At the beginning of 2022, the number of LinkedIn users in the United Kingdom is estimated to be well over 33 million, with their ages ranging widely from 25 to even 65+ years old. People are joining LinkedIn at a rate of more than 3 new members every second.
The platform is home to professionals belonging to almost every industry out there that are active during and outside of working hours.
Even with this wide-ranging and diverse base of users, it’s easy for you to find your target audience and reach out with your product or service. This is all thanks to the advertising tools and features that LinkedIn provides.
This article includes everything LinkedIn presents to its users to help you get started with confidence or to push you up the ladder of successful LinkedIn B2B marketing. Stay with us.
Benefits of B2B marketing on LinkedIn
Similar to any other social platform, LinkedIn provides you with a chance to build brand awareness, promote your content, form important connections, and successfully reach out to your audience.
A particular audience
Unlike Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, LinkedIn is mainly professional. Most users are serious professionals in their industries. Yes, over the last few years, LinkedIn has become more of a Facebook for professionals. However, that doesn’t change the fact that it’s home to influential people and businesses that can help you advance forward.
On LinkedIn, you may find yourself forming connections with professionals in decision-making roles. Statistics show that 61 million LinkedIn users are at a senior level of influence, and another 40 million are decision-makers. These are exactly the people you need to reach if you’re targeting companies on LinkedIn.
Every relationship you build on LinkedIn has to be strategic in one way or another. For businesses, connections on LinkedIn are like partnerships.
B2B on LinkedIn
B2B marketing on LinkedIn is one of the best moves you can make as a marketer. It’s the easiest and simplest way to reach your audience fast and guarantee quality leads.
We’ll be showing you how to do so in just a moment.
LinkedIn B2B marketing – Personal profile vs company pages
When it comes to LinkedIn B2B marketing, both company pages and personal profiles are viable places to use. And obviously, there happens to be a few key differences between the two when it comes to how they can be used.
For starters, LinkedIn personal profiles will have connections while LinkedIn pages have followers. The latter can host ads while the former cannot. Both are free to use, of course!
But the question, in this case, is: when should you use your personal profile, and when should you use your company page?
Here’s your answer
Well, for starters, if you happen to be the public face of your brand, then it’s logical to use your personal page for B2B marketing. Say, for example, you run a consulting firm called Emma Frost Consulting. And you happen to be Emma herself.
In this case, it would be very logical for your to use your personal profile for B2B marketing endeavours. This is especially effective since promoting yourself, and your achievements to your network can help grow your business in many ways.
More often than not, small businesses will make the transition from promoting their brand through their personal profiles to a company page. This usually comes as a result of adding new employees, new owners (shareholders) and because they want to grow quickly through LinkedIn paid advertising services.
Such a transition can be done smoothly, of course. You keep emphasising growing your personal network and then – once your brand becomes more independent – shift focus to the company page. Or of course, you can do both at the same time.
In this article, our focus is mainly going to be on company pages as one of our core services at Rockstar Marketing is paid advertising management through LinkedIn.
Ways to get your company up and running on LinkedIn
It’s important for you to do all the basics required to increase the chances of success for your recently started to already existing business on LinkedIn. These steps include:
Creating your company page
This is an obvious first step for those who do not have one. Filling out your profile and including a description, banner, and profile picture is very important.
To build consistent imagery, use your company’s logo that matches your website and the rest of your social platforms.
Defining your goals and audience
Similar to any other channel you might use, LinkedIn requires you to set a specific strategy. You should specify your objective, whether it was increasing brand awareness, generating more leads, using the site as a PR tool, etc.
The next step would be defining your company’s persona along with your audience. This will help you determine the exact content to share and what features to use on your ads.
Optimising your page
Quite similar to optimising your website for search, you’ll want to make your LinkedIn page search-friendly. This means including keywords your audience would usually look up.
You should include these keywords in your profile description. You should also add your company’s specialities.
Page promotion can also help you reach your clients very easily. You can achieve this by sharing it on your social media channels and sending it out to newly subscribed clients.
Best LinkedIn B2B marketing strategies and practices
An organised and fully optimised business page will not do it for your business. You have to move forward with your marketing. A plan must be put in motion.
Here are some strategies to consider in order to maximise your efforts and leverage the complete power of LinkedIn:
Regular posting
Consistency is definitely your key to successful regular posting.
Similar to any other social networking site, remaining relevant and top of mind depends on staying active. You can be posting weekly or daily. It doesn’t matter as long as you’re consistent and frequent.
When posting, always question if the content you’re putting out is providing value.
Your content should always be authentic, no matter the angle you’re taking. This will build up trust between you and your followers. You can also show your authority and provide thought leadership by posting about subjects that will interest your targeted audience.
