Using LinkedIn for B2B Marketing
LinkedIn is a powerful platform for B2B marketing. A company with an active presence on
LinkedIn can build a solid professional network. Over six hundred million people use LinkedIn, and it's still growing. Additionally, 46% of social media traffic to B2B company websites comes from LinkedIn.
B2B LinkedIn marketing is here to stay.
This article will show you how to leverage LinkedIn to be a powerful B2B marketing tool.
Set Up Your Company Page
The first step is to create your company page.
Fill out a LinkedIn profile completely. Be sure to include a description, profile picture, and banner. Use your company's logo and branding that's consistent with your website and other social media platforms.
Define Your Audience and Goals
Define what your objective is. For example, are you using LinkedIn for brand awareness or to generate leads?
Understanding what you're working towards and who you're targeting makes it easier for your company to determine the type of content to share and which calls-to-action to use.
Optimize Your Page
Optimize your LinkedIn company page just like your website. Use keywords that your target audience is actively searching for.
Just place them in your profile description and your list of company specialties.
The main reason to optimize your company page is to promote it. You can't expect people to stumble upon it. So link your company page to your website, share it across your other social media channels, put it in your newsletters, list it on your blog posts, insert it in your CTAs, etc.
Add A Showcase Page
If your company has multiple brands or product lines, then you need showcase pages.
These pages are extensions of your main company page, and they're nearly identical. Having numerous pages allows each brand to maintain its unique voice and personality.
Examples Of Excellent LinkedIn Company Pages
What does an optimized, SEO-friendly LinkedIn company page look like?
Here are some examples of companies with great LinkedIn company pages:
Total Beverage Solution
Total Beverage Solution travels worldwide to bring their customers, distributors, and retailers unique beer, wine, and spirits.
Their company overview describes who they are and what their goals are. In addition, they optimized their page by listing their specialties at the top of their about page.
Elenteny Imports
Elenteny Imports is a logistics company that provides services for the wine, beer, and spirits industries.
They grab your attention with a stunning and appealing banner. It's a picture of a cargo ship that's out at sea. Elenteny Imports also provides a concise overview of what their company does.
Loupe Graphics
Loupe Graphics provides printing services for various brands. Their overview page describes who they are and what they specialize in. In addition, Loupe Graphics has optimized its page by listing its specialties at the bottom of its overview page.
Glazer's Distributors
A wine and spirits distributor from Dallas, TX, Glazer's Distributors has an extensive overview page. They go into the history of how the business started and describe what they focus on.
Like other company pages, Glazer's lists their specialties at the bottom of the overview page, which works excellent for optimization.
Direct Wines, Inc.
Direct Wines, Inc. helps consumers across the U.S. discover exciting wines.
They have a dynamic banner ad. It's a picture of a couple of glasses of wine. Looking at this picture alone lets you know what they do.
Their overview page provides an excellent picture of what they do and who they serve. Like other company pages, they list their specialties at the bottom, which offers ideal keywords for people searching for what they do.
Peter Igel Group
Delivering innovative product solutions to the industrial, retail, foodservice, and alcohol markets, the Peter Igel Group has a short but well-defined overview page.
At the bottom of their "about" section, they list a group of hashtags. This will help people find them on LinkedIn. Finally, they list their specialties at the bottom of their overview page for optimization like everyone else.
Publish Quality Content
Once your company page is established on LinkedIn, you should start adding engaging content.
LinkedIn has excellent publishing tools that allow you to create and upload articles, images, and videos. It would be best to consider using all three to offer value to your followers to position your company as a credible resource in your industry.
Active LinkedIn users are always looking for new and valuable content. Therefore, your content needs to be unique. In addition, there's lots of content published daily on LinkedIn, which means generic topics won't get traction for you.
It would help if you took the time to create high-quality content that your target audience will find helpful. Your article should provide added value or a unique perspective to the industry alternatives.
To help your content stand out, OkDork analyzed three thousand LinkedIn blog posts and discovered what works best.
- Long-form content (between 1900-2000 words) gets the most social shares.
- How-to and list posts perform the best.
- Content with a 5th-grade reading level gets the most views.
Content marketing on LinkedIn is a great way for prospects to find your business. It will position your company as an authority in your industry and solves your prospect's problems. Producing great content can also reduce your sales cycle and guide your potential customer through your sales funnel.
Here are some companies that produce great content using an effective B2B LinkedIn marketing strategy.
Examples of Excellent LinkedIn Content
Delicato Family Wines
One company that does an excellent job at posting content is Delicato Family Wines.
Delicato posts content regularly about their company.
Here are some examples of their most recent posts.
3X3
3x3, a wine, and spirits marketing firm, posts many videos on their LinkedIn page. In addition, they interview industry experts, and 3x3 use a company spokesperson to talk about various topics within the wine and spirits industry.
VINT Wine Branding and Design
VINT is another company that posts a lot of content. Each picture that VINT posts is able to showcase a bottle of wine as you scroll down their post page.
