Everything you need to know about B2B Linkedin marketing

Just like other social media platforms, LinkedIn is a way for an audience to see a snapshot of what your company is about. When used correctly, LinkedIn could turn into one of your biggest B2B marketing channels, targeting the right decision-making professionals. And with 63 million decision makers on Linkedin it’s a gold mine of opportunity. 

How to optimize your Linkedin company page

If your company’s LinkedIn page is currently going through a stagnant, rough patch, try these six quick tips to optimize your LinkedIn company page and get on the road back to success. 

Refresh your profile and cover photo

When people land on your page, you want to ensure it looks inviting. Whether they are a long-lasting customer or a potential new lead, refreshing your cover photo every few months or quarter will help turn your page from stagnant to  vibrant in no time at all.

The options are endless in ramping up your page aesthetics. Play around with your brand colors, images, current campaigns, milestones or special events.  But ensure the cover image you choose is aligned with your other social channels, this will help make you more recognizable. 

Hype up your tagline

This is all about finding the ultimate sweet spot between catching the audiences’ attention and informing them about who you are and what you do as a company. Think of it just like an elevator pitch. 

The aim here is to keep it short and sweet and include keywords to increase your searchability. Also, stay away from using super tech heavy jargon (unless you have to.) 

Choose a CTA

Think about what desired action you want your audience to take. Is your goal to drive more traffic to the website, or contact your sales team?

At the moment, LinkedIn have five different CTA’s to choose from:

• Contact us

• Learn more

• Register

• Sign up

• Visit website

If you are sending your audience to your company website or a specific landing page, ensure you whack on a UTM tracking link you can track just how much traffic LinkedIn is bringing in. 

Make your profile search friendly

Have you completed the set-up checklist of your company’s page? LinkedIn wants to help you succeed and have created a set-up checklist to help your page get established, increase reach and drive engagement. In fact they state that once all is completed, your page is likely to see up to 30% more traffic. 

On top of that, it’s important to use relevant keywords within your tagline and bio to boost your reach on LinkedIn. By strategically including these keywords, LinkedIn will begin to recognize what your company does allowing you to appear higher in search results. 

Leverage from other channels 

Don’t be afraid to call on the assistance of other channels to boost your LinkedIn page. You may have a huge newsletter subscription, or customer base who may not know you’re on LinkedIn, so it’s time to tap into these untouched resources. 

Create a showcase page

A showcase page is a customized page built with specialized content for specific target markets. Add these into your new B2B LinkedIn marketing strategy, especially if your platform or product is a bit more complicated or you sell multiple services or products. 

They are great to use when promoting products or services highly relevant to that specific audience, which often leads to higher engagement. 

Level up your B2B LinkedIn content

If you're within the B2B industry, LinkedIn marketing needs to be prominent within your content marketing strategy. But how do you know what will capture the audiences’ attention? With so much noise to break through, we want to take you through the best practices to keep in mind when creating content.

Create valuable content

Differentiate yourself from competitors by creating industry specific content that your followers will see as valuable. The aim here is to create “scroll-stopping” content, where the viewer will stop and spend time looking at your post.  Using images with your post will see you get double the amount of comments, and videos will gain five times the amount of engagement.

Shopify has a very engaging and stimulating LinkedIn page. In the example below they use a fun and colorful animation to share their latest features news.

Other examples of valuable content can include opinion posts showing thought leadership, webinars, resharing industry news, research reports, ebooks and white papers. 

Think about what your target audience would be interested in learning, and focus on that. Creating valuable content is time consuming so remember that quality is more important than quantity. 

Maximize your exposure

When you send a post live, LinkedIn’s algorithm will categorize it into either spam, low quality or high quality. Making it into the high quality category isn’t as hard as you think;

• Tag people only if you know they will respond (and no more than 5)

• Only use three hashtags 

• Make sure it’s easy to read using correct grammar and spelling

• Post things to encourage a response or action

Take a look at the example below of the automated scheduling platform, Calendly. A simple format, tagging in three people paneling at the event and including only three hashtags. 

Use keywords and hashtags

You’ve gone to all the effort of designing the perfect piece of content, now it’s about helping that asset get in front of the right people. Keywords and hashtags will help make this happen. 

As mentioned above, no more than three hashtags should be used. It’s up to you to choose which hashtags will get the most traction. The best set up would be choosing one broad, one niche, then one super niche hashtag. For example #socialmedia, #b2bcontent, and #linkedinb2bmarketing

In terms of using keywords, if you are writing blog content then you’re likely to be a pro in choosing the right keywords for the job. The same process applies when using keywords in LinkedIn. They should be words that are specific to your brand (or website) while also being relevant to the user. When researching keywords pay special attention to the search volume and rankability. 

