Why LinkedIn is your most powerful B2B social media tool
Lauren Beeching
With more than 660 million active members, LinkedIn has grown into the number one social media platform for business. If the sheer volume of business professionals all collected in the same place isn’t enough to convince you to expend some marketing effort on LinkedIn, we’ve shared five more reasons to use LinkedIn for B2B marketing. Keep reading, we’ll have you convinced.
Five Reasons to Use LinkedIn for B2B Social Media Marketing
On LinkedIn, B2B marketers like you can find their next business partner, introduce their business to potential customers, and attract star talent to join their companies as employees. Want to get in front of more decision makers? There are over 46 million of them on LinkedIn. Need to introduce your business and impress someone in the C-Suite? Over 10 million C-level executives are here too. From entry-level professionals to influencers, to experienced decision-makers, everyone you would ever want to target is on LinkedIn.
This is why LinkedIn is a critical channel in our B2B Lead Funnel Framework. After the Planning Phase, when you determine your goals, audience, USP, and topics, is the Activate Audience Phase. During this second phase, the goal is to engage prospects where they spend the most time online. In the B2B world, the most relevant place buyers spend time is on LinkedIn.
Context, context, context
When you use LinkedIn for B2B marketing, you have the advantage of context. Unlike social platforms like Facebook and Instagram, where a user’s primary purpose is to see photos of a cup of coffee or your Sally’s Hen Do you weren’t invited on or what that random classmate you were never sure of from school is doing now, users flock to LinkedIn to enrich their lives as business professionals. If you thought Instagram was a platform to boast about your success, LinkedIn is next level.
More importantly, LinkedIn users may be looking for a time-management solution for their company or training software for their employees, and look – there you are. (Being transparent, 23% of our (Honest London) leads come from LinkedIn.)
When you advertise on LinkedIn, your ads appear in a news feed filled with industry news, expert advice, career training, and tips, and peer insights and recommendations. Your industry regulatory update blog boost feels right at home among discussions about how to act in the workplace and the next big industry conference. Your ad on LinkedIn will likely be better received than your ad on Facebook in this context.
When your LeadGen ad is shown on LinkedIn, it’s being shown to people who want to improve their industry and have business in mind. When it’s being shown on Facebook, it’s in front of a user who logged on to see Aunt Mary’s new puppy. This might be the same person, but think about it, when are you most likely to fill out a form to read a work-related, though valuable, white paper or case study? When you are in relax mode? Or when you are in work mode?
Remember those Four Ps of Marketing from Marketing 101. Just as crucial as the Product, Price, and Promotion of your campaign, is the Place where your campaign is shown and where the first-touch with your customer occurs. That’s why we love LinkedIn for B2B marketing. On LinkedIn, that first touch or continual touch occurs in a place where your customer is already in the business mindset.
Precise Targeting
Much of the data LinkedIn uses for ad targeting is sourced directly from their users. If used the right way, this precise, actionable, real-time, first-person data will get your company in front of your most valuable audiences.
LinkedIn’s targeting options are virtually limitless, and the same goes with targeting strategies.
Before each campaign, we carefully consider which targeting parameters will most effectively reach our audience. For example, using multiple IT job titles may reach people with those job titles, but may not reach someone in IT with an obscure job title or someone who performs IT functions with an unrelated job title. One way to address this is to use the function parameter instead of job titles; another is to use skills. But how do you know which is best?
With strategic testing, you can determine which audiences and targeting parameter combinations generate the most results. Simply create two campaigns with the same creative, copy, and budget. Then assign each campaign a different audience. Continually tweak the audiences to reach optimal performance.
Effectively Use Your Own Data
Do you already know who exactly you want to reach? Simply upload a list of emails, and LinkedIn will match those emails with its user profiles. If your list successfully matches 300 or more profiles, the end result will be a Matched Audience you can use in any campaign across LinkedIn.
Another unique way to leverage LinkedIn’s robust targeting tools is account targeting. Especially useful for account-based marketing, an uploaded list of company names will allow you to market to specific companies easily. LinkedIn will find matches amongst the nearly 30 million LinkedIn company pages. To increase your match rate, pair a homepage URL with each company name.
LinkedIn also recently introduced Lookalike Audiences. If you want to reach people similar to existing customers, upload your customer list, and create a lookalike audience.
Pro Tip: Matched Audiences, Account Audiences, and Lookalike Audiences can all be used as exceptions – if they meet LinkedIn’s match threshold. This is a great way to exclude competitors or existing customers from your campaigns.
Finally, by adding the LinkedIn Insight Tag to your website, you will unlock the ability to retarget your website visitors with relevant content. Once your ad reach exceeds LinkedIn’s threshold, the LinkedIn Insight Tag will also provide the ability to see specific, actionable audience data, including which job titles engaged most or which functions resulted in the highest number of clicks.
The Right Tool at the Right Time
With it getting harder and harder to reach people organically on social platforms, digital advertising is the best way to reach a lot of prospects. LinkedIn’s ad platform provides everything a marketer needs to make sure their ads reach the right people with an effective ad spend.
In addition to the myriad of targeting options LinkedIn offers, multiple advertising products are available. We’ve seen great results with all of them, except for text ads, but even text ads may be successful in the right context.
Ad Objectives
LinkedIn offers various ad objectives and is routinely introducing more. Our personal favourites are Lead Generation and Website Visits, but we’ve listed all of them below.
Brand awareness
Website visits
Engagement
Video Views
Lead Generation
Website conversions
Job applicants
Leverage your Employees
Like with anything else in business, your employees are your greatest asset–if you give them the tools they need to flourish. The same potential for your employees is present on LinkedIn.
With properly optimised profiles, your employees can become your greatest asset and spokespeople for your company. Optimised profiles, both those of your company and employees, provide a boost to search result visibility both within the LinkedIn platform and across the web.
Google doesn’t leave LinkedIn out of the page-crawling fun. Google will crawl your employees’ profiles as well as your company’s. So utilise your profiles and update them frequently to emphasise what is important. The most crucial initiative one month may not be the same the next month, so make sure profile summaries and headlines reflect what is most important now, not three months ago.
Another way to get the most out of LinkedIn is through employee amplification.
When an employee shares one of your LinkedIn posts, your organic reach will be amplified. Just like Facebook, organic, or unpaid, company page posts rarely show up in the average user’s news feed. However, as soon as someone shares your post, it will show up in a lot more feeds.
So don’t let your greatest potential asset go to waste. Encourage your employees to actively share and engage with your content or work with an agency to set up an employee amplification program that runs with little to no internal effort.