How to use LinkedIn for B2B marketing? 5 successful LinkedIn B2B marketing strategies, practices

LinkedIn is known as one of the most fast-growing social media networks and a powerful platform for B2B marketing. It effectively builds a solidly professional network that every business is seeking and already becomes an inevitable part of digital marketing. The number of its users is over 600 million by 2019 and still growing. Additionally, 46% of the social media traffic to B2B company sites is from LinkedIn.

It’s no longer the time now to ask, “Why should use LinkedIn?” but instead, “How to master B2B marketing on LinkedIn?” In this article, I put together an essential guide as a go-to source to help you make the most of your B2B LinkedIn marketing.

Let’s dive in!

Is LinkedIn effective for B2B marketing?

When discussing the integration of LinkedIn into marketing strategies with clients, a common inquiry often arises: Is LinkedIn genuinely effective for B2B brands? The unequivocal answer is YES – it holds significant value!

In fact, according to Statista, as of January 2023, LinkedIn stands as the second most important social media platform among B2B marketers, trailing only behind Facebook. Additional statistics further emphasize the effectiveness of LinkedIn in B2B marketing.

According to HubSpot, LinkedIn is among the top social channels for marketing. Also, 94% of B2B marketers employ LinkedIn for content distribution.

For those still having doubts about the platform’s efficiency, the best approach is to implement the strategies I’m about to share. This firsthand experience will reveal whether LinkedIn works for your business or not.

What Is LinkedIn B2B Marketing?

LinkedIn B2B marketing involves the promotion of products or services to other businesses, as opposed to targeting individual consumers. In contrast to consumer-focused companies with broad audiences, B2B companies, including those in software, manufacturing, or advertising, typically have a more specialized and niche audience.

The primary goal of B2B marketing on LinkedIn is to capture the attention of key business decision-makers within their respective industries. LinkedIn serves as an ideal platform for B2B marketing due to its ability to connect businesses with professional audiences, making it a popular and effective choice for businesses aiming to reach and engage with relevant professionals.

Benefits of LinkedIn For B2B Marketing

LinkedIn has transformed B2B marketing by offering a suite of tools and features that empower businesses to target their ideal audience, enhance brand visibility, and generate leads.

Utilizing LinkedIn for B2B marketing provides several advantages:

• Access to market Insights: LinkedIn offers valuable market insights and data, including industry trends, competitor analysis, and customer behavior.

• Competitive insights: LinkedIn provides valuable competitive insights, allowing you to monitor competitor activities, track industry trends, and identify fresh business prospects.

• Employee advocacy: Encouraging employees to become brand advocates on LinkedIn, sharing content and promoting the brand.

• Partnership prospects: LinkedIn offers possibilities for forming partnerships and collaborations with other businesses in your field.

• Industry-specific communities: LinkedIn features numerous groups tailored to specific industries, offering valuable information and networking chances.

• Access to industry updates: LinkedIn grants access to industry news and developments, keeping you abreast of the latest trends in your sector.

• Increased website traffic: Sharing website content on LinkedIn can drive more traffic to your site and improve search engine rankings.

• Personalized messaging: LinkedIn enables you to customize your marketing messages for specific target audiences, leading to increased engagement and conversion rates.

• Reputation management: LinkedIn serves as a valuable tool for reputation management, allowing businesses to monitor and respond to customer feedback and reviews.

• Cross-promotion: LinkedIn facilitates cross-promotion across various social media channels, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

• Word-of-mouth marketing: LinkedIn serves as a potent tool for referral marketing, letting you leverage your existing network to generate new business opportunities.

• Cost-effective advertising: LinkedIn advertising offers a cost-effective means to reach the target audience, with options for both pay-per-click and sponsored content.

Guide to master B2B marketing on LinkedIn

1. Beef up your business LinkedIn profile

It is crucial to create a professional profile for your business on LinkedIn. Basically, in your profile, you can list your work experiences and education. But now, LinkedIn allows you to enhance your profile by adding more interactive capabilities.

• Status updates: Posting status updates is one of the best ways to create and retain the connection between you and your networks. It is essential to update useful content which can contain images or relevant links on your page or third-party pages.

• Articles: You can easily publish an article to your profile, which makes you more similar to a thought leader.

• Videos and presentations: If you already have content like videos on Youtube or slides of a presentation on Slideshare, attach them to your profile to make it more sufficient.

• Recommendations: LinkedIn allows you to request recommendations from your connections, which accentuates your expertise and draws attention to your profile.

• Projects: You might have successful projects that should be exposed to your connections to show what your business does and how excellent your team accomplishes it. LinkedIn makes it easy for you to do that.

