power of LinkedIn for B2B marketing, investing time isn’t enough. You need a strategy.

A clear strategy is important to ensure that your marketing efforts remain focused all the time. Marketers who set clear goals, allocate appropriate resources, create quality content, and weave all of this into the organization’s marketing plan can unlock the full potential of LinkedIn.

In fact, a lack of clear strategy is one of the biggest mistakes most marketers make. They sign up on LinkedIn but have no plan in mind about how they are going to use it. 

Without a marketing strategy, marketers risk facing the following issues:

  • Lack of consistency
  • Inability to successfully segment the audience
  • Failure to understand the content requirements of their audience.

When planning your LinkedIn strategy, you should think beyond lead generation. You need to embrace other aspects of creating recognition, such as

  • Branding
  • Driving traffic
  • Customer engagement
  • Positioning
  • Finding and recruiting the right talent

A cohesive LinkedIn strategy that includes all of these functions provides new channels for content creation. It also opens up new opportunities to attract and keep customers.

3. Drive Engagement through Variety

People are experiencing Ad fatigue because they get bombarded with too much promotional content on a daily basis. So most people have developed the tendency to ignore brands and advertising messages. 

This means if you want to catch the audience’s attention, you need to create more than just compelling text. In other words, you need to create content that stands out and immediately catches people’s attention. This often involves visuals.

On LinkedIn, your brand page or company page provides you with ample opportunity to create eye-catching content. Rather than relying on text, use your page to tell an engaging story. Expand your marketing strategy to include videos, infographics, images, graphs, and informative data.

When everyone is struggling to capture people’s attention, using a combination of content types will help you stand ahead of the competition.

You can see a brilliant example of this strategy on the Ernst and Young (EY) company page. The company regularly shares information that resonates with its audience and engages them. They also make sure to include catchy headlines and attractive preview images and videos.

EY LinkedIn Post about FY19 Global Revenue
EY LinkedIn Post about FY19 Global Revenue. – Image source: LinkedIn

Besides this, you should also look for relevant industry influencers and see what content they share. You might be able to discover fresh and engaging content to share with your followers. If you’re sharing influencer-generated content, make sure to tag the respective influencers.

4. Leverage LinkedIn Ads

It costs more to advertise on LinkedIn than on any other social media platform. However, when it comes to conversion rates and lead quality, LinkedIn surpasses all other social media platforms by a hefty margin.

As you can see in the image below, the median cost per click (CPC) is the lowest for Facebook ads at $0.51. On the other hand, the media CPC for LinkedIn ads is $5.61.

Cost per click on each social media networks
Pay per click costs compared to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. – Image source: Instapage

However, a higher CPC doesn’t necessarily mean a high cost. In fact, for some people, LinkedIn ads were 500% more likely to convert compared to Facebook clicks.

Clearly, when it comes to generating B2B leads, LinkedIn is the best choice.

When you use LinkedIn for advertising, you can choose from any one of the three marketing objectives:

  • Build brand awareness
  • Drive website traffic
  • Generate leads and convert prospects

The next step is to select the ad format. You have various options, including:

  • Sponsored posts/videos on LinkedIn’s newsfeed
  • Text ads placed to the right of the newsfeed
  • Sponsored InMail

You can select a target audience based on the various filters available on LinkedIn. There’s an option to target users based on their company’s information, education, experience, and interests, and identity.

5. Leverage the Power of LinkedIn Groups

When you share a post on LinkedIn, you will typically share it with all of your connections. Besides this, you can also try sharing your posts with your LinkedIn groups.

While this may seem trivial, LinkedIn groups actually have a huge potential. You may have a limited number of connections, especially if you’re new to the platform. 

However, when it comes to groups, you can make sure that your posts are visible even for people who aren’t connected to you.

To find groups in your domain, simply type in the relevant keyword in the search bar and select the “in Groups” search option.

LinkedIn Search Options
LinkedIn Quick Search Options.

This will give you a list of groups relevant to that search term. The LinkedIn group search is not as advanced as people’s search, so you don’t have any filtering options. The largest groups (with the most members) will be on the top of the search results.

LinkedIn groups search results
LinkedIn groups search results

When joining a group:

  • Join it using your personal account and not with your company page. This will add a human touch to your posts and conversations, helping you build strong connections.
  • Do not get influenced solely by group size. Check the content and its activity level. Become part of groups that are very active and whose content aligns with yours.
  • Share content on a regular basis and engage with other people’s content to build trust.
  • Instead of being outrightly promotional, post content that will be of value and help educate the audience.

6. Start Your Own Group

You have already read about the networking opportunities that a LinkedIn group provides. One of the best ways to gain authority and power in LinkedIn groups is to create one yourself.

When you join different groups and interact with fellow group members, you may identify opportunities to form another group. When you start your own group, you become the moderator and gain recognition in the industry.

To start a new group, click on the “See all” section in the LinkedIn sidebar.

LinkedIn Sidebar
LinkedIn Sidebar

Then, click on “Create a new group”

LinkedIn - Create a Group
How to create a group on LinkedIn.

Enter the information and other details you want people to see, such as group name, description, and rules.

LinkedIn - Create a Group Form
LinkedIn – Create a Group Form

To make your group more interactive, keep the posts focused on other users and their interests. Avoid making it company-centric. As long as you can passively promote your product and create a place where your target audience can interact, creating a group is worth it.

Conclusion

LinkedIn is an ideal platform for B2B marketing, with plenty of targeting and engagement opportunities. Now you know six broad-level strategies that all B2B companies can apply. You can further personalize these tactics to develop a more precise business strategy.

Do you have experience using LinkedIn for B2B marketing? Please share your insights and tips in the comments section.

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