For years, marketers have experimented with techniques and platforms to make their way and gain leads in a pool of knowledge-driven content online. LinkedIn offers a range of exciting tools and features for marketers to efficiently reach out to their target audiences while focusing largely on the decision-makers. In this article, we look at some top strategies for reaching them.
What evolved from being a professional networking platform to a strong marketing field, especially for B2B businesses, LinkedIn has come a long way. Since its beginning, LinkedIn has attracted senior leaders and business professionals from across industries. Therefore, a lot of marketers are taking to LinkedIn to gain their attention.
Let’s find out more about these as we share some of the best LinkedIn marketing strategies for 2020.
7 LinkedIn Marketing Strategies
1. Strengthen your company page for a lead generation pitch
Your LinkedIn page is not just another ‘About Us’ section; it is an opportunity for you to navigate your potential customers back to your website or make them reach out to you for more details about your offerings. To achieve that outcome, you need to structure the content on your page accordingly.
You can do that by ensuring your cover picture or the header image, your profile picture, and description together spin a story that strongly grips your page visitors. Revisit your page and see how attractive, relevant, and conversion-driven your header image is. For example, look at Schneider Electric’s company page, here.
The header image conveys a lot about the company’s business. And right after that, the overview or company description clearly lists almost everything it has to offer. In fact, the first line in the overview is enough to give you the idea that it offers digitized, sustainable energy solutions to customers across B2C and B2B – through phrases such as ‘digitized sustainable energy’, and ‘people, homes and businesses’.
As a matter of fact, the first few lines of a company description are critical, and it is important that you grab your customers and prospects right there. Then, instead of focusing on a company journey and other chronicles about yourself, speak directly about what you do and what is in it for them, making them click on your website or any other direct ‘download brochure’ or ‘know more’ kind of link.
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2. Build ‘Showcase Pages’ for segmented brand outreach
As the name suggests, LinkedIn Showcase Pages allow companies to talk about their various individual brands and respective offerings. By doing so, brands can segment target audience for each of those brands.
This is how LinkedIn describes showcase pages on its website, ‘Showcase Pages are extensions of your LinkedIn Page, designed to spotlight individual brands, business units, and initiatives. Once created, they’ll be listed under ‘Affiliated Pages’ on your main LinkedIn Page.’
A showcase page differs from the company page and can reach users through each of these affiliated pages. It also has a larger header space and various options to link back to your company. That’s how it helps you with targeted inbound traffic/ leads.
For example, here’s how a list of Adobe’s showcase pages which LinkedIn terms as ‘Affiliated pages’ looks:
Showcase pages are meant to target a specific need or a specific audience and, LinkedIn suggests identifying business areas that need a showcase page, so you do not end up over-fragmenting your audience.
Focus on content that is high on engagement for these pages, so that people keep coming back to them, as LinkedIn says, ‘These pages are intended to develop long-term relationships with a specific audience.’
Much like the company page, yet unique, here’s what one of Adobe’s popular showcase pages’ Adobe Creative Cloud’ looks like:
It’s easy to create a LinkedIn showcase page from your company page itself. You just need to click “Admin Tools†from the dropdown menu in your Admin View. Here’s a screenshot shared on LinkedIn’s guidelines for creating one.
3. Leverage advanced search features to get to your target audience
While a strong company page and showcase pages can bring your customers to you, through search features, you can identify and directly reach out to them. LinkedIn’s Advanced Search is an effective way to find your target customers, using various filters that it offers.
LinkedIn Advanced Search offers a range of helpful features to narrow down your search for prospects basis industry, company, location, job title, and other demographics.
You can use Advanced Search to look for someone specific or a group of people from a specific industry, company, profile, location, and more.
For example, a marketing and advertising company looking to connect with people from the financial services companies, specifically located in the Greater Seattle area, can get to this group of people by choosing these options from the location and industry filters. Furthermore, you can filter this list for profiles as well, if, for instance, you are specifically looking for the head of marketing or CMOs from those companies.
Although Advanced Search lets you find people from the larger network, you have better chances of leads if you already have a lot of relevant 1st connections in your network. The 1st connections are most likely your best prospects or existing clients, but having more of them in the search list brings in better 2nd and 3rd connections, which could be your warm prospects for leads in an Advanced Search.
