Optimise Your B2B Marketing Strategy With LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a vital demand-generation marketing tool if you want to help your potential buyer narrow down their options while they are still in the buying journey. Many of your potential customers are vetting and ruling out options before ever contacting sales. 70% of the buyer’s journey is complete before a salesperson is even contacted. You don’t want to be out of the running because your company wasn’t part of the conversation. If you are going to end up on your potential customer’s shortlist, it’s more important than ever to provide content that helps them evaluate their options.
LinkedIn is not only the perfect place but is necessary for B2B digital marketing. Here is why?
- Context: When you use LinkedIn for B2B marketing, you have the advantage of context. Unlike Facebook and Instagram, where a user’s primary purpose is to see cute baby photos of their newest nephew or check up on random classmate from high school, users flock to LinkedIn to enrich their lives as business professionals. LinkedIn users may be looking for a time-management solution for their company or training software for their employees, and look – there you are.
When you advertise on LinkedIn, your ads appear in a news feed filled with industry news, expert advice, career training, 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 displayed on LinkedIn, it’s shown to people who want to improve their industry. But on Facebook, it’s in front of someone who wants to see cute dog pictures. It might be the same person, but think about it, when are you most likely to fill out a form or read a work-related, though valuable, white paper or case study? When you are relaxing? Or when you are in work mode?
Remember those Four Ps of Marketing. Just as important as the Product, Price, and Promotion of your campaign is 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 touch occurs when your customer is already in the business mindset.
2. Precise Targeting: Much of the data LinkedIn uses for ad targeting is sourced directly from its users. If used correctly, 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; the same goes for 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. However, they 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.
3. Effective Use of Data: Do you know who you want to reach? Simply upload a list of emails, and LinkedIn will match those emails with its user profiles. If your list matches 300 or more profiles, the 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. Pair a homepage URL with each company name to increase your match rate.
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. It is a great way to exclude competitors or existing customers from your campaigns.
Finally, adding the LinkedIn Insight Tag to your website 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.
4. 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 many prospects. LinkedIn’s ad platform provides everything a marketer needs to ensure their ads reach the right people with an effective ad spend.
The Bottom Line
Just remember, it’s all about getting and staying active on LinkedIn. Make it part of your daily routine, and you’ll definitely benefit from the marketing insights and social selling opportunities. Seek the help of a professional content writing agency like Dimensions Content to write compelling content for your LinkedIn page and profile and boost your sales and revenues to a new limit.
