LinkedIn B2B marketing delivered a positive ROI for 84% of brands studied by CMI. I believe the secret lies in how LinkedIn has evolved as a networking platform for professionals. Let’s start with the basics of B2B brand building on LinkedIn.
The first question is, why build a brand on LinkedIn versus other platforms?
The mindset users adopt when logging into LinkedIn is dramatically different from the mindset they have when using other platforms.
A lot of times, people are on platforms like TikTok or Instagram, or Facebook to be entertained. So building a brand on those platforms is different.
On the contrary, brands and people are logging into LinkedIn in order to be informed about B2B brands that influence buying decisions essentially.
They want to see who's doing what, what new tech is being used, and what new tactics are out there within their industry.
Organic Strategies for Building a LinkedIn Brand
If you build a noticeable LinkedIn personal brand in your space, and you're viewed as an expert resource in your niche, it automatically attracts more inbound leads than building a brand on many other platforms.
The basic and the right way to do it isn't just to build up visibility. It's to build up visible expertise by creating content that is shareable, savable, and valuable enough.
So, let’s review some of the basic actions you can take to build a brand on LinkedIn through strategic content creation and advertising.
1. Post consistently on LinkedIn
It might start as once a week. If you don't have that many followers or connections, you don't need to be posting daily.
When you don't have many followers, it's better to start with something that you can sustain. So, consistent posting might begin at once a week and grow to two or three times a week.
Eventually, you could post daily.
Unless in exceptional cases, there is no need to post two or three times a day. Multiple posts a day don’t necessarily double your reach; in fact, it can sometimes cannibalize it.
2. Produce quality content
Besides posting consistently, the quality of what you post really matters. The content should compel people to read, share, save, and bookmark it. Plus, it should be bingeable.
For instance, let's say they discover your content and start reading through your posts. It becomes this educational, bingeable content series, like a YouTube channel.
Building a brand on LinkedIn works differently.
On LinkedIn, people actually like valuable resources that they can pass on to their team, bookmark, and come back to it. The content helps them learn and replicate things that you may do for your clients.
And you can give away a lot of that information for free. People respect that.
And if and when they have the budget to hire you, those assets will position you as the go-to expert to whom they actually want to be able to give their money.
Pro Tip - Leverage employee profiles to push quality content at scale by strategic repurposing.
3. Networking in the comments section
The third element is engagement. If you want to promote your brand on LinkedIn, it's like this quid pro quo, this for that. So you get what you put into it. On LinkedIn, engaging with other brands and other people is a huge way to get better visibility on brand building for yourself.
So what that might look like is -
- Engage with other people’s posts.
- Reach out with direct messaging.
- Build relationships with similar complementary companies or ideal prospects.
- Engage with and reply to comments on your own posts.
Many people post consistently, and a couple of people will comment, but then they never actually engage with their own post’s comments. This indifference doesn’t help build a two-way conversation, which is important.
You can build a brand on LinkedIn either through organic efforts or paid ads. Paid ads help amplify organic efforts to speed up the brand building and ensure it's a little more targeted. We'll get into it a little later in the blog.
However, those are some of the basics of how B2B companies can build and strengthen their brand and their presence on LinkedIn.
Now, let’s explore what kind of LinkedIn content strategy works best.
Types of Content That Work Best for B2B on LinkedIn
So, there are a couple of buckets that most organizations should be using.
1. Educational Content
The first bucket is - Show, don't tell. Create content that shows people how to do exactly what you do for clients. Instead of saying, “Hey, we're a LinkedIn ads agency. Sign up, and we'll run your LinkedIn ads,” create a series of content that literally tells you how to do exactly that.
For example, we show the following by giving away all that information.
- How do we set up the insight tag?
- How do we set up your first campaign?
- How do we optimize the campaign?
The benefit of this approach is that it's almost an endless source of content because this is what you do for a living. You do it every day. You do it with tons of clients. Being able to write about the exact details should come naturally to you.
But two groups of people will see that content.
(i) The people who will have time on their hands, but they don't have a budget. They'll love that content, they'll go out, they'll try to do it for themselves. And that's okay because they don't have the budget to hire you. They're not your ideal prospects. You're not losing any possible prospects by doing that.
(ii)The other group has a budget but not that much time. Or they underestimate how much time it takes, so they might try implementing those and then quickly realize it's more complicated and time-consuming than they thought.
Your videos and your content have shown that you're the expert in the space, so they will gladly book a time to talk with you and sign up.
2. Third-Party Validation
The next type of content is third-party validation. It's one thing to say that we're one of the leading LinkedIn ads agencies in the United States. It's another thing to show clippings of a podcast, an interview, or an article where someone else is saying that.
So, third-party validation or social proof. If it's part of the user-generated comments, like testimonials, that works. If other people say that you're an expert, which is testimonials, podcast interviews, articles, or PR, it counts.
Any content in which another organization mentions or shouts out you makes great LinkedIn demand-gen content. It lets your target audience see that others recognize you as an expert, which makes them feel more assured about you.
