If you work in B2B, LinkedIn can be a genuine gold mine. It’s the epicenter of professional social media activity. There are 830 million users on LinkedIn in over 200 countries, with over 90 million users as senior-level employees and executives, and 63 million in decision-making positions. These users are professionals from nearly every industry who are onboard LinkedIn at some point during their working hours. Fact is, LinkedIn’s characteristics and marketing tools make it easier to unearth your targets and talk to them with your content.
In this blog, we’ll take a closer look at why LinkedIn is perfect for B2B marketing and why you should use LinkedIn to streamline your marketing efforts.
Social Marketing and Lead Generation
The number one reason why B2B companies should depend on LinkedIn is that it’s a treasure-trove for B2B lead generation and social marketing. You can depend on LinkedIn to build relationships with would-be customers and generate leads by sharing pertinent content, taking part in discussions and linking with prospects.
When people usually think about lead generation, they believe it’s the responsibility of a sales team, not marketing. However, it’s actually a shared endeavor. That’s why the big news for B2B marketers is that LinkedIn is the #1 platform for B2B lead generation.
The Content Marketing Institute reports that practically all B2B marketers employ LinkedIn for lead generations. Why? Because LinkedIn is the social media platform for professionals. For B2B marketers, these are the people you want to get to, the decision-makers with which you want to foster important relationships.
Moreover, you can search for individuals by industry, location, and type of job. In other words, you can target your marketing explicitly to the kind of professionals you want to connect with.
Gateway to Decision-Makers
As noted, one of LinkedIn’s substantial benefits is its knack of linking you directly with decision-makers. Employing LinkedIn for generating leads means you can connect with those important stakeholders who make purchasing decisions.
This direct contact boosts your odds of transforming leads to paying customers. By cultivating these connections, you can create solid business relationships and streamline your sales process, leading to growth for your company.
Create Brand Awareness and Build Reputation
Branding is the method of producing a vibrant, positive opinion of a company, its products or services in the customer’s viewpoint by blending essentials such as logo, design, and mission statement. Successful branding helps organizations distinguish themselves from the competition.
LinkedIn is critical for building your brand awareness and reputation. By distributing useful content, including blog posts, industry news and other pertinent information, you can demonstrate that your organization is a thought leader in the marketplace.
Speaking of thought leadership, you could also become a thought leader for your industry. You and your team can create articles and disseminate them on LinkedIn as well as having them distributed among your network and elsewhere. And if you’ve tagged your profile as you being an employee of your organization, this article will also be visible on your LinkedIn company page.
You can also connect with additional thought leaders by following them and commenting on their articles, or by taking part in discussions in groups within a compatible community.
In fact, one study reported that LinkedIn was ranked #1 among social media channels for truthfulness. If your brand is on LinkedIn, it boosts your image and builds confidence within your audience.
Building Traffic
Here are some numbers for your consideration:
- Brands advertising on LinkedIn witness a 33 percent improvement in intent to purchase from traffic and 2X superior conversion rates from LinkedIn users.
- LinkedIn is responsible for 97 percent of B2B social media leads.
- 94 percent of B2B marketers use LinkedIn
- 1 in 3 B2B marketers say LinkedIn is generating revenue for them.
- 77 percent of content marketers reveal that LinkedIn produces the best organic results and an equal number declare LinkedIn ads produce the best results.
Your brand can grow significantly by having a well-planned marketing strategy for LinkedIn using paid ads, articles and content, plus a company page, as well as connecting with people on the site.
Content Marketing
One of the easiest and most direct ways in which businesses employ LinkedIn for marketing is by using it as a platform for delivering quality content about their brand.
That’s because LinkedIn offers you a first-rate opportunity to demonstrate your know-how and create confidence with your target audience through content marketing. By producing and delivering high quality, instructive content including posts and articles, you can connect with your target audience and demonstrate yourself as an industry thought leader.
Clear-cut Targeting with LinkedIn Ads
LinkedIn’s advertising platform allows B2B marketers to target their ads to a particular audience. This amount of precision targeting is unrivaled by other social media platforms and can be quite valuable for B2B marketers wanting to speak directly to decision-makers within a particular industry. LinkedIn ads can be targeted to assorted types, including job title, company name, industry, etc.
To reiterate, by targeting employees of a specific company, you can boost the likelihood of influencing those in charge of making purchasing decisions. This is particularly the case for B2B marketers whose goal is to gain entree to decision-makers within specific industries or organizations.
Employ Your Data
Another handy incentive for employing LinkedIn is that you can home in on prospects utilizing your own data. Simply upload a list of emails and LinkedIn will match those emails with the user profiles. Once matched, you’ll possess a mailing list of LinkedIn contacts, available for any marketing campaign.
Moreover, if you’re participating in an account-based marketing project, you can use LinkedIn’s account targeting tool, which can make it easier to market your business to other companies on LinkedIn. There are several such handy tools available with LinkedIn, including Lookalike audiences or LinkedIn Insight Tag.
Some Closing Thoughts
It’s no secret that LinkedIn is the go-to social media marketing platform for B2B marketers. The present world of digital demands considerably more accurate and trustworthy information. There are various platforms to employ but the hunt for the best has become more difficult thanks to the overcrowded market.
For this reason, B2B marketers must rely on dependable, professional networks, especially LinkedIn, as it provides a setting where the content targets decision makers, boosts brand awareness, offers a platform for content marketing, generates high quality leads and delivers targeted advertising.
Simply put, LinkedIn is smart marketing for B2B and, without beating around the bush, a no-brainer for reaching your target audience.
Need some help with your LinkedIn marketing? Give Clay Marketing a call at your earliest convenience at 740.972.8500
