For enterprises large, small, new and old, LinkedIn offers a powerful way to reach business professionals in the full array of today’s industries — making it an especially powerful marketing tool for brands with a B2B focus. In fact, few avenues for connecting directly with business professionals in the modern marketplace even come close to rivaling the reach of LinkedIn, which currently boasts nearly 800 million registered users in 200-plus countries and territories, including nearly 180 million users in the United States alone.
Consider these promising statistics related to the popular social platform focused on professional networking:
- According to eMarketer’s 2020 US Digital Trust Survey, LinkedIn leads the pack as the nation’s most trusted social network.
- LinkedIn offers more than 200 different ways for advertisers to target platform users with their advertising, including education, job experience, demographics, interests, and much more.
- Advertising placements on LinkedIn can deliver a 33% increase in users’ purchase intent, increasing chances for brands’ future sales.
- Four out of five LinkedIn users serve in roles where they drive business decisions for their companies.
6 Simple Tips for Better Leveraging LinkedIn
To make the most of your marketing efforts on LinkedIn, consider these six easy-to-implement tactics that can quickly amplify the effectiveness of your LinkedIn activities:
1. Complete (and Regularly Update) Your LinkedIn Company Profile
A brand’s LinkedIn company page serves as the go-to resource for LinkedIn users looking to learn more about the business — and the spot where most visitors get their first impression of the brand. But many businesses never take the time to fully complete theirs, amounting to a missed opportunity to tell interested LinkedIn users more about what the business does and what makes it special. It can also cost a company missed leads, as completed company profiles get 30% more weekly views than incomplete ones.
To ensure that visitors to your brand’s company page can easily get all the information they need to know about your business, be sure to provide all the needed assets, including your company logo, a compelling image that showcases your brand, a polished business overview, detailed organizational information, and a strong call-to-action button. And to keep things fresh and up to date, be sure to revisit the profile on occasion to make sure all information is current, as well as to refresh the included imagery once in a while.
2. Optimize Your LinkedIn Page For Search
To maximize the online visibility of your company’s LinkedIn profile, LinkedIn recommends taking a set of steps to optimize your company page for search. These include placing within your company profile top keywords and phrases that consumers might use to search for your brand and its offerings. Another step is to link out to your LinkedIn company profile from your brand’s website to boost search rankings and use your brand’s LinkedIn page to regularly share quality content that’s relevant to your business, its industry, and its particular niche.
3. Claim Your Custom Profile URL
To make it easier for users to share their LinkedIn profile with others, the social platform allows for the creation of a custom URL that leads directly to the profile page (as opposed to a URL containing, at least in part, a random string of letters and numbers). Especially for brands, taking advantage of this capability and using some iteration of the brand or company name in the URL is highly recommended, as this can both make the URL’s destination recognizable at a glance and make it more memorable. Further, using the brand name in the custom URL can help boost SERP rankings when potential clients and other interested parties perform online searches for the business.
4. Crank Up Your Connections
One of the top reasons users join LinkedIn is for professional-networking opportunities, and, most platform members are open to (and even interested in) making connections. This offers a great opportunity for brands to find, reach out to and connect with users with common business interests — an especially powerful tactic when the relationship this might spur could be a mutually beneficial one. And once such connections are established, this can help foster “warm” leads (as opposed to cold calls) in the future.
For example, a brand representative for a B2B company might reach out to a prospect, mention shared interests and/or connections, officially connect on LinkedIn and strike up a conversation. Over time, and after building a relationship and learning more about the prospect’s company and its needs (and while being careful to avoid hard sells — a LinkedIn faux pas), the brand representative could share the ways his or her B2B company can help the prospect and his or her business. Called “social selling,” the tactic has proven to be an effective one. In fact, according to LinkedIn, leaders in social selling can generate 45% more sales opportunities for themselves per quarter.
5. Gain Growth with Groups
One powerful and efficient way to make valuable connections on LinkedIn — and to help to ensure that they’re pertinent ones — is to leverage LinkedIn Groups. With well over 2 million Groups currently active on the platform, they present an opportunity for brands to quickly find like-minded professionals with common business interests. And once a business has joined a LinkedIn Group, it can easily start conversations with interested users about what’s happening in its industry — a powerful way to spur engagement with potential prospects and heightened recognition of the brand. Users are allowed to join up to 100 LinkedIn groups, so for brands looking to make more strategic connections on the platform, finding and joining the right groups then engaging with its membership can deliver real benefits over time.
6. Leverage LinkedIn’s Targeted Advertising Options
As mentioned above, LinkedIn offers 200-plus ways to target specific users and audiences with advertising on the platform. And especially for B2B businesses, this presents a great opportunity to boost ROAS by sharing brand messaging with exactly the types of prospects who are most likely to be interested in their offerings. LinkedIn offers a range of advertising formats, including Sponsored Content, Sponsored Messaging, Lead Gen Forms, Text Ads, and Dynamic Ads. And by employing the right ad types at the right times, businesses can build big momentum for themselves using the platform.
Could your brand use the help of a team of seasoned marketing professionals to ramp up its messaging efforts on LinkedIn and other social media platforms? At The Brandon Agency, our team of certified brand strategists and data-driven marketing experts has a wealth of experience leveraging social media platforms to boost brand awareness, exposure, interest, and, ultimately, the bottom line. Further, TBA’s fully integrated marketing firm can cover the full spectrum of your brand’s marketing needs, including brand strategy, web design, creative, media, e-commerce, analytics, social media, SEO, conversion rate optimization, and more. To get started with help ranging from simple website analysis to a comprehensive strategy tailored to boost the performance of all of your marketing campaigns, contact us today.
Ed Lammon
Managing Editor of Agency Content
Ed Lammon is the Editorial Director of Blog and Long-Form Content for Brandon. A native of Enterprise, AL (home of the world’s only monument to an insect), Ed is a 1998 Journalism graduate of Auburn University (War Eagle!). When not working, he enjoys travel, hiking, telling dad jokes, and hanging out with friends and family (particularly around campfires, at concerts and at tailgates).