In general, social media marketing is one of the best ways to drive traffic and generate leads for your business. With multiple platforms out there, however, selecting the platform right for you is an essential part of your marketing strategy. Thankfully, with B2B marketing the answer is almost always LinkedIn. Whilst some may mistake it as just a jobs search engine, they are very much mistaken. When it comes to B2B marketing, LinkedIn is a very powerful tool.
With over 750 million members worldwide, 71% of whom use the platform to help inform business decisions, LinkedIn is the perfect tool to promote your business. What’s more, given the professional clientele it attracts, the platform has twice the buying power compared to an average website audience, so there is definitely money to be made. And it works! According to Octopost, 80% of all leads for B2B come from LinkedIn, that’s 3x higher than the leads generated on Facebook or Twitter. So how do you use this platform to your advantage?
Here are some useful tips and tricks to help you do so.
Optimise your company page
One of the first things any potential client will see is your company page. It is therefore essential that it looks professional, helping to build customer trust in the brand. Luckily, this is easily achievable.
- First, include a summary clearly and concisely detailing your company’s mission, location and how you can help potential clients. It is also important to use important keywords, to ensure your target audience finds your page.
- You should also create a cohesive “About Us” section, expanding on the summary including more information on the products/services you offer and emphasising your USP. It should help people see value in your company in accessible language and under 2000 characters.
- Make sure to include your company website and contact details.
- Focus on the design! Selecting the correct profile picture and cover letter can immediately make your page seem more professional whilst adding some personality, thereby helping it to stand out from your competitors.
- Ensure that LinkedIn sees your page as complete. You may feel like you have provided all the necessary information, but LinkedIn also provides the ability to provide extra information. By filling out these fields LinkedIn will view your page as complete and you stand a much better chance of appearing in the search results. In fact, pages that are fully complete receive up to 30% more views.
Once all this is complete, share your page. Get it out there and start getting views!
Create high-quality content
Creating optimised, high-quality informative content is an excellent way to convey your expertise and leadership to your target audience and separate you from your competitors. This can be achieved through research posts, opinion posts, factual posts, presentations, webinars, research reports etc. It’s worth experimenting with different types of posts and media forms then consulting the analytics to determine what was most successful and adapting your strategy accordingly. It is also important to note that it’s the quality of content that counts over the quantity. If anything, multiple poor-quality posts will only tarnish your reputation and reduce customer trust in your brand. So invest some time considering the kinds of content your audience will enjoy and ensure it’s clearly written and optimised with the correct keywords.
Encourage your colleagues to frequently post
Encouraging staff to post their expertise serves to humanise your brand and enables your audience to put a face behind it. People are far more likely to engage with another person than they are with a brand so, having your staff frequently post is very beneficial to the company. And it works, according to LinkedIn, content posted by members of staff had double the engagement than content shared by the company directly. What’s more, this method successfully builds trust between the company and their target audience, explicitly conveying that they are in safe hands. That, not only do your team know exactly what they’re doing, they are passionate and wish to achieve the best possible outcome for the company.
Reach out to clients directly
Another excellent way to humanise your brand and stand out from competitors is to message potential clients directly. Take a bit of time to research companies you would like to work with and message the relevant person directly, detailing how you can help them. Although this is possible to achieve with the free version, Sales Navigator, a feature of LinkedIn premium facilitates this process by providing information such as the company worked for, seniority level, company size etc. Not only does this method specifically target your desired audience, it makes it as easy as possible for them to get in touch and arrange doing business with your company and has proved very effective in generating new leads.
Run targeted ads
Whilst organic growth is beneficial, it can be difficult to achieve on any social network which unfortunately includes LinkedIn. It is therefore worthwhile allocating a portion of your marketing budget to paid advertising as it can significantly expand your reach. Paid ads appear upon user’s news feeds, reaching them when they are most engaged and most likely to see them. What’s more, LinkedIn campaign manager enables you to specifically tailor ads to your audience. You can target them through job title, company with which they are employed and even past visitors to your website. You can also create multiple different campaigns, each one targeting a certain section of your target audience.
So, there are multiple different ways to use LinkedIn to your advantage in B2B marketing. Here at Lambourn, we understand that developing a cohesive social media strategy, with the correct content can be difficult and time-consuming to deliver consistently. Luckily, we can help. Our team of experts are more than happy to work with you in developing an effective social media strategy, help with the required content creation and even run these campaigns to save your company time.
Here at Lambourn, we understand that developing and maintaining an effective digital marketing strategy can be both difficult and time-consuming. Luckily, we have experts in all aforementioned areas who will work closely with each client to develop a strategy specifically tailored to your company. With Lambourn’s help, your website will be generating sales in no time.