5 Reasons to Use LinkedIn for B2B Marketing

by Lauren Glover

| July 8, 2020 |

July 8, 2020

5 Reasons to Use LinkedIn for B2B marketing

With more than 750 million members, LinkedIn has quickly grown into the number one website for business. If the sheer volume of business professionals all collected in the same place isn’t enough to convince you to expend some marketing effort on LinkedIn, we’ve compiled 5 more reasons to include LinkedIn in your B2B marketing plan. Keep reading, we’ll have you convinced.

5 Reasons to Use LinkedIn for B2B Marketing

On LinkedIn, B2B marketers like you can find their next business partner, introduce their company to potential customers, and attract star talent to join their companies as employees. Want to get in front of more decision makers?

Want to get in front of more decision-makers? There are over 65 million of them as part of LinkedIn’s user base.

Need to introduce your company and impress someone in the C-Suite? Over 10 million C-level executives are here too. From entry-level professionals to influencers, to experienced decision-makers, everyone you would ever want to target is on LinkedIn.

This is why LinkedIn is a critical channel in our B2B Lead Funnel Framework.

After the Planning Phase, when you determine your goals, audience, USP, and topics, is the Activate Audience Phase. During this second phase, the goal is to engage prospects where they spend the most time online.

In the B2B world, the most relevant place buyers spend time is on the LinkedIn platform.

The LinkedIn platform is vital for demand-generation marketing if you want to help your potential buyer narrow down their options while they are still in the buying journey.

Many of your potential customers are vetting and ruling out options on their own before ever contacting sales. In fact, 70% of the buyer’s journey is complete before a salesperson is contacted.

You don’t want to be out of the running because your company wasn’t part of the conversation.

If you’re going to end up on your potential customer’s shortlist, it’s more important than ever to build sound LinkedIn marketing strategies and provide valuable content to influence business decisions.

Still unconvinced? We’ve got you. Here are the five reasons we love the LinkedIn platform for B2B marketing.

Reason #1: Leverage the Power of Context with the Right LinkedIn Marketing Strategy

When you use LinkedIn for B2B marketing, you have the advantage of context.

On a social media platform like Facebook, a user’s primary purpose is to catch up with friends and family. Users flock to the LinkedIn platform to enrich their lives as business professionals.

LinkedIn users may be looking for a time-management solution for their company or training software for their employees, and look – there’s your brand.

With LinkedIn marketing, your targeted ads and social media posts appear in a news feed filled with a steady stream of industry news, expert advice, career training, tips, peer insights, and recommendations.

Your business’s blog post feels right at home among discussions about how to act in the workplace and the next big industry conference. Your ad on LinkedIn will likely be better received than your ad on other social media channels in this context.

When it appears on LinkedIn, it’s shown to people who want to improve their industry.

When it appears on Facebook, it’s in front of someone who wants to see cute pictures of dogs.

This might be the same person, but think about it, are you more likely to fill out a form or read a case study when you are in relax mode or work mode?

Remember The Four Ps Of Marketing

Remember those Four Ps of Marketing from Marketing 101.

Just as crucial as the Product, Price, and Promotion of your campaign, is the Place where your campaign is shown and where the first touch with your customer occurs.

That’s why we love this powerful platform for B2B marketing. With LinkedIn marketing, that first touch occurs in a place where your customer is already in the business mindset.

Reason #2: Create the Perfect Target Audience with Precise Targeting

Much of the data LinkedIn uses for ad targeting is sourced directly from its active users on-platform.

If used the right way, this precise, actionable, real-time, first-person data will get your brand in front of your most valuable audiences.

LinkedIn’s targeting options are virtually limitless, and the same goes for targeting strategies.

Before each campaign, we carefully consider which parameters will most effectively reach our target audience. For example, a list of multiple IT job titles may not reach someone who performs IT functions with an unrelated job title.

One way to address this is to use the function parameter instead; another is to use skills. But how do you know which is best?

