By Timothy W. Joseph on Feb 28, 2023
If your business is B2B, LinkedIn should be a staple in your marketing repertoire. LinkedIn serves the largest professional community in the world with over 875 million members. It’s an extremely powerful B2B platform for finding, connecting to and sharing content with customers, colleagues, employees, contractors and potential business partners.
This is a platform to make connections, educate, add value and cultivate relationships. Sure, you can advertise on LinkedIn, but this is not the place for a hard sell. If you are selling, you are not forming relationships. But once you have a relationship with someone, they are much more likely to buy from you.
If you are going to market on LinkedIn, it’s important to fully understand the platform in order to optimize it. Following are some recommendations for how you can use optimize LinkedIn marketing effectively.
Set up a free LinkedIn business page to make your presence known. You can publish posts and articles to your page that will appear in the feed of those following you and also a much wider audience if LinkedIn decides to ramp up the volume on a post because of its value or if you decide to pay to boost a post.
Your LinkedIn page should be consistent with the branding on your website and other materials. You need to post regularly on your page so it appears active. If you let your page languish, it will not reflect well on your company. So, commit to your page before creating it.
If you do set up a LinkedIn page, be sure to claim the URL with your company’s name. It can then appear on search results when people search specifically for your company.
Here’s how to set up your LinkedIn business page.
LinkedIn is all about making connections and building community. Since four out of five LinkedIn members drive business decisions, these are the people with whom you want to network. Start by inviting colleagues and others you know to connect with you on LinkedIn. Then you may want to connect with members your connections are already connected with, to people in your groups and finally to others you think would be good for your business. Although there are some restrictions on the number of invitations to connect that you can issue, there are ways to increase your available invitations.
Once you have connected to LinkedIn members, you can easily interact with them and build relationships. After you have built a relationship and further established your credibility, that’s the time when a contact will be extremely open to doing business with you.
LinkedIn’s lead conversion rates are three times higher than those of other major ad platforms. Most of what someone sees on LinkedIn (aside from paid ads) are from their network. However, LinkedIn has a limit of 100 connection invitations per week. So is there a way to connect with more professionals?
Umbrella’s LinkedIn experts have developed a technology that enables you to add accounts for your entire team and send tens of thousands of invitations each day. This means you can generate many connections, leads, meetings, webinar registrations and more in order to market to the vast B2B LinkedIn community at scale.
Unlike a lot of other platforms, LinkedIn gives you a choice on whether to publish posts (up to 3,000 characters) or longer thought leadership articles (up to 120,000 characters).
Offer content that adds value by informing your audience or giving them tips. Write regular posts to grab attention and keep your audience warm and write longer articles to establish yourself as a thought leader in your field.
Your posts and articles will appear in the feed of your highly targeted audience, and in some cases, LinkedIn will promote them if of great interest to others. You can also pay for boosts of your posts and articles. They will then appear in the feeds of a much bigger but highly targeted audience.
A great way to establish your own credibility and that of your company is to join LinkedIn groups that are relevant to your industry. LinkedIn groups enable you to interact with other professionals. You can ask questions, offer advice and share experiences. This is an effective method to make connections and build credibility that could result in new partnerships or new customers. The key is to be active and helpful to others in order to set yourself up as an expert.
You might also want to join groups that are relevant to your target market. It’s a good way to find out what is on your customers’ minds. And as a group member, you can message others in the group even if you are not connected. This is a very big deal for lead generation.
Don’t stop with just joining groups if you want to optimize LinkedIn marketing. Create your own LinkedIn group. If you have already joined groups, then you can message appropriate members and ask them to join your group. If you have been adding value to the group you are both in currently, they are very likely to join yours.
What’s the point? Once you have targeted prospects in your group, you can address them all in one place. You can regularly demonstrate your expertise in your group, so when group members are looking to buy, they think of you. This has the added value of giving you a great email list. Joining and creating groups helps you to give your brand a lot of visibility and generate leads.
LinkedIn can’t be beat as an effective B2B platform for advertising to businesses. You can target by industry, company size, job role and much more.
Types of advertising include
A company is made up of people, so don’t neglect completing your personal LinkedIn profile. You can talk about your company and your own accomplishments in 2,000 characters. Of course, you want to include contact information.
LinkedIn is its own animal, and to optimize LinkedIn marketing, you need an expert. Contact Umbrella Local today for a free consultation here or call us at (646) 440-1426.
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