10 Tips for LinkedIn B2B Marketing Success

As the most trusted social network and the place where 630 million Professionals are seen, LinkedIn is a B2B marketer’s dream. In our first blog in this series, we discussed why LinkedIn is the place to be for B2B marketing. Now, we’d like to share with you our 10 tips for LinkedIn success.

Tip #1: Build an Engaging and SEO-Friendly Company Page

Marketing is all about putting your best foot forward. It’s the dating stage of any great B2B relationship. Your LinkedIn company page should be thought of as your first date, your first opportunity to make an impression rather than a place to just throw up a bunch of company stats. Turn your company page into a compelling story. Include testimonials and links back to your website. Use a vibrant and compelling header image. Include a call to action. And last but not least, make sure your company page is searchable and findable, not just for LinkedIn, but other search engines as well.

Since Google and other search engines see LinkedIn as a credible source, your company profile will often be in the top ten search results. So, we recommend you focus on making your company profile SEO-friendly (check out our blog post 3 Tips to Make Your LinkedIn Company Profile SEO-Friendly). Many people use LinkedIn to research a company, especially when the stakes are high. Make sure your company profile is interesting enough that they want to learn more about you.

Tip #2: Research Your Target Audience on LinkedIn

Use LinkedIn to listen to and investigate your potential and current customers. Visit people’s profiles to understand how they describe themselves, what they do, what skills they have and so on. You can also see what types of content they like and engage with. This can help you develop more relevant content and advertising for your target audience. Although we’ll discuss more about LinkedIn groups below, they can also be a valuable resource to help you understand what people are talking about, what they are sharing, and even what other companies are doing to promote their products and services to these specific groups. If you’ve added LinkedIn’s insight tag to your website, it will also gather Website Demographics, which will give you a better understanding of who’s visiting your website, including information such as roles, industries and company names.

Tip #3: Post Engaging and Relevant Status Updates Regularly

Studies vary, but typically we’ve seen stats that suggest at least 2 to 3 times a week, and at least 1 to 2 posts with links to long-form content every month. But, like everything in life, it really depends on your business, your industry and your audience. We think it’s far more important that a company focuses on posting relevant and engaging content rather than how many times they post. If you don’t post great content, you’ll eventually lose your audience. Over the years, we’ve seen lots of companies post many different types of content—everything from product information to employee news—and since we haven’t seen all those stats we can’t say for sure which type of content is going to get the most engagement for you. A good barometer though is to think of time as money; give them good value for their time spent. Don’t bore them to death.

Tip #4: Create and Publish Highly Relevant and Targeted Content on LinkedIn

Like status updates, content that you publish (whether through LinkedIn articles, or links in status updates to your company blog or website) should be relevant and engaging for your target audience. There’s lots of networking happening on LinkedIn, with 81% of B2B buyers saying they share business-related content with their LinkedIn network. As we mentioned above, take advantage of LinkedIn to research what your target audience is interested in before you develop content. And if you put the content behind a form, we also recommend that you use a native LinkedIn lead generation advertising (see Tip #10 below).

Tip #5: Create Thought Leaders and Let Employees Do The Talking

People prefer brands that are more human. In B2B, where client and customer relationships may continue for years, how your potential customer or client thinks of the people they work with matters. Your employees can help you humanize your company, and can be great spokespeople for your products and services. If they are considered to be thought leaders in your industry, that credibility will transfer to your company.

Letting your employees like and share company content is a great way to distribute content. But, it’s also equally important to have your employees participate in LinkedIn Groups, asking and answering questions, sending out non-promotional status updates and so on. On LinkedIn, your employees become the face of your company, and the more your employees give potential and current customers a positive impression, the more successful your presence on LinkedIn will be.

Tip #6: Leverage LinkedIn Groups

LinkedIn Groups are ready-made target audiences for your products and services. LinkedIn Groups are great for networking and for employees to leverage to help build brand awareness and credibility. There are two ways you can leverage LinkedIn, first your employees can join and participate in groups. Or, you can launch your own group, which can help you create brand awareness and authority in your industry. LinkedIn Groups are a great way to engage with potential customers, announce events and new content, but if you make it too promotional, people will lose interest. So, always post with your customer’s needs in mind.

Tip #7: Create Showcase and Product Pages

Showcase pages are great if you have different business units, brands or initiatives that you’d like to spotlight separately for a specific audience. They appear on a company profile under Affiliated Pages, and we’ve added a screenshot below. The design of a Showcase page is a little different than a company page, with a larger header, places for links back to your company, and page posts that appear higher on the page.

Snapshot of Microsoft Showcase pages which appear under the headline Affiliated pages on the right side of their company profile.

LinkedIn product pages are also great for lead generation. Although product pages disappeared several years ago, LinkedIn brought them back in December 2020. Product pages can be used to feature customers, reviews and ratings and of course, more in-depth information about a specific product. According to LinkedIn, buyers make millions of searches for products every day. Employees can also link to specific products in their profile page.

Tip #8: Get Highly Targeted with LinkedIn Advertising

LinkedIn Advertising is another B2B marketer’s dream. There are a range of targeting options, from targeting based on titles to company followers to LinkedIn Group participants. We also find it’s quite good for targeting niche audiences. As long as your audience is greater than 300 members, you can advertise to anyone. LinkedIn data also tends to be highly accurate, since it’s in people’s best interest to keep it up-to-date. We believe in LinkedIn Advertising so much, that we’ve written a blog post devoted to the subject: 3 Big Reasons to Advertise on LinkedIn.

Tip #9: Leverage LinkedIn Video Marketing for More Engagement

YouTube is the second most popular search engine in the world, right after Google. That’s because people love to watch videos. It’s a great way to make an emotional connection with your potential and current customers (for more reasons read our blog post: 5 Big Reasons You Should Try Video Advertising). On average, in comparison to a text post, a video on LinkedIn receives 3x more engagement. For success, we suggest trying shorter videos and remember, you only have a few seconds to make a big impression and keep people watching — extra tip: consider portrait-style videos for greater engagement on mobile devices.

Tip #10: Focus on Lead Generation

Everything you do on LinkedIn should be done with an eye to lead generation. LinkedIn is a B2B lead generation machine and has been rated by other marketers as the #1 platform for lead generation. A study by Hubspot found that traffic from LinkedIn generated the highest visitor-to-lead conversion rate of 2.74 percent—3x higher than Twitter and Facebook. LinkedIn Advertising lets you use native lead generation forms to let people auto-fill information from their profile with just a click, removing a major barrier for people when deciding whether to sign up for an event or download content. On average, marketers receive 2x the conversion rate when they leverage native lead generation forms. If you haven’t yet, we highly recommend you try them.

And if you liked these tips, you may like this too:

3 Tips to Make Your LinkedIn Company Profile SEO-Friendly

3 Big Reasons to Advertise on LinkedIn

Why LinkedIn? Because Professionals are Consumers too

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