How To Win With LinkedIn In Your B2B Marketing Plan

Dave Orecchio

The terms “LinkedIn” and “business” have become synonymous over the years, so it’ll come as no surprise that you can profit from incorporating this major social media platform into your B2B marketing plan. Here are some tips for making the most of your company’s LinkedIn presence.

Turning Your LinkedIn Page Into a Content Machine

One major strategy in any successful B2B marketing plan is the generation of a steady stream of authoritative, trustworthy, engaging content that speaks directly to the target audience’s needs and interests. This is critical for inbound marketing because you want to appear in front of prospective clients when they’re looking for the kinds of solutions, skills, experience and wisdom that your company just happens to provide. LinkedIn has established itself as a treasure trove of such data for all kinds of industries and specialties, so guess where those business people will look first!

For this reason, your company’s LinkedIn page demands the same level of compelling content as its main website homepage. Use this valuable real estate to tell your business’s story, explain what you can do to help your visitors optimize their own enterprises, and provide the necessary links through to your main website so they can fall right into your online sales funnel. But that page is just the beginning. LinkedIn is an ideal place to post company news, blog articles, requests for information, and other updates, the sheer accumulated weight of which will keep your presence vital to viewers and make you more attractive to the major search engines.

But quality LinkedIn content includes more than regular updates to your company’s main page. As we noted in a previous article, your employees’ individual LinkedIn pages also play a critical role in establishing and underlining your online authority as an industry powerhouse, whatever that industry may be. You want colleagues, clients, prospects and competitors alike to recognize your employees’ skills, talent, and experience. Make certain that every member of your core team has a well-written, fully-fleshed, frequently-updated LinkedIn page, complete with relevant keywords that will naturally attract the attention of the right businesses in the course of their online searches. To maximize the sheer scale and mass of your company’s LinkedIn presence, link all your employee pages back to your central corporate page.

Linking LinkedIn To Your Other Social Media Channels

LinkedIn may be a fantastically powerful social channel for your B2B marketing plan, but it’s still only one channel. A truly wide-ranging marketing strategy will make use of multiple channels, including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, to ensure maximum reach. But of all of these options, LinkedIn is clearly the most well positioned to communicate directly to the business world. So what do you do? Simple — you harness the other channels to your LinkedIn presence. Whenever you post a video, tweet, or other tidbit about your business on YouTube, include a link back to your LinkedIn page. Whenever you post a blog update to your LinkedIn page, tweet about it with an appropriate backlink.

Before you adopt this practice, however, make sure all your channels are communicating a consistent, congruent message. Each piece your marketing content needs to fit seamlessly into the larger puzzle of your brand identity. A skilled online marketing agency will automatically take this need into account when creating a large-scale B2B marketing plan for your company.

Interacting With Your Target Market

LinkedIn is an astonishingly bustling online community all to itself, a sort of mini-Web dedicated to business issues, interests, questions, and answers. This high degree of interactivity is made possible by the plethora of professional groups it sustains. Members of these groups initiate and respond to lively online conversations — and if your conversation skills are up to the task, you can use this feature to great advantage.

The first step in utilizing LinkedIn Groups is to pick out which groups are most likely to be populated by business people whose concerns line up with your solutions. While you’re NOT there to sell, the mere fact that you can speak on these subjects with authority can make a suitably powerful impression. If you’re really bringing a lot to the discussion, you may be recognized by LinkedIn as one of the group’s “Top Influencers,” and this will give your voice (and presence) even more weight within this collection of prospective clients and collaborators. It’s not a far leap from that point to receiving website visits from your new LinkedIn friends.

Taking Advantage Of LinkedIn Ads

Paid advertising is still alive and well as a potent online marketing tool. Once the major search engines began offering enterprise advertising options with great success, the major social media channels were quick to board the bandwagon with their own advertising options — including LinkedIn’s targeted advertising platform, LinkedIn Ads.

Incorporating LinkedIn ads could be a very wise move for your B2B marketing campaign. In fact, Moz states that of all the different types of campaigns out there, B2B promotions have the most to gain from this particular platform. Why? Because unlike other social media ad platforms, LinkedIn is uniquely optimized, not just to expose your ad campaign to your general industry or target market, but to put you directly in front of decision makers at businesses who may need your products or services. (You can even specify that you want your ad to be viewed by c-level executives.)

Of course, this requires you to post the appropriates kinds of ads that are aimed specifically at cultivating high-level partnerships and collaborations, instead of merely promoting your “Deal of the Week” as you might if you were reaching out to a consumer audience. But there’s one field in particular whose participants can do especially well through the use of LinkedIn ads, and that’s financial services for the small business vertical. Small business owners are getting the message that they need to be on LinkedIn, and more and more of them are relying on the social media channel for self-promotion, recruiting and industry information. If you provide financial assistance to this segment of the marketplace — well, here they are!

LinkedIn could turn out to be one of the most powerful weapon in your B2B marketing arsenal, as long as you’re willing to load it with the proper ammunition. Start by downloading this white paper: Stand Out From The Crowd: 24 Inbound Marketing Tips To Set Your Company Apart.

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