• Expertise: a great way to help others understand your business from the first-visit on your profile is by listing the expertise of your company.

• Patents, Certifications, and awards: As a certification for your works and ability, add them to your profile to enhance its incredibility.

2. Create an informative company page

A LinkedIn page can be an ideal place to tell your company’s story. It is essential to show explicit information about your products and services, which might be the prior concern of people when visiting your page. Build a page that is helpful for both you and your connections.

Such essential contents on your company page can be a banner image, products & services, status updates, and career opportunities. You can turn LinkedIn from a career-focused networking platform into a place where you create your brand’s exposure.

You have 2000 characters to describe what your company does and why should people follow you and further use your products. So get your content team together and create an informative appealing description. It is excellent if you can get your employee profile and your company page sharp.

3. Optimize your page performance

Your brand needs a complete profile to underscore its presence. A compelling profile will help your customers or connections get more insight into who you are and what you do. So it’s critical to optimize your profile or page, just like Kleo does.

There are typical ways to do for your profile optimization. Include photos, key employee details, logos/headers, and other relevant content that makes your business professional-looking and human to the audience.

You should consider using search engine optimization (SEO) to make the content utterly optimized, as Google will preview up to 156 characters of your text in its search result. So it’s better to put relevant keywords into the page’s description and the entire page text. It helps the search engine quickly understand what you’re about and improves your page ranking.

4. Identify your audience

Understanding the audience is one of the most critical factors to the success of any marketing strategy, including LinkedIn marketing. By providing Website Demographics, LinkedIn makes it easier for you to get into the audience’s insights and capture their traits.

This tool tells you which types of your page visitors and what content they are engaging the most. So you can use this data to target your content to the appropriate audience, measure the impact, and optimize the return of investment (ROI).

Moreover, you can try different Linkedin automation tools in order to target audiences based on several demographics and generate more leads for your business. If you are working as a part of a growth or sales team, or your own business, it is good to know that you can log in to Linkedin Sales navigator, and use tools like Wiza to generate leads from LinkedIn.

5. Create valuable content

The great content can lead your marketing to succeed. Once you launch your business page on LinkedIn, ensure the content you post on it is valuable. Viewers only hit the follow button and keep you in their connection once they find values on your page. Some people might broaden knowledge from your content; others find solutions to their problems.

One of the great ways to do this is by sharing insider knowledge. It can be useful tips or practices which are helpful for the readers or content that speaks your brand image.

Your content shouldn’t be too sale-oriented or all about promoting your products. It is better to grab the audience’s interest and build their trust first, then target them to your products and services.

6. Create videos

Today, LinkedIn makes video sharing available for all companies and publishers. In just one year from the launch of LinkedIn native videos, video posts generated more than 300 million impressions on the platform. The study indicates that a video post gains 4 - 5x engagement than a text post. If you intend not to conform to this trend, take time to think about it.

You can create useful videos for your audience relatively quickly using a screen recorder. It is better to use a native video on LinkedIn. Native video is uploaded directly on the LinkedIn app or the browser version rather than embedding links from Youtube or another site.

7. Take advantage of LinkedIn community features

LinkedIn offers a lot of community features that enables you to conveniently communicate with other users, clients, or partners to expand your connections. There are two types of standard community features: groups and influencers.

• Groups: By joining groups that focus on your interest or expertise, you can stay informed about what’s happening in your field and keep in touch with people or firms in your network. You can also create a group for your company. A great way to expand your influence and connect with others is being active in discussions in various groups.

• Influencers: You can connect with many thought leaders through LinkedIn influencers. They often discuss the newsy and trendy topics. You can comment under their posts and get noticed by being deep into the discussion.

8. Set up a posting schedule

A posting schedule can decide whether your campaign succeeds or not.

It is said that 3 - 4 status updates per week and 1 - 2 long-form posts of content per month keeps an ideal balance for your network connections.

The time of schedule is also vital, and it depends on the timezone of your audiences. It doesn’t have an exact ideal time frame, but there is a range for each social media platform. For LinkedIn, you can post on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday at 5 - 6 pm EST or Central time. To make the most of LinkedIn, posting updates daily to retain your followers’ concerns.

9. Try LinkedIn Ads

LinkedIn Ads offers various types of campaigns that drive brand awareness and lead generation effectively. It provides a diverse range of opportunities for marketers. The most used ad formats are Sponsored Content, Sponsored InMail, and Text Ads. Importantly, the newest and expected-to-be, the most powerful one is LinkedIn Video Ads.