Have a consistent cadence

Set yourself up for success by ensuring you are posting consistently on LinkedIn. This will help you build up a rapport with your followers.

Just make sure that the cadence chosen is achievable by your team. There is no point saying we will post five times a week, and not have the content pieces to match.  With each post you should be asking yourself, does this post provide value?    

3 ways to build awareness for your company’s LinkedIn page

Employee advocacy

If you currently don’t have an employee advocacy program running, then here is your sign to start. Think of it like this, your employees are working directly in the industry, they are the masters in their own field or department, so people are more likely wanting to hear what they have to say. The first-hand insights they share or trends forecasted will provide excellent content plus a great way to build awareness. 

If you’re starting off in employee advocacy and need a helping hand to spark interest there are employee engagement platforms available (e.g. gaggleamp.com and ambassify.com) that provide suggested links, copy and gamify the whole process to encourage more sharing. 

If that seems out of your budget, then it can still be done on the simpler and cheaper side of things. Start off by asking your employees who would be interested in being more involved in sharing company content (or a version of it) on their own page.

Add these members to a LinkedIn Messaging group, or designated Slack channel, then each time you have content to share simply add it in there. You can always offer guidance in the copy or key messaging to include, but encourage them to put their own spin on it as well. 

The employees who take part are also building and growing their own Linkedin presence, which is very beneficial for future opportunities. This is something you can start today and see your brand awareness blossom.

Customer advocacy

In the B2C and ecommerce world, the concept of influencers and user generated content is far more common, and high on the priority list when building out a content strategy.  B2B should be no different, if your customers can encourage more customers then you’ve just hit the jackpot. 

When done correctly, your customer advocates grow into extensions of your brand. They love your product or service as much as you do.

Finding your advocates is easy, think about the characteristics or behaviors that make an advocate. Have they submitted a high NPS score? Or engage regularly with your social posts or perhaps reach a certain milestone with your company. Whatever the case may be, hone in on this audience and prompt them into the world of customer advocacy.

Encourage your customer advocates to write about their experience with your brand on LinkedIn (ensuring they tag you), if you have a community then invite them to share their own hacks, templates or suggestions. 

This will build awareness of your brand plus improve industry credibility and recognition. 

Tagging in posts

While this is a great way to grow awareness of your business and key for relationship building, it’s also a very quick way to get categorized as spam, if overdone.

Only tag people who you know will comment or interact with the post, for example if you are posting about a case study about a particular company, tag them. If an individual is hosting a webinar or releasing a blog article, tag them. This will help build meaningful awareness, rather than annoying other companies with useless tags.

Best practices for increasing engagement on LinkedIn

Engagement is the ultimate metric when it comes to social media, and unfortunately B2B has the stigma of being quite dull. It doesn’t have to be this way. We collected some best practices to spice up your B2B linkedin feed and help you grow engagement.

Don’t get stuck using one type of content

Polls, infographics, videos, gifs, carousels, newsletters, and images are all different types of content used to show off what your company is working on and achieving. By changing up the content type it will keep things interesting for your audience. Plus certain content types are suited for different pieces of information, for example: 

Polls: An incredible way to boost engagement and drive your audience to interact with you one on one. Use polls to ask a question. It can be a quirky, fun question, market research or finding out more about your audience. For example, “what kind of content do you want to see more of?” Then offering up to 4 different suggestions.

Newsletters: This is a somewhat new feature of LinkedIn and an incredible outlet to share weekly updates, company news, industry insights, and throw in your favorite meme. A couple of big wins happen when using the newsletter tool. Firstly, when you publish your first newsletter it automatically sends a subscription invitation to every one of your followers. Secondly, your newsletters are indexed by Google helping you with SEO opportunities and ranking. 

Talk to your followers

It’s important to develop relationships with your audience. If they have a question, answer it and offer more help. If they are gushing about your product or service then gush back. If it's a negative comment, find the easiest and best solution for them.

Dr. Flo Falayi from  The Hybrid Leadership Institute, sums it perfectly, “make sure you treat everyone in your network how you would like to be treated by responding promptly to comments, feedback and questions.”

When others see you showing an interest beyond the standard “we appreciate your feedback”, they remember that extra effort.

Offer value 

Falayi also adds, “the ideal way to increase engagement is to provide value by sharing actionable, practical and insightful content.” Offering tools, templates or how-to documentation can act as the optimum social post, as it's shareable.

This will not only increase your engagement but if you continue down this path and get a reputation for these shareable tools, you will become the go-to of your field. 

What to remember when B2B advertising on LinkedIn

Organic growth never seems like it is happening as fast as you would like. Running targeted ads on LinkedIn will help speed things up, especially if you are using this channel as a sales or lead generation tool.

