9 Effective LinkedIn Marketing Strategies for B2B Businesses

LinkedIn is one of the most sought-after platforms for networking and growing your business. This social networking platform can be an invaluable part of your social media marketing strategy, especially if you are into B2B business. It helps you establish important connections, promote brand awareness, and generate valuable leads for your B2B business. 

LinkedIn networking isn’t limited to professionals like recruiters and job-seekers but can also be a great tool to grow your business. However, hard-selling on LinkedIn is not appreciated, so crafting an exclusive marketing strategy for this platform is essential.

In this post, we’ll explore some of the effective LinkedIn marketing strategies for B2B businesses and learn how they can be implemented correctly to help them grow. 

1. Turn Your Company Page Into a Lead Generation Page

If you want to generate leads from LinkedIn, you have to set the stage for capturing them since they won’t come to your B2B business automatically. The best way to do this is to turn your company page on the platform into a lead generation page. 

Generally, your company page on LinkedIn will contain basic information about your company and a link to your company website. You can structure your company page in such a way that it elicits a conversion action. This conversion action is a click-through to your website, either in your recent updates or company description. 

The first step is to choose an image for the LinkedIn page header that clearly tells what your business has to offer. The purpose of the header image is to generate interest in your prospective leads and get them to read more about your business.

Next, you need to create a compelling pitch about your business. The tone of the content should be conversational and engaging. For example, instead of telling how many offices you have opened in the last 12 months, you should focus on sharing how many businesses you have helped or what makes your B2B business different from your competitors. That’s the information your prospective leads may want to read.

The first two lines of your company description on the LinkedIn page should be a stunner because that’s what people can see when they land there without having to click “See More.” 

Finally, you must focus on making your recent updates section clickable and conversion-focused. Let’s be honest, the probability of people coming to your LinkedIn profile and going through all the information there is low, which is why you need to maintain an active and engaging feed. 

You have to post content that’s directly aimed at your target audience. For example, you can post blog updates, important links, media coverage news, infographics, case studies and more. Remember to add a call-to-action to every post to encourage click-through.

2. Develop a Showcase Page

Showcase Pages are a feature offered by LinkedIn where you can promote individual brands that are extensions of your company. Once you create a Showcase page, it will be listed under the “Affiliated Pages” of your main LinkedIn page. 

Showcase pages are custom-made for B2B companies to help them generate leads. Although Showcase pages have the same posting options and analytics as your LinkedIn page, it still differs from the latter since your Showcase page gets a larger header image space, more above-the-fold posts and places to link back to your company page.

Showcase pages are a great way to capture more targeted leads for your business and spread the brand name further. To make your Showcase page powerful and effective, make it conversion-focused like your main company page and keep the page’s name short to avoid being truncated. 

3. Use Advanced Search

The above techniques mentioned in this post focus on getting your leads to your business, AKA inbound techniques. Now, we’ll see how to reach out to your leads on LinkedIn. The platform’s advanced search feature helps you identify the people you want to target for your business. 

To do this, go to LinkedIn’s header menu, click on the search people icon and choose the advanced option. In advanced people search, you can filter the search results by industry, location, current company, school, profile language, and more. 

The bigger your personal network is, the better the chances of finding the right prospects for your business. Although LinkedIn’s advanced search includes the entire search network, the best leads will come from your connection at the first, second and third levels. 

4. Save Searches 

When you run a highly targeted search, you will want to save it. Saved searches help you to maintain progress in your prospect hunting. From your advanced search, look for the saved search option in the upper right corner of the page. 

You can create up to three saved searches for free on LinkedIn. When doing so, you also set up alerts for each search criteria. This is a great way to find prospective B2B leads for your business at a granular level and market your products to them.

5. Claim Your Custom URL

Every business should ensure that its LinkedIn page URL is customized to include its business name. This is especially important for B2B businesses where your prospectus might want to know more about your business before getting into any business conversation. By ensuring that your LinkedIn page URL has your business name, you make it easier for other businesses to find you and do their own research about your business.

6. Search Groups

Another great way to find B2B leads for your business is to search for groups. With more than 20,0000 LinkedIn groups present at the moment, you are sure to find multiple groups in your niche. All you need to do is find them, join and maintain a certain activity level in these groups to nurture leads.

You can simply perform a group search on the platform. Group searches do not have elaborate filters as people or company searches, but you can still filter groups based on language, category and relationship level.

When you look for groups, ensure that it is highly relevant to your target audience and are active in nature. LinkedIn ranks groups as per their activity level, so you can see the activity level of each group before you decide to join them. You can select groups that say “Very Active.”

Another critical factor to consider while joining LinkedIn groups is the group size. Since LinkedIn allows you to be a part of 50 groups, it is wise to go for medium-sized groups and avoid those with very few or huge members to avoid not being noticed.

7. Start Your Own Groups

LinkedIn groups offer a plethora of networking opportunities. If you want to unleash more incredible benefits from LinkedIn groups, create one yourself. When you become the owner and moderator of an active group, you gain recognition in the industry. 

To create a group, go to the “Groups” section in the sidebar, click on “See All,” and “Create a New Group.” Then, add the necessary details and invite people who can be potential business leads to join and interact there. 

8. Publish Content 

LinkedIn offers a professional content publishing platform called Pulse, where industry leaders and business experts can share news, insights and other important information. When you publish content on Pulse, everyone in your network will be notified, and it is possible to share the content you publish on Pulse to other social media platforms too. You can also publish content on Pulse as an individual or a company. 

By creating quality content, you can raise awareness about your business and establish your authority as a thought leader in your industry. Since LinkedIn Pulse puts forth your content within your network, it is an effective inbound marketing strategy to draw user attention to what you offer and boost the chances of generating leads for your B2B businesses. 

9. LinkedIn Ads For Lead Generation

You can boost your LinkedIn performance by buying ads. The LinkedIn pre-filled lead generation form can help you collect quality leads for your B2B business by displaying your ads only to your preferred audience. The ads you can buy on LinkedIn include sponsored content, where you can boost the visibility of your post much more than what you could’ve boosted organically.  

You can run LinkedIn text ads where your company ads appear on various LinkedIn pages, profile pages, search results pages and group pages. You can also try sponsored InMail to send personalized messages to people on LinkedIn.

Conclusion

LinkedIn offers a massive opportunity for B2B business marketing. However, lacking the proper knowledge about the platform could restrict you from utilizing its potential to your advantage. So, when you’re on LinkedIn next, try exploring the features explained here to drive leads for your B2B business.