Don’t Forget to Test Your Audiences!

With strategic testing, you can determine which specific audiences and targeting parameter combinations generate the most results.

Create two campaigns with the same creative, copy, and budget. Then assign each campaign a different audience. Continually tweak the audiences to reach optimal performance.

Reason #3: Effectively Use Your Own Data

Contact Targeting

Do you already know who exactly you want to reach?

Upload a list of emails, and LinkedIn will match those emails with its user profiles. If your list successfully matches 300 or more profiles, the end result will be a Matched Audience you can use in any campaign across LinkedIn.

Account Targeting

Another unique way to leverage LinkedIn’s robust targeting tools is account targeting.

Especially useful for account-based marketing, an uploaded list of company names will allow you to market to specific companies easily. LinkedIn will find matches amongst the over 57 million LinkedIn company pages. To increase your match rate, pair a homepage URL with each company name or add a LinkedIn company page URL.

If you want to reach people similar to existing customers, upload your customer list, and create a predictive audience.

Pro Tip: Matched Audiences, Account Audiences, and Predictive Audiences can all be used as exceptions. This is a great way to exclude competitors, company page followers, or existing customers from your campaigns.

Using the LinkedIn Insight Tag

Finally, by adding the LinkedIn Insight Tag to your website, you will unlock the ability to retarget your website visitors with relevant and engaging content. Once your ad reach exceeds LinkedIn’s threshold, the LinkedIn Insight Tag will also provide the ability to see specific, actionable audience data, including which job titles engaged most or which functions resulted in the highest number of clicks.

Reason #4: The Right Tool at the Right Time

With it getting harder and harder to reach people organically on social platforms, digital advertising is the best way to reach a lot of prospects.

LinkedIn’s ad platform provides everything a brand needs to make sure their ads reach the right people with an effective ad spend.

In addition to the myriad of targeting options LinkedIn offers, multiple advertising products are available.

Ad Objectives

LinkedIn offers various ad objectives and is routinely introducing more.

Brand awareness
Website visits
Engagement
Video Views
Lead Generation
Website conversions
Job applicants

Website Visit Objective

Ads using the Website Visit objective, or traffic ads, are used to generate traffic for your website, specific pages on your website, or specific landing pages. Each and every click that is charged is a click to your website.

Did you know most clicks on Facebook ads are not generating traffic to your website? They may be clicks on your profile picture, clicks to your profile page, or even clicks to open up a comment string. And guess what? You are charged for all of them.

With LinkedIn marketing, only clicks that result in traffic to your destination URL will be charged and counted.

Your CPC may be higher than on Facebook, but the CPC you see is much more accurate.

LinkedIn traffic ads don’t waste money on extraneous clicks, and we love that.

Lead Generation Ads

Another favorite LinkedIn ad objective of ours has got to be Lead Generation.

Quality leads are the bread and butter of B2B digital marketing, especially for high-consideration products and services with a long buying process.

There’s nothing worse than spending a lot of money to get potential clients and customers to your landing page and then seeing them leave without filling out the form.

LinkedIn’s Lead Generation objective solves this problem.

LinkedIn’s lead gen ads include a native form. When a LinkedIn user clicks the CTA button, the form appears within the same window.

What makes this objective even better, is LinkedIn will auto-fill the form with the user’s profile information – greatly decreasing friction and helping you generate more leads.

Ad Formats

LinkedIn also offers various ad formats (full list below). Let’s dive into a few of our current favorites.

Thought Leader Ads

LinkedIn’s Thought Leader ad format helps companies build authority by leveraging social proof and insights from experts in their industry.

Boost your expert’s thought leadership content by sponsoring one of their high-performing posts and targeting it to your distinct audience. This allows you to increase reach and engagement while positioning your brand as both knowledgeable and connected.

Ideally, the ad encourages more engagement and conversation to help form new connections and build relationships with your audience.