Assigning a percentage of your marketing budget to LinkedIn paid advertising will increase your reach, plus get your brand seen by the right people. It will show up in their feed when they are most engaged.

Below we have listed a few things to keep in mind when running your B2B paid advertising. 

Retargeting your audience

This is a must when setting up your B2B Linkedin marketing strategy. If someone has already shown interest in your product or service by interacting with your page, or clicked on an ad, then it’s time to strike while the iron is hot. Retargeting ads will help nudge them to conversion.

Ortto can help with this. Identify your retargeting list and download it as a CSV from Ortto, then you can upload it to LinkedIn. Voilà you have your new hit list. Remember to add UTMs to your ads, that way you can also track the results of your campaigns within your existing reports and dashboards in Ortto. 

Create lookalike audiences

Once you have created your ideal target audiences, use them even further by creating lookalike versions. These are groups of people who share the similar demographics, interests or behaviors but are yet to become a customer of yours. Lookalike customers will increase your reach to a new set or potential leads. 

You’re getting a head start on reaching people who are far more likely to be interested in your B2B product or service. And better yet, when you build your lookalike audience, only LinkedIn members who have been recently active will be included. This ensures that your ad budget is being spent on highly engaged and qualified professionals.  

Test messaging and creative

You’re not always going to create the ultimate high-conversion ad each time. It’s far more likely that you will need to test assets and copy variations to learn exactly what sticks with your audience. 

LinkedIn allows you the opportunity to rotate your ad variations and refine different elements of your creative in order to test the performance.  Their recommendation is testing two to three variations within one campaign to truly see what returns the highest conversion. 

For example, you can test slight changes like the use of emojis, different CTA’s or length of copy. Or testing the type of content used. Do customer testimonials, videos or static imagery work better? 

Testing your messaging and creative is a task that is never complete. You should always be refining and optimizing your work. 

4 tips to finding B2B sales prospects on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is full of potential prospects, all you need to know is how and where to find them. Sure, you can set your margins wide and go for a blast approach , but if you follow our tips below, you will spend your time and resources contacting prospects likely to convert. 

Use LinkedIn’s search tool

When leveraging LinkedIn’s search functionality you can find the right people, in the right industry working in the right role. Therefore finding your ideal sales prospects. 

You can filter your search down to a specific location, industry, or even profiles that include the relevant keywords. 

If you have a premium account there’s also the option to target your potential prospects even further using company name, size and seniority level. 

After discovering your prospect, LinkedIn allows for you to reach out to them through direct messaging. Here you can start to build a one-on-one relationship and send through your elevator pitch. 

Join industry related groups

LinkedIn groups are a great way to meet and network with professionals who are more likely to fit your ideal customer. These groups will then provide you with an audience where you can share your company’s product perks and take part in meaningful conversations. 

The idea here is not to take over every conversation by talking about your product, but if another group member has a problem that can be solved by your company, then now is your time to shine.

Join a variety of groups ranging in size, and industries relevant to your product or service. More populated groups make it more challenging to break through the noise and be noticed as an expert in your industry, so be sure to join those smaller, niche groups. 

Keep an eye on what your competitors are doing

Just like the old saying goes, keep your friends close and enemies closer. While enemies may come across a little strong, it is important to keep an eye on what your competitors are doing. 

We are talking about knowing when they release any new features or product offerings or change their pricing. This information can give you inspiration for content pieces highlighting your brand’s USP. Say a close competitor increases their prices or you have a new feature that you know your competitor does notoffer, you can use these as a talking point for any prospects who come through and are weighing up both options.

Keeping an eye on your competitors also includes the sales representatives. Set up a premium LinkedIn account to sleuth incognito to find potential prospects by looking at the LinkedIn network  of your competitors’ sales representatives or managers. 

They may have connections to what your company deems as ideal prospects, and you can boldly reach out to these prospects and see if they are happy with their current offering, or you may even come across an industry or area where you are not currently targeting.  It is also much easier to speak to an audience who already know or have some sort of understanding about what you are selling. 

Move the conversation 

Once you have snagged yourself an interesting prospect, it’s time to make the conversation a little more professional. Even though LinkedIn is a great source to networking it still is a social media platform, where it’s easy to be faced with unproductive meaningless conversations resulting in no action. 

By collecting their email address, you can then move your new prospect into a winning lead nurture campaign in your Ortto account, prompting them to take the next step until they convert. 

Final word

This is just the tip of the iceberg with what you can achieve in LinkedIn B2B marketing. With the building blocks covered plus some best practices you will be able to start off on the right foot and take your brand’s LinkedIn page to the next level.