Why LinkedIn is vital for B2B marketing in 2024 – and how to do it

LinkedIn started in 2003 and now has more than one billion members in 200 countries and regions across the world. Around 140 job applications are submitted every second, with 61 million people using it to search jobs every week and six people hired per minute through the platform. And while that’s only one element of LinkedIn’s functions, it does indicate the level of activity it attracts.

According to a survey on LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, which is its paid advertising vehicle:

• 40% of B2B marketers indicated it was the most effective channel for driving high-quality leads
• Brands see a two to three times lift in brand attributes when advertising on LinkedIn
• Brands see a 33% increase in purchase intent from ad exposure on LinkedIn
• Marketers see up to 2x conversion rates on LinkedIn
• Audiences exposed to brand and acquisition messages on Linkedin are 6x more likely to convert

While it’s becoming more competitive to generate organic visibility, there’s plenty you can do to make an impact, and boost that with paid advertising. You just need to understand how to use it most effectively, adopt a strategic approach and be consistent.

Building a community of potential customers

One of the biggest benefits of LinkedIn is that you can use it to find and build a network – not just any network, but a community of people who could legitimately need your services. This gives your marketing a much more targeted approach.

There are many ways you can build your community on LinkedIn. The key to this is being relevant, personal and not salesy when reaching out to people you don’t know.

Managing your network: The ‘manage my network’ button on your personal profile page is a great place to mine information and contacts. You can use this feature to look at all your contacts and the friends of your friends (tier 2) and their friends (tier 3). Finding relevant people to reach out to using this method already gives you a natural ‘in’, especially in the tier 2 category. When you message someone to connect, you can say something along the lines of ‘I notice we’re linked through X and work in similar areas, so it would be great to keep in touch’. If you can add something more personal, so much the better.

This feature will also show you who other people with your role follow.

‘People also viewed’: From the profile pages of people you’re connected with, you can see who they are connected with and use the ‘people also viewed’ panel on the right of the page to see who they’ve been looking up.

Searching for job titles: Think very specifically about the individuals who would be buying your services. Is it the IT manager at a distribution company, the marketing director at a digital agency, the HR lead at a medium-sized enterprise? Simply type that role into the search menu and you’ll get a list of people which you can further filter down by things like location, industry and services.

Joining groups and events: Joining relevant groups or attending LinkedIn events can be another great way to find relevant contacts, because you’ll be able to see other members of the groups, or attendees at an event. Groups can also be helpful for engaging in conversations and building your reputation.

For LinkedIn to work best, you need to spend some time building your profile so that when you do reach out to people, they can easily see what value you might be able to provide them. This will improve the chances of people a) connecting with you and b) doing business with you.

This means making sure the basics are right, such as having an up to date personal profile and a decent image. Spend some time making your profile stand out, this is going to be at the heart of all your LinkedIn activity. We’d advise focusing it on how you can benefit others and showing examples of that through case studies and testimonials, rather than having it read as a CV.

Next is curating your page. When someone comes to your profile to check you out, they’ll likely look at what you’ve been posting about. It might be a red flag to them if there’s nothing, or if what is there isn’t relevant or something they’d want to read. Your content needs to be consistent, interesting and engaging. You can tag your favourite posts as ‘featured’ posts which will appear on your profile page always, much like a pinned post on Facebook. Use this for your best, most enticing post, that you’d want everyone to read.

Upload a mixture of content, including videos, articles, and you can even send a newsletter via the platform. Make sure your employees have the same ethos and engage and interact with any company pages too.

Reaching out

There’s nothing people hate more than a spammy, irrelevant message in their inbox, but that doesn’t mean people don’t have success with messages. If you’re not paying, you can only message people you’re connected with, or send a short message as part of your invitation to connect. The key is to be friendly and relevant, highlighting any mutual connections or common ground.

For example: ‘I was interested in what you had to say at the X online event the other day and would love to connect’, or ‘I see you’ve recently posted about X, this is something I’m also working on and would love to chat further’.

Focus on making a connection that isn’t asking them to immediately buy something from you.

From the above you can see there’s A LOT you can do to amass a decent LinkedIn following organically and in a way that will generate leads. Once you’ve spent some time building your profile, you might want to supercharge this by putting some money behind it.

You can use LinkedIn’s various paid strategies in a number of ways, with really specific campaigns, depending on what you want to achieve. For example, you might want to get attendees to a specific event, promote a new product, get more people signed up to your database, or just raise awareness of your brand.

You can run adverts to your target audience, pay for sponsored content to appear in their feed, or a mixture of both. This can be linked to your customer relationship management system so you can get those prospects into your sales funnel and see how your campaign performed.

How we can help you build a successful LinkedIn campaign

LinkedIn can be an incredibly successful tool to use as part of your B2B marketing strategy, as long as it’s executed well. But this can be time consuming and there’s a lot to consider. We’re here to provide as little or as much help as you might need when it comes to building your LinkedIn profile, managing your paid social campaign and growing a network. We’ll work to your goals and provide regular reports and updates so you can see how your campaign is doing and how we continually make your investment work even harder for you.

Contact us to find out how you can generate more leads using LinkedIn.