Video Ads

LinkedIn’s Video Ad format offers marketers a way to tell their story through video content, giving them another creative tool in their toolbox.

Our favorite aspect of the video ad is the capability to grow a retargeting audience from viewers of the videos sponsored. We often deliver a doc or event ad to the retargeting audience built from the viewers of our video campaigns.

What are LinkedIn’s Ad Objectives and Ad Formats?

Ad Objectives

Brand awareness – This objective, is perfect for generating as many ad impressions as possible.

Website Visits – Drive traffic to your website, a page on your website, or a landing page.

Engagement – Increase social engagement with your ads and/or build your LinkedIn page followers.

Video Views – Generate as many video views as possible.

Lead Generation – Capture leads using a native form that is pre-filled with a user’s LinkedIn profile information.

Website conversions – This objective helps to boost conversions on your website like filling out a form or watching a video.

Job applicants – Drive clicks to job posts and other job-related experiences.

Ad Formats

Single-image ad – Promote a single image along with post copy, headline, and destination link.

Carousel-image ad – Promote several images in a rotating carousel along with post copy, headlines, and destination link(s).

Video ad – Promote native videos along with post copy, headline, and destination link.

Event ad – Generate interest and build registrations for your next event using LinkedIn’s built-in event pages.

Document Ads – Encourage consumption of your content, file downloads, and even generate leads with this format that delivers documents in-feed.

Thought Leader Ads – Leverage social proof and employee expertise by sponsoring posts from your experts.

Conversation Ads – These interactive ads allow you to lead the conversation with multiple CTAs and a chatbot-like experience.

Message Ads – Ads that appear in your audience’s LinkedIn messaging inbox.

Text ad – These simple ads are served in the right-hand column of the desktop experience.

Spotlight ad – Drive conversions, traffic, or leads with these dynamic ads that are served in the right-hand column of the desktop.

Follower Ads – Encourage follower growth on your LinkedIn company page with these display ads.

Reason #5: Go Beyond Your Company Page & Leverage Your Employees

Like with anything else in business, your employees are your greatest asset–if you give them the tools they need to flourish.

The same potential for your employees is present on LinkedIn. Employees can be a great resource for distributing thought leadership content through a LinkedIn marketing strategy.

Dust Off that Personal Profile

With properly optimized profiles, your employees can become your greatest asset and spokespeople for your brand.

An optimized LinkedIn page can provide a boost to search result visibility both within the LinkedIn platform and across the web.

Like with the rest of the internet, Google will crawl your employees’ profiles as well as your company’s.

Therefore, you should review your profiles and update them frequently to emphasize what is important. The most crucial initiative one month may not be the same the next month, so make sure profile summaries and headlines reflect what is most important now, not three months ago.

We’ve created a step-by-step guide to profile optimization for your use, so now you have no excuse.

Get Your Employees Involved

Relationship building is a huge part of the value the LinkedIn platform brings to any brand’s marketing strategy.

Another way to get the most out of your LinkedIn marketing efforts is through employee amplification.

When an employee shares a LinkedIn post from your company page, your organic reach will be amplified.

Just like Facebook, organic, or unpaid, company page posts rarely show up in the average user’s news feed. However, as soon as someone shares your post, it will show up in a lot more feeds.

So don’t let your greatest potential asset go to waste. Encourage your employees to actively share and interact with your content or work with an agency to set up an employee amplification program that runs with little to no internal effort.

Can we help?

Do we have you convinced? Do you want to add a LinkedIn marketing strategy to your B2B marketing mix?

Be sure to check out our Ultimate Guide to LinkedIn B2B Marketing. You will love the actionable LinkedIn marketing strategies to increase traffic, leads, and sales.

We also offer strategic planning, social media advertising, social selling training, and sales enablement tools that can help you win online. If you are interested in learning more, sign up for a complimentary initial consultation/discovery meeting. Schedule yours today, and let’s see if we can help.