Sponsored Content is LinkedIn native advertising. It is a regular post that the publisher boosts with an ad budget.

Sponsored InMail enables you to send customized personal messages to the audience by using the private messaging system. It helps your contents reach the audience directly.

Text Ads appear at the top or right side of the users’ feeds. It is a short text in a small optional image usually used to drive lead and promote specific offers.

LinkedIn Videos Ads automatically play on the feed of users. It is an effective way to increase engagements and views for your content.

10. Testing

It can be difficult at first to define which tactics and strategies work for your business. So do A/B testing to sort out ideal solutions and apply for your business. It ensures your campaigns are rolling out properly, target your key prospects, and save time as well as budget on ineffective methods.

Five successful LinkedIn B2B marketing strategies

1. Service Brands

Service Brands International is a multi-concept franchise system with worldwide headquarters, based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Such leading brands in this system are Molly Maid, Mr Handyman, and ProTect Painters. The mission of the company is to make dreams of franchises and their customers come true.

Increase brand awareness with LinkedIn company pages

Nicole Hudson - Franchise Marketing Manager of Service Brands, saw the chance for franchisees to learn about business, notably via LinkedIn and raise franchises’ brand awareness in the target audience. She decided to carry out a three-part strategy to attract the target audience and encourage followers to learn more about franchises.

She realized that helpful content is the key to drive users’ attention to multiple LinkedIn company pages for Service Brands and its franchisees. So the first step was to keep their pages updated by posting PR mentions. Besides, they created blogs for each new franchise owner showcase posted on LinkedIn as updates.

Enhance web search engine ranking

Nicole Hudson also saw the positive impact of status updates on company pages on the page’s ranking result. They added the most relevant keywords to the status updates on LinkedIn.

Besides, the company added “Contact Us” boxes on the Products & Services tab on each company page to make it easier for franchises owners to connect with Service Brands. They also added video testimonials from franchises owners and displayed free downloadable franchises kits.

2. Stones Corner Hotel

Stones Corner Hotel is a typical example of embracing images and contents to create a successful LinkedIn marketing.

Julian D’Souza, venue manager at Stones Corner Hotel, posted a photo of the newest edition to the burger menu and asked his connections to give a name for the burger. The image quickly caught the followers’ attention, and the engagement on it is impressive.

Within 23 days, a simple post generated over 2500 likes and 8000 comments. It is not an immediate result. D’Souza run his personal account effectively with incongruous updates to promote Stones Corner Hotel. It was a vast and long-term effort to raise awareness, increase reach, and improve brand loyalty.

(Image source: Ourcailtimes )

3. American Express

Millions of users are sharing content on LinkedIn - the dominant platform for B2B marketers. Therefore, targeting the audience with a message and resonate them with what you post is easier said than done.

To tackle this challenge, American Express partnered with the Global Business Association to create a research report that piqued the curiosity of business travellers. The company then used LinkedIn to strengthen its campaign by posting blog posts and infographics. They reappropriated all of the contents published on the platform from the original report.

American Express took efforts to produce high-quality content, then got a spectacular result. Their LinkedIn posts gained several engagements and attracted many business travellers.

4. PwC

PwC - an international enterprise brand, focuses on consistency and culture and keeps the audience engaged with robust and diverse approaches. It now has over 2 million users on LinkedIn, with a high percent of engagements through each post.

PwC’s strategy is to keep the content be updated continuously on its page in a continual flow with a heavy focus on the company culture. They keep publishing educational and up-to-date content on their page. PwC points out that they’re a trustable and value-created partner. The point is represented through the content on their feed which correlates well with the narrative of being in the 2019 Global annual review, and description “PwC helps organizations and individuals to create the value they’re looking for.” They also stay visible to their followers and clients by updating multiple times per day, which makes its documents and posts always available to the audience.

5. Adobe

Adobe uses the business showcase segment to highlight different lines of its business. Notably, the company creates multiple Showcase Pages or Affiliated Pages on LinkedIn. Each product has a separate page containing content only related to it. This strategy enables the B2B business to promote its product to a targeting market and audience.

No need to conquer a bundle of information about multiple products on one mother page of Adobe, the audience follows the page of the product they concern. The company also creates specialized content and delivers to targeted customers thoughtfully.

A final thought

Whether you are a big or small B2B business, it’s time to put your marketing effort into LinkedIn. Incredibly, no need for a big budget; you still can succeed in Linkedin marketing. Many successful examples above prove that’s true, and will you be the next? Take time to create quality content, be engaged in conversation in groups, LinkedIn community, and your follower’s discussion.

EXPLORE MAGEPLAZA B2B EXTENSIONS