What’s more interesting about this feature is that all the hard work and effort you put into filtering your search can be saved for future references. Saved searches help you revisit your targeted pipeline of prospects who you would want to consistently try to reach out to. You can save your searches from your advanced search by clicking on the ‘Save Search’ option in the upper right corner of your search results screen. However, without an upgraded subscription, you can only save up to 3 searches.
4. Join groups on LinkedIn and create one yourself
From using search to target individuals, you can widen your hunt for decision-makers and your target audience through groups on LinkedIn. There are niche groups on LinkedIn for almost all kinds of business contexts, where people interested in the subject come together to share ideas, new developments, or generally discuss the concerned topic.
A good way to get a chunk of your target audience is to search for groups relevant to your business, join them and actively participate in the discussions, engaging with people you want to nurture as leads.
You can search for groups using keywords relevant to your business and then look for the metrics that LinkedIn lets you know about the groups’ relevance to your business and the activity levels in a group. From your search, focus on groups that are ‘highly relevant’ and ‘active’.
Alternatively, create your own group on LinkedIn! Once you’ve been part of groups, and you know the pulse of your audience or if you have identified something that may be lacking in the existing groups where your target audience is present, you know the purpose of creating your own new group.
In doing so, however, ensure that the group is not just about your company and its offerings – for that, you have your company page, and showcase pages – but has content relevant to all that people want to talk about. Only then will people join or follow your group and remain active and engaged there.
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5. Publish thought-leadership content to prove your expertise
Another organic way to generate leads and engage with prospects and customers for a meaningful relationship is to consistently publish relevant, thought-leadership content on LinkedIn. Pick informative topics:
– that help your readers with the information they might be seeking; and
– that culminate into helping generate curiosity for your business and in turn, give you leads
Individuals and companies post such content on LinkedIn, and you can also publish content as a company or as a senior executive, through your personal accounts. Make sure your content is not direct or pushy, but such that it connects with the readers and indirectly helps you support sales.
Those who engage with such content are your most qualified leads or could give you some insight into your warm prospects. Articles or thought-leadership content that gets shared also gives you more followers and, in turn, more leads.
6. Promote your business through LinkedIn Ads
Now that you know the best ways to promote your business organically in a non-paid way on LinkedIn, here’s one that will seek a portion of your marketing budget. So, make it worth all the bucks you spend.
LinkedIn has various paid options to promote your brand. Under LinkedIn Ads it offers:
Sponsored Content, Sponsored InMail, Text Ads, Video Ads, and Dynamic Ads.
Sponsored Content allows you to put up native content as ads that appear in people’s LinkedIn feed. Sponsored InMail allows you to send personalized, targeted LinkedIn messages to your target audience, and test ads are simple PPC or CPM desktop ads. Lastly, Dynamic Ads are automatically personalized to your audience for building brand awareness and increasing the number of your followers on LinkedIn.
The Video Ads help you capture your audience’s interest with native videos to not just build awareness but generate qualified leads as well.
If you avail LinkedIn Ads, you can stay organized, manage your ads, keep everything updated, and measure the impact as well through its Campaign Manager.
7. Evaluate the effectiveness of your LinkedIn marketing efforts
A good marketing strategy always includes evaluation and improvement, and with LinkedIn, it’s easy to keep a constant check on the performance of your posts, ads, and content – paid or non-paid. As a basic rule, you should keep a tab on everything, starting from the number of followers to post-performance metrics.
To leverage LinkedIn Analytics, on your LinkedIn page, select Followers in your dropdown list to check your follower growth, and from the same list, click Updates if you want to check your shares growth and the overall interactions. Through the Updates section on your LinkedIn Analytics page, you can see post-performance parameters such as impressions, engagement, CTR, etc. in the form of a table.
For all your LinkedIn Ads, the campaign manager lets you see all these details for your ads in one single table.
This way, you will know what kind of posts or ads are doing better among your audience, what to continue doing, and what needs to be taken away or improved upon.
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What LinkedIn Marketing Strategies are you using? Tell us in the comments below. For the latest news and trends update in the world of marketing, follow us on TwitterOpens a new window , FacebookOpens a new window , and LinkedInOpens a new window .