Commerce7
Commerce7 is a modern DTC platform for wineries. They help wineries increase their sales. Commerce7 posts a lot of content like links to sign up for their webinars and links to other businesses within the wine industry.
Bricoleur Vineyards
Bricoleur Vineyards has recently posted self-congratulatory content about the recent awards from the 2021 American Fine Wine Competition.
Bricoleur Vineyards also posts content announcing sales and showing great places where consumers can go to enjoy wine. Most of the images on their posts contain pictures of wine bottles.
Mark Anthony Brewing
Producing brands like White Claw®, Hard Seltzer, and Mike's® Hard Lemonade, Mark Anthony Brewing has a lot of content.
They post a lot of news about their company, including job openings and announcements about opening a new facility.
PCW-Pacific Coast Warehouse
Pacific Coast Warehouse (PCW) is a logistics company specializing in helping the food and beverage industry.
They post a lot of content about their company, and they share news about their industry. They also invite people to learn more about how PCW can help meet their followers' needs.
Share Newsworthy Content Daily
Creating content is an excellent way to get found on LinkedIn, but it can also be time-consuming. You should also share content from relevant sources that your company didn't create that your target audience will find helpful.
Take some time daily to share some newsworthy content and add your thoughts.
Being active on LinkedIn every day gives you a place to express your brand's position and engage with your prospects and customers.
It also shows that you're up-to-date with the latest developments in your industry.
Join Groups Where Your Customers Hang Out
LinkedIn groups are an excellent place to build meaningful connections with your customers. First, focus on a small number of groups that fit your target customer's industry and look for ways to engage them. Then, you can see what they post and respond by adding a thoughtful comment of your own.
You can't join groups as a business; you can only participate as an individual. However, observing and engaging with your target audience provides great marketing benefits for your company.
LinkedIn allows you to join up to fifty groups, so you need to focus on the groups to add value and engage in conversations with people in your target market.
Here are some tips to maximize the most out of using LinkedIn groups:
- Choose groups with at least a few hundred members.
- Engage with your top groups at least a few times a week.
- Start discussions in your top groups.
- Add your thoughts to popular discussions.
The more groups you join, the more significant influence you'll make.
You can also create your own LinkedIn group that focuses on your own business. Then, being the owner and moderator of your group, you can gain leadership and recognition in the industry.
Just keep your group focused on the user, and don't make it all about your company.
Position yourself authoritatively and don't be salesy.
That way, you can form a place where your target audience can gather and interact.
Advertise On LinkedIn
Organic company updates can only take you so far. You may find that purchasing a LinkedIn ad will help increase traffic to your company page. This means instead of going to your audience, your audience will come to you.
You should optimize your company page before you get started with a paid advertising campaign. First, you need to include showcase pages for the products and services you want to promote, so when new traffic arrives, they will see what you have to offer. Then choose which one of the following paid services you'd like to use.
Sponsored Content
Sponsored content boosts the visibility of your LinkedIn post.
Organic posts that show up on the feed of your followers can be seen by the target you choose by paying for sponsored content. Choose artless that are popular with your followers to use for sponsored content.
Your sponsored content should have a call-to-action or a gated component like a webinar or a white paper that a new reader can sign up for or download. It would help if you always targeted your widest possible audience.
Your sponsored content will be distributed on the LinkedIn feed or other pages of the people you're targeting. In addition, the content will appear as company updates on your company profile or showcase pages when they click back to your site.
Direct Sponsored Content
Direct sponsored content expands on sponsored content.
Direct sponsored content posts are not published on the company page. They're not part of a campaign, and your company can personalize or tweak the content. This will allow your company to test and retest the content until they're satisfied. The advertiser creates both sponsored content and direct sponsored content ads in LinkedIn's campaign manager.
Text Ads
Text ads are LinkedIn's version of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. Just like other PPC options, companies can choose which audiences to target. Then, the company creates its ads, sets the budget, and pays when the ads get clicks or impressions.
Sponsored InMail
Sponsored InMail is LinkedIn's version of an email marketing campaign. Companies using sponsored InMail can send personalized messages such as invitations to webinars, or other events to targeted audiences, with no limits on character counts.
It's quick to set up and launch campaigns, and just like other LinkedIn advertising services, companies set their budget.
Sponsored Messages
Sponsored messages are ads that are sent right to your audience's LinkedIn inbox. You can send these ads in "message" or "conversation" format. Companies will experience variable success rates with each format.
If you're a B2B marketer, LinkedIn is the most powerful online tool you can use for lead generation.
To get started on LinkedIn, first, do these three steps:
- Complete and optimize your company page.
- Fill in the required fields on your company profile.
- Please share a link to your LinkedIn page in an email, tweet, or link back to it on your website.
Then, test things out, make mistakes along the way, and keep improving.
Schedule your audit today and see for yourself how powerful LinkedIn can be in your !