Are You Maximizing Linkedin’s Potential For B2B Content Marketing?
When you think of the top social media platforms, you probably think of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter before any others cross your mind. After all, these three have grown quickly and steadily over the last several years.
But don’t forget about LinkedIn! According to a 2020 report from eMarketer, LinkedIn is expected to hit 62.1 million adult users this year — up 6.2% from 2019. It should be a priority platform in your marketing strategy.
LinkedIn has a variety of organic, paid, and sales offerings that can help you engage an audience of professionals, which is an excellent opportunity for your B2B strategy.
If you’re not already maximizing LinkedIn’s potential for B2B content marketing, here’s how:
LinkedIn Pages
The first place to start is with your LinkedIn Page. This is a free tool that allows LinkedIn members to learn about your company, culture, products, services, and job openings. With a Page, you can gain followers and share creative content with your community.
Your organization can post updates, respond to your audience, and more. When it comes to B2B content marketing, you can also use your Page to share a customizable call-to-action with your posts.
Say you’re a marketing company like Ride the Sail Marketing, and you’re looking to attract new clients. You would want to use the About section of your LinkedIn Page to explain who you are and your expertise.
Then, to build and engage with your audience, you can post regularly about news and stories that align with your particular field. For example, we post marketing tips and relevant news articles every week.
When prospective clients happen upon our Page, they get a good sense of what we’re about and why they might want to work with us.
LinkedIn Advertising
Once you’ve got your Page established, the next best B2B content marketing tool is LinkedIn Advertising. With an estimated 62.1 million users in the U.S., your business can certainly benefit from targeting this audience.
You get to narrow down your audience by job title, function, industry, and more. Plus, LinkedIn makes it easy to create ads, set a goal, and control your budget. Whether you’re looking for leads, brand awareness, or event registrations, you can customize LinkedIn ads to fit your needs.
Continuing to use RSM as an example, if we wanted to reach new clients outside of our organic network, our next step would be to set up some ads.
With this tool, we could target users who list themselves as “owners” of companies within the U.S. — or narrow it down further to specific industries. Then, we could set it up so that one of our posts shows up in their feed, even if they’re not following our page.
By using LinkedIn ads, our content will reach business leaders who wouldn’t have known to look for our company otherwise.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator
Lastly, Sales Navigator is a paid tool you can purchase for your sales team to research and engage with prospects on LinkedIn. With this tool, you can target the right audience, track leads, and interact with them. It acts as a supplement to your CRM.
Different than standard advertising, Sales Navigator allows you to send private messages directly to prospects within your target audience and measure the results of your efforts. Varying price points for this platform are determined by the number of features you want and the number of messages you want to send.
Sales Navigator enables a more personal connection with your audience. In our RSM example, we could use it to send InMails to dozens of potential clients. From there, we could start one-on-one discussions to pitch our services and give these leads a more specific example of how we can help their businesses.
No matter which combination of features you use, it’s important to take LinkedIn seriously as a marketing platform, especially for B2B companies. As the user base continues to grow every year, you’ll see a high return on your investment.
How do you use LinkedIn in your B2B content marketing?
