More than 30 million companies use LinkedIn for business, not just because it’s the social network of choice for finding and hiring the best people. The social media giant has more than 700 million members, due to which most brands use LinkedIn as a marketing platform for B2B lead generation, sales, brand awareness, and business growth.
Unlike other social networks, LinkedIn has a qualified audience of companies and professionals; therefore, it allows you to create a network of contacts based on strategic relationships. It is, therefore, not surprising that LinkedIn has become a key channel for B2B marketing. What you share makes the difference because users look for quality professional content.
LinkedIn automation tools are available for businesses of all types and sizes, from small to large, B2B or B2C. This guide will show you how to use LinkedIn B2B lead generation software to grow your business., introduce you to the best tools, and help you get the most out of your LinkedIn marketing strategy.
This is what LinkedIn Marketing is for (and not for)
Before you start with LinkedIn marketing, you should not only think about your goals or those of your company but also about the unique character of LinkedIn. LinkedIn is different from Facebook and Instagram in many aspects.
LinkedIn is particularly suitable for B2B marketing. The platform offers three main approaches to attracting decision-makers’ attention, increasing brand awareness, and generating leads and conversions. Ideally, you use all three.
Why do you need a marketing strategy?
It would be best if you had a marketing strategy for your business to discover the areas that need improvement and cater to the customer’s needs. A marketing strategy’s basic purpose is to achieve an organization’s short-term and long-term goals. This will also help you to get more people involved and get more comments on LinkedIn. Here are reasons why you should create a LinkedIn marketing strategy for your company.
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Get information on employees and customers.
We can leverage LinkedIn to gain employee and customer insights and use that knowledge to build relationships or generate new business opportunities.
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Improve the professional image of our brand.
LinkedIn is beneficial for enhancing our brand image on a more professional level, taking care of our profile on the platform, and publishing the right content.
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Increase the audience and engagement.
Sharing content and encouraging our connections to interact with us by creating a relationship with them is the perfect option to broaden the range of action and improve engagement.
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Promote your products or services.
Ultimately, LinkedIn can be a speaker to promote our products or services by sharing product pages, images, videos, articles, etc.
Let us explore the top LinkedIn marketing strategies in 2022.
Define your goals
Before using LinkedIn to market your brand or business, you should know your company’s goals. The LinkedIn strategy should align with the goals whether you want to create brand awareness, increase your sales or scale up your business. Once you have clear goals, creating a strategy for your business will be much easier.
Create an optimized page for your business
Your company’s LinkedIn page is capable of generating leads for your website. Therefore, optimizing the use of each element of the page is vital to create a successful LinkedIn profile.
The term “page optimization” means, first of all, the creation of a description of the company. The page should contain the purpose of the company and the services it offers. It should be aimed at the right audience in such a way as to entice them to find out more about what lies behind your LinkedIn page.
Share the best content.
Once you’ve crafted the perfect profile, it’s time to share equally ideal content. Like any social media platform, LinkedIn also means sharing content and connecting with other people. However, the real advantage of this channel lies in the possibility of building a network with people operating in the same industry.
Therefore you have the opportunity to create, share and use content that other people in the sector in which you operate will find interesting, which increases the possibility of circulating helpful content for your goals.
Mike Schiemer of Bootstrap Business says, “By consistently publishing and sharing high-quality content that can be useful to your professional network, you are demonstrating your value and authority in the industry. Increasing visibility helps generate leads, increase sales and even attract job offers or contracts “.
Grow your network
- Fill your feed with helpful content for users but at the same time, keep it exciting and fun.
- Expand your network with everyone you meet: Do you meet someone at a conference? Did you find a speaker particularly interesting and captivating? Add it to your circle;
Never stop doing the first two steps of the LinkedIn growth strategy. They are fundamental and allow you to increase your circle of people constantly.
Connect with prospects: people who have liked the page or shared or liked content created by you; contact them and add them to your circle.
The most crucial part is that of sharing educational and, at the same time, exciting content. People will thank you or ask you questions. In this case, you can answer them with personalized messages in which you will commit to understanding their problems and, consequently, offer them an optimal solution.
It is a process that requires time and commitment; maintaining many connections and contacts is not an easy thing.
Start conversations
Posting great content on LinkedIn isn’t the ultimate goal of this business, but it does offer tremendous help in starting conversations with users.
Share an article or video about a scientific discovery or surprising news, and tag the people you think would like to hear about it. In this way, in addition to encouraging the circulation of content, you will help stimulate comments from tagged users, who will thank you for the update or comment on the discovery.
Another technique is tagging those who contributed to the article’s creation. Not only will they be notified of the actual publication, but it will also increase its notoriety in the eyes of other users.
Transforming engagement into conversations
When you notice users sharing your content or videos, please take a moment to thank them. It seems trivial but keeping this commitment helps generate actual leads.
When someone comments or shares the post, it means that they found it interesting, so they may also be interested in starting a conversation with you about who made it or who shared that news.
So it’s all in the way you approach LinkedIn:
- Stop seeing it as a mere platform that directs people to your website to fill out a form to get in touch with you (the process is a bit too complex, don’t you think?)
- Start thinking of it as a more accessible and engaging way to connect with people interested in your business.
Use LinkedIn’s People filters.
If you are searching for contacts, it is advisable to narrow the search by title and by company. Once the investigation is carried out, it is possible to obtain a narrower circle of results by using the “advanced search” function and specifying the name of the company and the job position.
On the other hand, the recruiter search filters allow you to build complex strings using Boolean logic with operators such as AND, OR, and NOT.
Check the connections of your contacts.
LinkedIn’s purpose is to generate leads by expanding its network. Therefore, it is enough to explore the knowledge of our contacts to connect us to new potential leads who operate in similar industries or have similar needs.
Involve your entire company
The marketing team doesn’t have to be alone in promoting and delivering content on LinkedIn. Connor Gross of Lola states how significant the whole company’s involvement is to have a good strategy on this social network.
Promoting content by the employees themselves is the first step in generating contacts for the company. This type of sharing amplifies the scope of shared content, thus allowing their conveyance to more potential leads.
Focus on quality to expand your reach
Often it happens to meet people who are interested in the services offered by the company but who at the same time are not good customers. If you add these users to your network, you will passively update them on the actions carried out by your company, placing you towards them as a solution provider for yourself and others.
We can conclude that LinkedIn is no longer the social network dedicated exclusively to the world of work; it has evolved and is getting closer and closer to the other big names in the market.
Conclusion
In short, a LinkedIn content marketing strategy can be very productive. To do this, first, we have to define our objectives and buyer person, as well as some appropriate KPIs.
With a well-planned strategy, you will be able to see how over time, and by constantly executing actions, interactions with similar users increase steadily.