If you’re struggling to come up with new and innovative ideas for your posts, curating industry content is one way to present your audience with valuable content while still using something that is already circling around the internet.
LinkedIn also has a feature you can use for generating ideas. It is the Content Suggestions tab that will help you figure out what your audience may be interested in.
Strategic posting
Timing is very important in LinkedIn posting. Some research shows that the best time to post on LinkedIn is around 8 am till 3pm from Tuesday to Friday, which is usually working hours and days.
After all, LinkedIn is a professional networking site, so it’s normal for success to lie during working hours. LinkedIn users would probably not be scrolling there on weekends or off-hours.
LinkedIn B2B marketing: Media experimenting
To truly figure out what kind of posts will suit your audience’s liking, you really should experiment with various formats and styles, such as photos, clips, long posts, short posts, emojis, and much more.
We will touch upon one of the most effective types of content on our next point, and it is:
Video content
Video content tends to get high success rates on LinkedIn. It can get 5 times more engagement than any other type of content. Live videos especially score the most significant numbers.
It’s safe to say that video content has established its value for marketing on the Internet over the past few years. But for it to work for you, you have to do it the right way.
Try to keep your video clips on the shorter end. It is shown that B2B buyers spend about 10 minutes or less watching video content in cases of considering a purchase.
Relationships building and engagement driving
Always keep in mind that LinkedIn is all about forming relationships.
It’s a bit of a hard task, but it’s not impossible. Pivoting back and forth is the key to succeeding in building both your brand on LinkedIn as well as your personal image, as they are closely tied.
You should always be aware that you’re building your own place of business with your presence on the platform, especially since you’re always viewed as an employee. Building an image for yourself as a thought leader gives you a sort of authority in the business. This automatically reflects on your company too. Positively, of course!
LinkedIn paid advertising
While getting seen on LinkedIn for free is quite feasible, some businesses might still struggle to do so. And it’s only natural and logical for them to resort to paid advertising. Indeed, the points we have mentioned above do have a limit to how effective they can be.
Luckily for them, LinkedIn is well known for its amazing and very effective advertising capabilities.
When setting up an Ad on the site, you get to choose from the many different audience attribute categories. It includes interests, workplace, location, and job title. This allows you to accurately reach the target audience that works best for your needs and goals.
Users on LinkedIn, including businesses, are continuously looking for solutions to certain needs or problems that they might have. And you can help solve some of these problems – the ones solved by your business model – for them through ads.
Ad types
Not only that, but you also have 4 different ad types to select from:
- Text Ads that are usually PPC ads that show up on the right side of the home feed. They usually contain a short description and sometimes a small image. The image could be a brand’s logo, for example
- Dynamic Ads that also appear on the right side of the home feed. They’re usually personalised to insert the scroller’s provided name and picture into the ad itself
- Sponsored Content usually takes the form of a native ad. It appears within the feed and can be told apart by its “promoted” label. These ads can sometimes include video, images, or even carousels. Available on both mobile and desktop
- Sponsored Messages that are sent directly to your targeted client’s LinkedIn inbox. It can be sent in both conversation or message format
Additionally, LinkedIn ads can help you significantly increase the visibility of your brand online. This will consequently lead to a boost in the number of quality leads that you can generate.
B2B companies with great success on LinkedIn
The brands that we’ll be mentioning below really know what they’re doing on LinkedIn, resulting in a super-engaged audience.
Adobe
We all know that Adobe is a very big company with numerous business segments, and each plays quite a different and active role on LinkedIn. Every showcase page posts content directed to its specific audience. You have an affiliate page that focuses on the Experience Cloud, one that focuses on the Creative Cloud, and more.
Dropbox
Dropbox has curated a special mix of media into its postings. Their constant uploads of personalised videos and images make their page pleasing to the eyes. It’s almost like an aesthetically pleasing Instagram feed.
TEKsystems
TEKsystems, a provider of IT staffing solutions and services, is another example of brilliant LinkedIn B2B marketing in practice.
They take advantage of LinkedIn’s publishing platform, where they offer informative pieces that are related to the services offered by them in one way or another. This establishes them as a household name in the IT industry.
Prophix Software
Prophix Software teamed up with a marketing agency to create a B2B campaign that combines customer stories with guidance on career growth. In this campaign, they created a robust and well-written landing page that featured influencer videos about topics covered by them.
They also made good use of LinkedIn’s organic carousel format to add a visual angle to the campaign’s storytelling. Their campaign hit home with a lot of LinkedIn members, significantly increasing their engagement benchmarks as a result.
Need help with LinkedIn B2B marketing?
If you need a hand with your LinkedIn Ads, book a discovery call with us. One of our B2B marketing experts will get in touch shortly.
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