How to ace LinkedIn for your B2B company - our Social Media Strategist shares his perspective

Are you looking for a single platform for networking, branding, selling, and marketing? LinkedIn – the largest and most powerful professional networking platform with 830 million users– is your answer. Hiring managers consider it to be the best recruiting tool. The “LinkedIn Easy Apply” button has made life a lot easier for job seekers. Additionally, there is “LinkedIn Learning” for those who are looking to upgrade their skills. LinkedIn provides several useful tools for professionals. The question is, do you know how to leverage it to grow your business? More than 90% B2B marketers use LinkedIn as part of their content marketing strategy. It offers a variety of features that companies, and marketers can leverage. Before diving into these features, let’s get our basics right

Optimize your LinkedIn company profile

• Determine why you need the page
• Fill out company page details
• Update your cover photo and company logo
• Add admins to your page
• Share fresh content
• Create and join relevant LinkedIn groups

Optimize your LinkedIn posts

• Create and post original content for your LinkedIn Business page
• Maintain consistency in your brand color and communication
• Use a powerful Call to Action (CTA) and redirect your audience to the right pages of your website
• Do your hashtag research and use 3-4 hashtags with high search volumes on each post
• Use keywords (that are being used for your website for SEO purposes) within your captions and creative
• Make your post clickable and customize image and titles

To reach the right people at the right time is one of the top marketing challenges for a B2B company. To be successful, B2B marketers must pull in, interact with, and include all important decision-makers in the purchasing process at every level. Now that you are up to speed with the basics, lets dive into some of the cool features LinkedIn offers to market your Business.

Invite your connections and grow your followers

If you are the super admin of a LinkedIn Page, you can increase the number of followers on your page by inviting your first-degree connections to follow you. Each page receives a fixed amount of monthly invitation credits that are distributed among the super admins of the page. Here’s how you can invite them:

1. Go to your company’s LinkedIn page and click on admin tools on the top right corner
2. Click on the “Invite Connections” option from the drop down
3. Select those connections you want to send the invitations to by using a filter option (if needed) and invite them to follow your company’s page

Optimize your Search Rank for LinkedIn:

1. Use the keyword research from your website optimization to make sure people can discover your page.
2. Include a link to your website on your company page, publish links to relevant pages like your careers page and invite followers to share these posts.
3. Frequently share thought leadership articles/posts from industry professionals on LinkedIn or Medium to keep your audience engaged.
4. Include a robust ‘About Us’ section with information about your company’s vision, values and what you offer, as well as pertinent career information for prospective employees.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator

If you’re a B2B Marketer or a B2B salesperson, then LinkedIn Sales Navigator is meant for you.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator- a paid feature, is a sales enablement platform that offers several tools to discover and filter the right prospects to develop trustworthy relationships.

It also offers useful data and insights that can help in developing a deeper understanding of leads and prospects. By providing customized material, exciting discounts and offers, you can interact with your prospects on a personal level.

Benefits

• Generate Leads by filtering your target audience according to geography, industry, company, keywords and other key information.
• Save up to 5,000 prospects after searching for potential prospects.
• Send up to 30 InMails per month to potential customers.

LinkedIn Live – Instagram and Facebook first launched live streaming back in 2016. LinkedIn launched its live streaming feature only for creators & individual users in early 2019. They added the LinkedIn live feature to business pages in 2020.

A LinkedIn profile, LinkedIn Page, or Event can stream live video material through LinkedIn Live, which is available to approved members and Pages.

Review the LinkedIn Live access requirements if you want to broadcast on LinkedIn Live. Once you go through the requirements, you can access the LinkedIn live feature.

Here’s a step-by-step guide to get LinkedIn live for your business:

1. Apply for LinkedIn live.
2. Register to a third-party broadcasting platform.
3. Link your LinkedIn tool with a third-party broadcasting platform.
4. Set your event details and go live.

LinkedIn Ads

Like Facebook, LinkedIn also gives marketers a platform to run paid advertisements. They are comparatively expensive, but if used correctly, LinkedIn ads can guarantee that the right audience knows about your brand.

Create a Campaign Manager Account – Through Campaign Manager, LinkedIn offers you a comprehensive advertising platform to create ad accounts and manage campaigns while managing your budget. To get started, all you need is your current LinkedIn account.

Define your Goal/Objective – Clarity regarding your ideal advertising strategy, brand awareness direction and business objective will allow LinkedIn to tailor your campaign creation effectively.

Once you’ve decided on your goal, LinkedIn will direct you to create an audience, choose a budget and upload your original advertisement. Set up your payment information and your campaign is good to go.

Use LinkedIn Analytics

Without analytics, you won’t know what content generates the most interest. Monthly engagement statistics of your company’s and individual posts are displayed on your LinkedIn Analytics Page. You can optimize your posts based on performance data and witness an increase in engagement over time.

With LinkedIn Analytics, you can:

1. Analyze your data to identify the right types of content that will engage the right audience. Filter down the visitor’s demographic by their job function, company size, location, industry and seniority. Understand your audience demographic effectively and generate content that would appeal to the people who are watching.
2. Keep an eye on your competitors by viewing the competitors’ analytics.
3. Add tracking codes to your post links to track how much traffic your firm is receiving through LinkedIn Page updates and adjust future site links when necessary.

Conclusion

LinkedIn is the best social media platform for B2B marketing and provides a wealth of options. LinkedIn’s features can be a game changer if implemented right in your marketing plan. Make sure you have a LinkedIn strategy and constantly objectify these tasks to understand where you are and where you are headed.