3. Case Studies
This is similar to the first bucket, except telling people how to set it up, which is more theoretical. If you are going to run case studies, it’s like demonstrating the solution you provided an actual client who the client was, and what happened.
That kind of content works really well, especially if you target it well. You can repurpose the case study document, amplify it, and put it in front of other marketing agencies.
4. Promotional Content
The other kind of content that works really well is promotional. There's very much a place for just coming out and saying, “Hey, we're a LinkedIn ads agency that serves B2B startups. This is who we are and what we do. These are the main reasons that people choose us. These are the results that a lot of our clients enjoy by working with us.”
You can definitely get a good response from that. If you've already built trust with people, don't be afraid to have a stronger call to action. Push them to book a meeting. Dig into the pain points or results a little more.
Those are subcategories: content that focuses on the problems you solve, the pain that your solution solves, and content that's really just focused on the end result.
For example, save money by switching your LinkedIn ad provider and proving the results shifting, finding more wasteful ad spend, and really investing it into more profitable campaigns.
So those are the main types of content that we look to use and leverage.
How to Amplify Content with LinkedIn Ads
The assets mentioned above work really well for organic and paid ads as well. Most people initially build a B2B brand on LinkedIn organically. But what if you want to kind of speed that up and take it to the next level?
Using ads as a way to guarantee distribution is a great way to amplify your organic effort. The problem with only focusing on organic is diluted targeting. Yes, the great part is that it's inexpensive. You can do all this if you have time and access to labor and some of the basic assets.
But that doesn't cost as much as amplifying those with ads. The good part about amplifying with ads is that you can actually narrow down your targeting.
Yes, organically, you can send targeted connection requests. But often, say, 60- 80% of your audience isn't necessarily your ICP fit.
It's people who are active on LinkedIn, complementary businesses, competitors, and people who enjoy your content. Maybe they're elementary teachers who love reading about marketing and dream of someday entering the workforce as marketers.
That's why we get a lot of inbound leads from organic, but that's with 78,000 followers, and around 15% of those are ICP fit. Some of these come inbound, like a diluted funnel. When you switch over to the paid ad side, it’s better to test and learn from organic and then amplify it with paid ads.
So from all my organic testing, I know I have about 15-20 posts where almost every time I repost on that topic or a variation of that post, I get [A] lot of traction. People seem interested in the topic and the way I present it, and then [B] I seem to get almost consistent inbound leads. So I have proof that posting on ‘this’ subject and posting about it in ‘this’ way tend to get audiences reaching out to my DMs or targeted ICPs reaching out with connection requests.
So, I will pick those and convert them into paid ads through LinkedIn thought leader ads or create separate ads based on the same idea. However, thought leader ads work really well as they turn those posts into evergreen, highly targeted ads. Meanwhile, an organic post has about 24-48 hours where it's getting ordinary traction, maybe a couple of inbound leads, and then it's quickly buried in the feed.
If I want to get more out of that, I'll have to repost it in another month or two. But if I cross over and take that really top-world post with 100 likes and 50 comments, I can sponsor it with thought leader ads.
Then, I can target it to show this paid version to my top ICP clients from these five industries that I serve, these company sizes with budget, these senioritis, or position titles that actually make purchasing decisions. I want LinkedIn to show these 20 of my top-performing ads or posts to people who come to my website and company page and who fit my ideal ICP criteria. I want them to see 15 - 20 of these ads over the next three months. This targeting and frequency have a huge benefit of building trust and credibility with your warm prospects, especially, thereby moving the needle to make them come inbound.
The best part about LinkedIn thought leader ads, I think, is that [a] they can be highly targeted, and [b] they come with social proof. Suppose you're amplifying your already successful LinkedIn posts. In that case, they already have more likes and comments than any new ad you could create. So they're starting with an advantage.
And then [c] the third thing I like is that they don't look like ads. Many of the thought leader ads show your name, your profile picture, and the exact post. The only difference is they'll have an extra line under your headline that says 'sponsored by Impactable B2B LinkedIn ad agency.'
But the average viewer doesn't necessarily see that, and they don't make the connection that these are ads. And I know that because anytime someone comments on something that's sponsored as an ad, I get emails and notifications that you have a new comment on one of your ads.
And I can see from the comments that these people don't realize that they were served an ad.
They think it's a piece of organic content that they're engaging with, and they're shocked to find out that it was actually a sponsored ad targeted at them.
But the effect is then even more powerful because they're learning about you, they're seeing you pop up. They're seeing all the reasons that they can trust you as an expert. And they don't even realize that that's a curated experience from ads.
So, that has an extremely powerful effect and creates inbound leads. It helps amplify your brand and your following, personally and on the company side, too. A combination where you test with organic and then amplify and target with ads is a really good combination that produces a lot of inbound leads.
Conclusion
B2B branding on LinkedIn is a valuable addition to your existing marketing ecosystem. To kick off things, employ a tried-and-tested strategy for LinkedIn organic traffic. Study the analytics to stay informed, and then amplify what’s working with paid LinkedIn ads.
Are you struggling to employ resources and time for building a B2B brand on Linkedin? See how you can create a content machine to drive revenue on almost auto-pilot mode.
