Why LinkedIn is a Dominant B2B Marketing Strategic Approach

LinkedIn has now emerged from a mere job search site to an industry professional connection social media site where industry experts share the relevant and important content daily, create a network with each other, and establish their personal brand and online presence. It has also gained an excessive amount of interest within businesses to establish their thought leadership and authority in their respective industries and thereby recruiting the best talents to their organization.

As mentioned above LinkedIn is all about establishing networks and connections. It’s not just about whom you know but moreover whom your connections know.

That’s the real potential of LinkedIn for businesses which opens opportunities to tap into existing connections and leverage your brand prominence through word-of-mouth. It is considered as one of the top-rated and effective social networking platforms for lead generation.

LinkedIn is evolving as the best social media platform with its new features and updates that you shouldn't ignore, particularly if you're a B2B marketer. Marketers who are confused and wondering whether to invest time and resources in a LinkedIn marketing strategy or not, this below picture will clear all your wrong perceptions and the social media network’s worth.

Look at this LinkedIn statistics report:

That’s not an end to it furthermore according to LinkedIn demographics statistics the site owns 500M users, 61M senior-level influencers, and 40M top decision-makers engaged with the website. The platform not only boasts huge amounts of users, but the users are influential, high-level executives that most businesses are targeting in their B2B marketing campaigns. LinkedIn, therefore, is a prominent social platform to reach these top decision-makers to promote a product or service.

Keeping in mind the above statistics it’s clear that how robust is the platform for b2b marketers to generate quality leads, to drive businesses to a new horizon, to quickly gain better results on your marketing efforts, to achieve business objectives and goals faster than ever.

LinkedIn users are more educated and high-income earners. It not only opens door for professional connection but also gives opportunity for industry leaders and experts to share their personal experiences in particular industry, educating their connections about new technologies and updates happening in the industry they belong to and also an opportunity to inspire and motivate new talents to acquire new and updated knowledge in their interested domain and accordingly pursue their dream jobs and leverage their careers.

Types of Content Sharing Best Practices on LinkedIn

1. Share industry trending, how-to’s, and thought-leadership content
2. Make use of the analytics
3. Post images and videos
4. Use data to find your best time to post
5. Schedule 1 post per weekday
6. Study other Company Pages
7. Optimize your Company Page for search
8. Help your colleagues help you
9. Share industry trending, how-to’s, and thought-leadership content

I am sure you have this doubt what to post on LinkedIn?

It’s nice to customize and personalize your message for your targeted audience like any other social media platforms because what goes well on other networks will not work well on LinkedIn. There is little special advice on what types of content do well particularly on LinkedIn.

• Jobs and career information (Job Listings, Career Info, Company Culture, Employee Achievements, and working experiences, etc)
• Company news (You can also share business news and milestones on your LinkedIn business page in addition to posting about work possibilities and career Info).
• Professional content (Another sort of content that you can share on LinkedIn is content that is important to the targeted professional audience. This involves webinars on training, whitepaper, and surveys of the sector.)

2. Make use of the analytics

Use your Company Page's analytics to define top posts, such as those with the greatest impressions, clicks, or engagement rates, and determine what resonates with your members. A couple of weeks later, you can generate comparable posts or repost those top posts.

3. Post images and videos

One of the best practices to run a LinkedIn Company Page, according to LinkedIn, is to use rich media such as pictures and videos. They discovered that pictures lead to a comment rate of 98 percent, while links to YouTube videos may lead to a share rate of 75 percent.

4. Use data to find your best time to post

LinkedIn discovered that "Updates published in the morning generally receive the greatest engagement, with a slight increase occurring again after business hours," but the best advice is to "experiment to see what time best works for your business."This can be learned through LinkedIn Analytics.

5. Schedule 1 post per weekday

Now that you know what to share and when to share but you don't know how often to share.

LinkedIn discovered that twenty posts a month can help you achieve 60% of your distinctive audience.

Of course, more posts will lead to a greater percentage of reach, but a point of decreasing returns will come. It will always be difficult to reach a certain proportion of your audience because they never log in, so you're really searching to reach those who log in and scroll their top updates.

Start with 20 quality posts per month and scale up if you see more advantages coming from a more comprehensive schedule. As it turns out, if you post four weeks once a day and skip the weekends, you're going to reach the spot with 20 posts.

6. Study other Company Pages

LinkedIn has a tracking function for Companies. It demonstrates you businesses that are equivalent to yours and a few important metrics like maximum followers, development of followers, and social engagement. Using this data, you can measure your success with theirs on the LinkedIn Company Page. For instance, here is some of the analysis you might be able to do:

• Is my Company Page increasing as quickly as other Company Pages that have about the same amount of followers?
• How do I compare my amount of updates and social engagement to similar Company Pages?
• What kinds of content do they do well? (To visit their company page, you can simply press on their name.)

In the end, studying similar company pages, understanding what performs well for them, and experimenting with those insights on your own company page will be great. A great starting point is to look for company pages that have a similar size to your followers but a greater development of followers or average engagement (i.e. dividing social engagement by the number of updates).

7. Optimize your Company Page for search

One thing is common with every effective Company Page: an audience. These two tips will assist you to create your LinkedIn crowd.

1. First, improve your company page for a search. Whether your audience is looking on or off LinkedIn, a well-optimized business page can assist you to achieve visibility among those looking for what your business is offering.
2. Your Company Page is meant to be SEO friendly – here are three ways to optimize for search:

• Insert keywords: Make sure you enter keywords into the company profile information, clearly defining who you are and what you do and offer.
• Link to your Company Page: it is vital to create links to your Company Page to boost your search ranking. Linking from your website, blog, and other marketing materials to your company page is a simple and easiest way. Another way is to ensure that staff and colleague's LinkedIn profiles are up-to-date. A connection is developed back to your Company Page when they add your business to their work experience.
• Share the relevant content: Sharing appropriate content on a regular basis is one of the best ways to enhance your rankings and search results. They also appear on your public page when you publish updates from your Company Page, enabling Google to index your content. The more consistently you share content the more your followers will participate and engage with, the faster your company page will appear in search results.

8. Explore LinkedIn ads

Finally, if it's something you want to explore now or once you're more acquainted with LinkedIn, I just want to mention briefly about LinkedIn advertising.

There are three types of ads you can create on LinkedIn:

1. Sponsored content: ads appearing in the LinkedIn feed directly
2. Sponsored In Mail: It's a unique ads format which allows you to deliver personalized, relevant content through LinkedIn Messenger
3. Text ads: pay-per-click (PPC) or cost-per-impression (CPM) ads that appear on the side

Final Thoughts

B2B companies should opt for LinkedIn as one of the marketing approach. When done correctly, it can boost your business by increasing your brand’s visibility. Also, there are many better ways of generating high-quality b2b leads, trust and building relationships between your connections than using LinkedIn for B2B Marketing. However, you need to make sure that you share the right type of content on the platform. You must twist your LinkedIn strategy according to your business.