If your business is based on B2B relationships then LinkedIn is for you!
What is LinkedIn?
LinkedIn has been around for more than a decade and is often referred to between serious and funny as the professional version of Facebook. Many believe it is only used for job searches, as LinkedIn’s fastest growing demographic group is university graduates and students.
There are nearly 675 million users on LinkedIn in more than 200 countries, making it the most important social network to reach business decision makers and connect with professionals from every business sector.
On LinkedIn, your business can be seen among millions of professionals and potential customers, externalise its positions and thoughts on the industry it operates in, find its next partner and attract new employees to join its team. And all thanks to LinkedIn’s ever-growing user base, new features as well as promotional tools.
Why is it different from other media?
Having read all of the above data, many people seem to be unaware that LinkedIn’s most powerful feature is building relationships on both a professional and personal level… As a professional and as a business owner, building relationships is vital to guiding users through the sales funnel and converting them into customers. But how does LinkedIn differ from the relationship building that can happen on other social networks? Let’s look at them one by one:
Facebook: The largest social network in terms of active users, it’s ideal for connecting with friends and interacting with other users’ content. All the dynamics of the network is its main page, the newsfeed or stream, however, thanks to the changes that have taken place, the organic visibility of business posts has been significantly reduced unless they are running regular advertisements.
Twitter: If used properly, it is extremely beneficial for building relationships with the public. Almost all companies engage with their audiences with direct, quick and genuine tweets about current affairs. As a result, about 500 million tweets are sent out per day, so it’s quite difficult for a business to not only grab someone’s attention, but also gain credibility with the segment of users they care about.
Pinterest: Pinterest is essentially a large note board that, by definition, is not a social network, as it was designed more for the individual than for a network, as Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann has stated. But this has not stopped several businesses from joining Pinterest. Some businesses have tried to reach their audience through storytelling, that is, telling visual stories, on these boards, showcasing their products and services in useful and creative ways. However, it is evident that due to the type of content that can be placed on these boards not all businesses can take advantage of Pinterest.
Instagram: Like Pinterest, Instagram relies heavily on storytelling. However, Instagram is more about the individual, hence the plethora of selfies that continue to appear. The network’s entire dynamic is its main page, newsfeed or stream, therefore limiting its reach for businesses and their ability to build relationships. Big brands have established themselves not only through their brand awareness, but also through constant paid advertising, a tactic that many smaller businesses probably find difficult to follow.
We are not in any way denouncing these social networks, as each has a specific audience with whom your business can interact. Different types of relationships can be developed with your target audience on each of these networks, but LinkedIn has built a solid reputation as the go-to business social network. LinkedIn can build relationships easier and better for both professionals and businesses.
How can your business use it in its digital strategy?
The right instrument at the right time
When you use LinkedIn in your B2B digital strategy, you have the advantage of being in the right medium at the right time. Unlike other social networks such as Facebook and Instagram, where the user’s primary purpose is to see simple daily habits of their friends (where they went what they did, etc.) users join LinkedIn to enrich their professional knowledge. They may be looking for a time management solution for their company or a new training software for their employees. You need to make sure your business is there when they search.
When you advertise on LinkedIn, your ads appear in a newsfeed, a news feed full of news about the industry your potential clients are in, expert advice, training suggestions, and tips. In other words, you are appearing to people who want to improve their industry, their business and themselves as professionals.
Precise targeting of the audience
Much of the data LinkedIn uses to target its ads comes directly from its users. When used in the right way, this accurate, actionable, real-time, personal data will help your business be seen by the audience it wants to reach. The targeting options LinkedIn provides are almost limitless
At Astrolabs, before each campaign, we carefully consider which targeting parameters will help your business to reach the intended audience more effectively. For example, using multiple IT job titles may reach people with those job titles, but may not reach someone in the broader IT sector with an unclear job title, or someone who has the expertise to perform such work but has another job title listed on their CV.
One way to deal with this is to use the “job function” parameter, i.e. the object the user declares to be working on, instead of job titles. So through strategically selected testing we can determine which types of audiences as well as which combinations of targeting parameters produce the most results for your business.
Make effective use of the data your business already has at its disposal.
Do you have a list of emails of potential customers at your disposal? Upload it to LinkedIn which in turn will try to match these emails with the profiles of its users. If it manages to successfully match the emails of at least 300 profiles, the end result you’ll have in your hands will be a Matched Audience audience that you can use in any of your business’s LinkedIn campaigns.
Another way to leverage the powerful targeting tools available on LinkedIn is account targeting. Upload a list of company names and easily market your products and services to specific companies from specific industries. LinkedIn will match the companies on the list among its nearly 30 million company pages above to increase the match rate, you can also add a URL with each company name.
LinkedIn also recently introduced Lookalike Audience. If you want to reach people similar to your existing customers, upload your customer list and create a similar audience based on the characteristics of your existing audience. Finally, by installing LinkedIn Insight on your website, you’ll have the ability to retarget your visitors with relevant content.
Make the most of your employees
Your employees are your greatest asset if you give them the tools they need to grow.
With properly optimized profiles, your employees can become your company’s representatives and its greatest asset. Optimized profiles, both those of your company and your employees, boost their appearance in search results on both the LinkedIn platform and Google searches.
Google will crawl the profiles of your employees, as well as the profiles of your business. So use these profiles and update them frequently to highlight what’s important to you and your business.
When an employee shares one of the company’s LinkedIn page posts, organic reach will be boosted. Just like on Facebook, organic business page posts rarely appear in the newsfeed, the feed on the main page, of the average user. However, once someone shares your post, it will appear in many more user feeds.
So don’t let your greatest potential go to waste. Encourage your employees to actively share and interact with the company’s content.
If you’re a business that is primarily in the B2B sector and you’re not using LinkedIn, now is the time to get started. But if you are using LinkedIn and haven’t seen the results you’d like, the Astrolabs team is here for you!
Contact us and we will perform an immediate and FREE audit of your LinkedIn page.
