LinkedIn is where more than a billion professionals come to learn about industry news, develop their knowledge, and in many cases, find new products and services for their company. With all this activity, it’s no wonder why LinkedIn is seen as a major lead generation asset for countless B2B businesses.
If you’re looking to tap into LinkedIn B2B marketing and build brand equity in your market, there are certain proven techniques you can incorporate into your marketing strategy to maximize engagement, leads, and ultimately, sales.
Here are 5 LinkedIn B2B marketing best practices to incorporate into your strategy.
1. Align Your Profiles for Lead Generation
Whenever LinkedIn users come across a piece of content they find engaging, there’s a fair likelihood they’ll click through to check out the poster’s personal profile. Once users in your target market have put a face to the name, you can take things a step further by optimizing your profile as a lead gen machine.
Instead of simply listing your position, experience, and accolades, you can utilize various fields in your LinkedIn profile to grab users’ attention and show them how you can solve their problems.
Creating a header image that speaks directly to your audience, showcases your value proposition, and promises a solution to their pain point will compel them to find out more about your product or service far more effectively than the company logo or another generic asset.
Write your headline to include a compelling call to action that points to whatever lead magnet you’re trying to push at the moment.
Scrolling further down, you can use your summary to further explore the value of your product or service, and list some customer success stories that will help your target market envision how your business can help them.
2. Join LinkedIn Groups
LinkedIn groups offer huge potential for LinkedIn B2B marketing, allowing you to reach a much larger audience than just your current connections and focus your marketing efforts on people who have a clear interest in businesses like yours.
To get started with groups, we recommend checking out some current connections who are as close as possible to your ideal buyer persona, reviewing the kind of discussions they’re involved in, then highlighting some recurrent keywords from their content you can use to search for groups.
As you search through groups, check out their membership and look for profiles that align with your core target segments, in terms of variables like industry, company size, level of seniority, etc.
Once you’ve found a few groups with a high concentration of users who align with your target audience, you can join them and work on becoming an active part of the community by posting useful content and adding new takes to discussions.
3. Strategize and Optimize Your Posting Times
Like any social media platform, things move fast on LinkedIn. No matter how insightful or engaging a post is, it will only be on the top of people’s feeds for a few days maximum before being overwritten by the hum of activity from other accounts.
To maximize your chances of being seen by the right people, it’s important to research the best times to post to boost engagement.
Looking at the entire spread of LinkedIn’s audience, the best times to post tend to be during working hours - weekdays between 9 and 5 for your target audience’s timezone. Within this, however, there are probably even more effective posting times when your target market in particular is likely to stop scrolling and engage.
Using a robust analytics tool, like the Highperformr social media analytics suite, you can methodically analyze the days and times when people in your audience are more likely to engage in posts, then update your schedule to ensure you’re targeting these times with more activity.
By keeping a close eye on engagement data and working to optimize your posting times, you’ll maximize your content’s chances of being seen and resonating with your target market, instead of being passed by in favor of other accounts.
4. Retarget Site Visitors
If you’re launching a LinkedIn B2B marketing drive for the first time, it can be hard to sift through the various interactions you build up on the platform and determine which contacts have the highest potential value.
One of the easiest ways to make sure you’re investing in the most “switched-on” members of your LinkedIn audience is incorporating site analytics.
People who have clicked through to your company website are sending a clear message that they’re interested enough in your product or service to look past your LinkedIn content and find out more.
By using UTM tracking parameters and LinkedIn’s advertising targeting features, you can ensure more of your ad budget is focused on people showing increased interest in your brand, and more likely to convert.
This will maximize the chances of your LinkedIn campaign getting off to a strong start, and help you build towards an optimal ROI.
5. Encourage Employee Advocacy
When approaching the topic of LinkedIn B2B marketing, some marketers tend to overlook one of the most effective assets they have in their corner: their employees.
Stimulating employee advocacy on LinkedIn will help you extend the reach of your marketing content, humanize your brand in the eyes of stakeholders in your target market, and boost the overall efficiency of your social media sales pipeline.
Some effective best practices to bear in mind when stimulating employee advocacy include:
- Empower employees to share content using pre-written posts or AI content creation and repurposing tools that will help them share content with greater efficiency.
- Create policies on interacting with people from outside the organization to keep employees aligned with your branding and quality standards.
- Encourage employees to share their own original insights based on their positions and life experience.
- Showcase “behind-the-scenes” content to broadcast your company culture and invite more participation from employees.
- Reward and recognize employees who take part in your advocacy program, and offer ongoing resources to make employee advocacy easier for those taking part.
While kick-starting an employee advocacy program can be challenging, putting in the resources to make advocacy both easy and attractive to employees will help you get the ball rolling and relay your content to a much wider audience.
Supercharging Your LinkedIn B2B Marketing
When it’s optimized correctly, your LinkedIn profile can be turned from an idle touchpoint into an indispensable lead generation machine! We hope these tips have helped you gain some direction as you work on developing your LinkedIn presence, expanding your network, and driving more leads into your pipeline.
For more support on your LinkedIn B2B marketing analytics, content creation and more, sign up to Highperformr for free today!
