LINKEDIN MARKETING: Do Business with the Right Businesses
Reach out to them on the leading B2B platform.
Build professional relationships with potential clients.
When a business reaches out to another business, it isn’t quite the same as the way it strikes up a conversation with its customers. And for businesses targeting a highly specific, select audience, it makes sense to reach them through channels that show they mean business.
For advertisers and 360 digital marketers who understand what it means to reach their target audience in the right places, LinkedIn is the social media marketing platform of choice for engaging with organisations and the professionals behind them.
LinkedIn has over 660 million monthly users in 200 countries (LinkedIn, 2020)
30 million companies are on LinkedIn (Hootsuite)
90 million LinkedIn users were senior level influencers in 2019, and 63 million were in decision-making positions (Business of Apps)
11 million of the 87 million millennials on LinkedIn are in decision-making positions (Kinsta)
44% of LinkedIn users have an annual take-home pay of over USD75,000 (Kinsta)
94% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn as their most effective social media platform (Content Marketing Institute)
LinkedIn is 277% more effective for lead generation than Facebook and Twitter (HubSpot)
Sponsored InMail has a 52% average open rate (Hootsuite)
Get right down to business.
Professionals who use LinkedIn aren’t there to see snapshots from a family dinner or watch cute hamster videos — they come to the platform in a work-related frame of mind and usually for work-related purposes which include
Headlining their professional skills and achievements
Staying up to date with industry developments
Keeping an eye out for potential career or business opportunities
Maintaining relationships with, or reaching out to colleagues
Find big business names among your big name user base.
AirAsia Group CEO Tony Fernandes
DBS Bank Group CEO Piyush Gupta
Biocon Chairman & Managing Director Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw
Rakuten CEO Hiroshi Mikitani
India Prime Minister Narendra Modi
Telstra CEO Andrew Penn
Target these thinkers with pinpoint precision.
Because LinkedIn users are on the platform to take care of business, the information they provide is high quality, considering how many professionals use their LinkedIn profiles for networking, job-hunting, or for strengthening their authority in their respective fields. This allows marketers to target potential clients much more accurately.
You can set the targeting of your ads according to
Location: Country, city
Company: Company connections, industry, size, name, followers
Demographics: Age, gender
Education: Fields of study, member school, degrees
Job Experience: Job function, seniority, title, member skills, years of experience
Interests: Member groups, interests
Level up your B2B marketing with ABM and more on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn’s ability to target specific companies make it perfect for account-based marketing or ABM which LinkedIn itself defines as directing your marketing efforts towards engaging with specific target accounts.
ABM involves tailoring your messaging and creating strategies for the very people who work at those target accounts, which allow you to nurture relationships with these targets and increase opportunities for conversions.
LinkedIn’s campaign management platform also makes it easier for advertisers to nurture leads by making sure their ads reach their targets at just the right time, i.e. where they are in their individual buyer’s journeys.
Note that 52% of shoppers say that LinkedIn is their most influential channel while researching about a product or service (Oberlo).
52% of shoppers say that LinkedIn is their most influential channel while researching about a product or service
~ OBERLO
Reach a high-ranking readership.
If your business is big on content marketing, you’ll be glad to know that LinkedIn is a prime channel for content distribution.
Content published on LinkedIn receives 9 billion impressions per week (LinkedIn)
About 45% of content readers on LinkedIn are in CEOs, VPs and other key decision makers (LinkedIn)
91% of marketing executives look to LinkedIn to provide top-quality content (Sophisticated Marketer’s Guide to LinkedIn)
64% of all social media traffic to corporate websites comes from LinkedIn (Sumo)
94% of content marketers use LinkedIn to get their content out there (Sophisticated Marketer’s Guide to LinkedIn)
Remember that content has a major part to play in encouraging conversions among B2B leads. LinkedIn ads work well for B2B marketers using gated content to collect emails, educate leads, and cultivate relationships.
Find the ad format that works best for you.
LinkedIn offers different types of ads, each of which has its own features and advantages which businesses can use to reach their marketing objectives. Businesses can even switch between ad formats as necessary.
Sponsored Content appears in your feed featuring a single image, video or an image carousel, and is great for driving traffic, building brand awareness and encouraging engagement.
Video ads also appear in your feed and are effective in creating brand awareness, generating leads, and acquiring customers, as well as easy to assess in terms of performance.
Carousel ads likewise appear in your feed and are ideal for telling complete brand stories, holding your audience’s attention, and driving results for your business objectives.
Text ads appear in the right sidebar of your page, are excellent for driving traffic and lead generation, and may use Pay Per Click (PPC) or Cost Per Impression (CPM) pricing schemes.
Dynamic ads also appear in the right sidebar of your page featuring the name and photo of your target customer, and are perfect for personalising your audience’s experience, automating and scaling personalised campaigns, and customising ads to your marketing objectives.
Display or banner ads likewise appear in the right sidebar of your page and are basically dynamic ads sans the personalisation.
Get a foot in the door with Sponsored InMail.
As one of the strongest weapons in your LinkedIn arsenal, Sponsored InMail has the advantage of allowing you to engage potential clients without them having to take action, e.g. give their email address or click or tap a link.
You can use Sponsored InMail to connect with individual LinkedIn users in a highly personalised way—just as though you were emailing a friend or co-worker—to let them know about your offer and how it benefits them. You may also use InMail to
Encourage them to try or buy your product or service
Download your brochure or book an appointment with you
Register for events such as talks or webinars
Probably the best feature of Sponsored InMail is how LinkedIn makes sure that you don’t send InMails to inactive users and waste your marketing dollars, and that you only reach users that are most likely to respond to your message.
Data Source: Content Marketing Institute
Adjust your ad budget and get a great ROI.
Because of the audience quality, advertising on LinkedIn may cost more than other digital marketing platforms.
LinkedIn has a 10-dollar minimum daily budget requirement for running ad campaigns, and a 2-dollar minimum bid for its CPC and CPM text ads (Search Engine Journal). This is significantly higher than the dollar-a-day budgets you can spend on other social media platforms or the 1 to 2-dollar CPCs you can have with Google Ads (WordStream).
However, the quality of the leads that you can generate on LinkedIn versus other social media platforms more than makes up for the disparity in rates, particularly for B2B sectors such as SaaS and manufacturing or niches like higher education.
Note, however that like other social media platforms, LinkedIn does allow you to adjust your ad budget according to how well your ads are performing. LinkedIn also requires its minimum bids and budgets to help make sure you get the most bang for your marketing buck.
Make the most of LinkedIn with experienced LinkedIn marketers.
Every digital marketing channel has its best practices and LinkedIn is no exception. Because you’ll be communicating with a particularly discerning audience on a business-before-pleasure platform with unique budgetary considerations, a little experienced assistance in setting up and preparing your communications on LinkedIn can go a long way.
And because LinkedIn itself is only one channel in the omni-channel digital marketing ecosystem, it’s a distinct advantage to know how LinkedIn and other channels can be used to the full as part of a 360 digital marketing strategy.
After all, your other digital assets such as your business website, content, analytics and marketing automation are all part of that super saturated and competitive ecosystem. Make sure your LinkedIn advertising fits seamlessly into the rest of your digital marketing activities for maximum results, today.